Melancolia e traduçâo: Walter Benjamin e "a tarefa do tradutor"

Abstract

The thesis's first aim is to demonstrate the existence of a link between traditional conceptions of translation, and an even older tradition which connects intellectual, literary and artistic work to different manifestations of a melancholic disposition. After examining different interpretations of melancholy in the past, I focus on one exemplary case: the role of melancholy in the work of the modern German critic Walter Benjamin, as shown in his essay "The task of the translator".

The alternation of moods is the main feature of melancholy, leading, in its more extreme manifestations, either to a state of depression, or to an omnipotent exaltation of the subject. This pendular motion appears in different 'forms of intellectual work, including the theory of translation. If traditional vision. of translation incorporate melancholy as resignation, contemporary translation theory, discussing the nature of translational work on a new basis, takes a starting point in the recognition of loss implied by all translations.

Walter Benjamin's writings make an attempt to elaborate on this loss; and in various texts of his, melancholy is an explicit object of the writer's thinking. In the essay on translation he both affirms and tries to overcome melancholy impulses through certain images, in which the typical duplicity of melancholy is given in a paradoxical form