La Traduction — le pour et le contre

Walter Benjamin

Abstract

In 1935 or 1936, Walter Benjamin and Günther Anders jointly conceived a dialogue on the problems of translation, which they intended to broadcast on French radio. The French title — La traduction – le pour et le contre (“Translation – the ‘for’ and the ‘against’”) — is explained by this circumstance, although the broadcast was never carried out and the fragmentary draft written by Benjamin in German was never further developed or translated into French. Beyond the text’s incipient character, the speakers’ lines are not identified, so that when Anders gained access to the manuscript in 1971, he was no longer able to determine what stemmed from him and what from Benjamin. Nevertheless, the document is valuable both for understanding how Benjamin intended to present his ideas to a non-specialist radio audience and for the interesting ideas it contains concerning the nature and function of translation.