Criticism, commentary and translation: some reflections based on Benjamin and Blanchot

Abstract

In this 1986 essay, originally published in the journal PO&SIE, Antoine Berman examines the “essential” proximity and the “essential” difference between three forms of relating to works (literary or otherwise): criticism, commentary, and translation. Drawing mainly on the reflections from his seminar of the previous year on The Task of the Translator by Walter Benjamin, he argues that criticizability, commentability, and translatability are a priori structures. For this reason, rather than being simple metatexts, criticism, commentary, and translation would constitute true “destinies” of works. Inseparable from the space of modernity, criticism would be oriented toward the “book to come.” Unfolding on the plane of writing, it would seek to go beyond the work through the extraction of its pure meaning. Commentary and (literal) translation, in turn, would be directed toward the work’s significance. Understood as traditional modes of relating to texts, they would seek to bring forth their original “orality,” which is the “orality” of the so-called mother tongue, in order to ensure the continuity of a certain tradition. In the end, even while showing himself to be “critical” of criticism, Berman concludes by affirming the importance of all three forms for the preservation of the traditional experience of the world that works contain within themselves.