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An attempt to elucidate Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic essay “The Translator’s Task,” followed by an analysis of two approaches to its meaning: the philological-historical, represented by Peter Szondi, and the deconstructionist, used by Paul de Man and Barbara Johnson. In spite of the radical difference between the two, they are surprisingly shown to meet in their final assessment of Benjamin’s intended meaning.
June 2015: Shimon Sandbank is Professor Emeritus in Comparative Literature and English, Hebrew University, author of books on Hebrew poetry and the European tradition and Kafka and his influence on modern literature. He has published Hebrew translations of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and the poetry of Hopkins, Yeats, Celan, Hoelderlin and many others. He is the winner of Israel Prize (1996) for poetry translation.
