1The romanian-French poet Benjamin Fondane, born in 1898, established himself among the avant-garde circles of 1920s and 1930s Paris through his essays on philosophy and aesthetics – most notably a study of rimbaud, Rimbaud le Voyou – and with the impressive body of poetry he eventually composed into the book Le Mal des fantômes, a coherent chef d’œuvre organised into five ‘long poems’ of around 60 pages each. His poetic approach was greatly influenced by his encounter with Dada and a resulting metaphysical loss of confidence in language – which initially led him to abandon poetry. However, despite his mistrust of meaning within a fragmentary modern world, he eventually confronted this philosophical and linguistic breakdown through poetry itself, ceaselessly questioning the limits of language, rewriting his poems even after they had been published. In an essay titled Mots Sauvages (1929), he outlined the halting, uncertain stance of his renewed engagement with poetry, and its synonymy with the exploration of life itself:

I understood that the poem was something else… what? I didn’t really understand… I still don’t understand… Something which modifies reality? No… Something which modifies me… Me? But whom? And who am I?1

2His unstinting search was only snuffed out by his tragic deportation and death in Auschwitz, condemned for his Jewish background.

3This paper will explore the ways in which Fondane’s open-ended poetic ‘quest’ – a quest without a determined objective or final destination, its ends and means inseparable – constitutes fertile ground for considering approaches to translation. In the industrialised world of the early twentieth century, a world where words were wrenched into the new domain of mass media and individual human lives explicitly devalued in mechanized slaughter, the question of meaning and the value of each utterance became urgent and complicated in new ways, foreshadowed philosophically by Nietzsche’s challenge to human values. What follows here therefore situates Fondane’s works and thought in the contemporary context of this urgency. A context of critical observation borne out of the practice of translation will be complemented by readings of theory texts, especially essays by Walter Benjamin and Paul Valéry which confront the potential inseparability of form and meaning. The theoretical grounding will be followed by close readings of the translated poems, broadening into a discussion of the ‘theological’ horizon of meaning and the catastrophic impossibility of approaching it. Finally the translator’s own quest for meaning will be reconsidered in light of Fondane’s poetic enterprise.

1. Fondane, modernity and aesthetics

4Modern revolutions in aesthetics – from romantic conceptions of the sublime to the Surrealist fixation on the unconscious – had, in their attempts to dig at deeper truths through critical analysis and creative practice, repeatedly redefined the uses of language in new and unexpected ways. The abyssal realms visited by Baudelaire, Lautréamont and rimbaud exposed a faultline which was cracked wide open by Europe’s experience of the First World War. The nakedly senseless carnage blew apart totalizing interpretations of humanity’s place in the universe – both traditional religious cosmologies and post-Enlightenment ideals of progress – and the reverberations of this death of meaning, of a collapsing centre, were felt in the very structures of language itself, as was most acutely diagnosed by the Futurists and Dada. In the wake (an apt word, in the context of mourning that lost centre) of this, poets such as Fondane found themselves adrift in a world in which words had lost their stability, and yet where language remained the medium of human thought (‘we are still under the reign of words’ he wrote in Mots Sauvages2).

5The wilful absurdity of much inter-war European poetry reflects this loss, but also reflects, in various ways, attempts to mean in a world in which meaning is no longer underwritten, making the effort to move past the ultimately aporistic critique of signification manifested in dada, though without a new, stable horizon of meaning in sight. Fondane’s poetry also employs heteroglossia (and polyglossia to some extent, T.S. Eliot comes to mind as a poet working in a similar paradigm, though their personal circumstances and convictions were very different) in order to create a tension whereby utterances are played off against each other to create kaleidoscopes of meaning which never resolve into a fixed pattern, filled with statements which never lead to a final conclusion and images which force the reader into a negotiation of sense wherein no perspective can be final.

6Such a portrayal of his work as is laid out here perhaps foreshadows late 20^th-century approaches to texts in general, and indeed it could be argued that in his poetry Fondane explored similar territory to his influential theoretical contemporary Maurice Blanchot. In terms of thinking about sense, the importance of Fondane’s work is that it not only grapples and negotiates with the slipperiness of meaning – surely intrinsic aspects of writing any poetry – but foregrounds and exposes the essential groundlessness of words, their dancing above the abyss. If this sounds high-flown, it bears emphasising that Fondane fundamentally sought to bind his metaphysical explorations with concrete practice and experience – hence his central dedication to poetry, over and above his philosophical prose writings. In its laying-bare of the paradox of language in an obscure world, this modern (ist) consideration of the role of the poet, this approach to the practical negotiation with meaning, offer constructive parallels to the translator in her or his quest to fix a meaning which eludes definitive enclosure. The experience of reading, and especially of translating, Fondane’s existential poetic response to a context of crisis, with its foregrounding of linguistic tensions and striving to make them urgent for the reader, provides a useful example of the point where theories of translation and modernist poetics meet.

2. Fondane as case study: praxis as research

7Fondane’s post-dada ‘metaphysical crisis’, and its correspondences with the difficult circumstances of his own life, are the fulcrum of the relationship between his poetry and his reflections on aesthetics, including his gradual understanding of poetry as a practice which picks up where logical processes of prose leave off, opening up meaning and entreating the reader to engage with it. This paper too straddles the boundary between logical discursiveness and creative activity, in that it represents a form of ‘praxis as research’: the analysis developed here has largely come about at the same times as and/or because of my collaboration with Dr Henry King in the translation of part of Le Mal des fantômes. The collection has hitherto been unjustly neglected in the English-speaking world. Selections of our translations have already appeared in The New York review Books anthology Cinepoems and others. Many of the reflections in this paper are born out of our working discussions.

8Our focus is the long poem “Exodus”, a modern anti-epic of over fifty pages, combining a multitude of poetic forms and free verse to insist upon the enduring importance of the life of the individual, cut loose from the safeguards of God and tradition in an overwhelming context of bureaucracy, industrialisation and impending war. Fondane began the poem as an expression of abstract metaphysical quandaries, a continuation of his somewhat anguished, philosophical, existential thinking. He used the biblical exoduses of the Jews as analogies for the experience of the individual cut adrift in a modernity without a unifying centre, homeless and tribeless. However, the German invasion of France in 1940 halfway through the period of the poem’s composition and the ensuing flight of around 10 million people living in the north of France brought his thoughts and personal life crashing into concrete reality and lent a new and acute pertinence to his images. His crisis of sense was not occluded but rather thrown into relief by the catastrophe irruption of an existential threat of biblical proportions.

9My own scholarly engagement with Fondane was bound up with the practice of translation from the beginning, when I translated two of his essays, along with a critical commentary, for my MPhil degree. But it has only been recently, after getting some of our poetry translations to the publication stage, that I have begun to reflect more broadly on the translation process in light of my experience of translating his work. The value of his poetry as a counterfoil or complement to thinking about translation, and especially translating poetry, is perhaps best brought out by juxtaposing it with texts on translation from his own time, which, to a greater or lesser degree of directness, were dealing with the same broad historical and intellectual upheavals.

10This text, as well as attempting to follow some of the thinking of the composition of “Exodus”, will focus on two contemporary essays on language and translation which arguably form part of the same wide-ranging debate on language which Fondane felt so keenly and which manifested itself as a kind of crisis in his poetic voice (Le Mal des fantômes begins ‘I was a great poet born to sing of joy /– but here I sit, weeping in my cabin’ (Fondane 2006: 27)3, the speaker interrupting his own proclamation, his confidence in speaking undermined). These essays are Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”, from 1923, and Paul Valéry’s introduction to his translations of Virgil, “Variations sur les Bucoliques”, from 1944. In their aesthetic and ultimately philosophical reflections, they too turn to look across the same precipice of meaning in its exposure by the act of translation.

11This complementary textual contextualisation did not bear on the actual approach to the translations, which has been anything but programmatic. We have been progressively establishing the tones and voices in a dynamic manner as we go along. Besides, it would hardly be controversial to say that Benjamin’s famous essay has been of little practical use to translators. Picasso allegedly said, ‘when art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine’, and even if translation itself criss-crosses the boundary of scholarly and practical work, it remains, in my view, a creative process, and my working discussions with Dr King on form and structure and meaning have been tended to the specific rather than the generally theoretical. The turn to Valéry and Benjamin’s texts was borne out of an interest in how, on the other hand, practice can inform theory, and a wish to connect Fondane’s poetics with the ideas of his contemporaries, in parallel with my experience of translating his poems. In so doing the experience of and some reflections on translating Fondane are placed within the context of early 20th-century debates and engagements with language in general, and the continuing relevance of the questions they pose is considered.

3. Benjamin, Valéry and the tensions of sound and sense

12For Fondane poetry was the crucial medium for a living and effective meditation on life and meaning simultaneously, and its potential for exploring and pushing the boundaries of the latter also made it fundamental to Benjamin and Valéry’s essays on translation, in its animation of the relationship between representation and what may be represented. Benjamin’s essay does not explicitly distinguish between poetry and prose, but as he holds that ‘the more formal a work is, the more it will still, even in the most fleeting brush with its sense, be translatable’ (Benjamin 2009: 44), then the poem is presumably the closest thing to the ‘ultimate’ original (if we leave aside the Messianic example of the bible, whose so-called ‘interlinear version’ Benjamin considers the actual ‘archetype or ideal of all translation’, in which ‘literalness and freedom’ are united (ibidem: 45)). Any attempt to translate poetry which goes beyond a prose gloss of the perceived sense surely ‘breaks down barriers’, in Benjamin’s terms, in the target language to some extent:

To redeem that pure language that is banished into otherness in one’s own language, to release the language held prisoner in the work by rewriting it – that is the task of the translator. For its sake the translator breaks down crumbling barriers in his own language: Luther, Voss, Hölderlin, George all broadened the bounds of German. (ibidem: 42)

13A selective quote from Valéry could be employed to support this emphasis on the importance of engaging with the characteristic structures and forms of the source, as a simple gloss of the perceived sense is held to neglect the fundamental essence of the work: ‘the better a work which appears poetic survives being turned into prose… the less it is the work of a poet’4, he writes. In his focus here on the relative unimportance of sense Valéry seems to parallel Benjamin. Poetry draws attention to the fact that language is inherently formal, is a form or network of forms in and of itself.

14However, a slightly different approach is taken by Valéry at the start of his essay. He begins by praising Latin grammar and explaining how it is impossible to reproduce its arrangements in French, leading him to state that he will abandon the attempt at a ‘line by line’ translation. He explicitly compares the work of the translator with the work of the original poet, seeing the ‘transmutation of a text from one language into another’ as a comparable creative exercise. We appear far removed here from Benjamin’s approval of German critic rudolf Pannwitz’s recommendation that the translator ‘let the foreign language shift [his own language] by force’. Benjamin’s approval of these statements on translation from 1917 could be read as advocating (if we apply them to Valéry’s specific instance) a remoulding of French according to the structures of Virgil’s Latin, creating a hybrid rather than a simple transference:

our translations […] proceed from a false basic principle seeking to germanize indian greek English instead of indianizing greekifying englishing german, they have far more respect for their own linguistic customs than for the spirit of the foreign work […] [the translator] must widen and deepen his language with the foreign language.5

15Whereas for Benjamin the source should push into the target and shape it, Valéry seems instead to imply that the target must completely modify the substance of the source. For Valéry the translator of poetry has the same task as the poet: in an ‘affair of pure imagination’, beginning with the raw and perhaps pre-linguistic materials of inspiration, he must refine his own language into ‘le langage des dieux’, the language of the Gods. This could be read as locating the nucleus of sense underlying the ornamentation of poetic language and then re-gilding it with the target tongue. Transmutation in place of force: rather than shifting the translation, the original poem is shifted by it, its essence carried wholesale into the entirely new domain of a different language.

16Translating Fondane’s poetry has brought me to consider the way that most translations of poetry sit somewhere between Valéry’s transmutation and moulding into a new (and equally lofty, according to Valéry’s views on poetry’s actual metaphysical elevation above ordinary language) composition in the translator’s tongue which yet remains internally consistent and Benjamin’s desired comprehensive sweeping away of barriers in the target language towards an ‘interlinear’ language (Benjamin of course accepts that the task as he outlines it ‘seems utterly impossible’ and depends upon a condition which is essentially theological: a context of adamic naming where word and referent would have a single, inter-bound existence, where ultimately the only language would be the ‘pure’ language of creation, and neither translation nor, perhaps, language itself would be necessary to understanding).

17Some examples from “Exodus”, focusing in particular on the translation of nouns which do not offer straightforward choices for rendering into English, will now serve as a means to developing the actual translation’s status in relation to Benjamin and Valéry’s theoretical positions. This development will also reveal the self-consciousness of Fondane’s poetry as it simultaneously orbits the same problems of meaning and expression which animate his contemporaries’ meditations.

4. The translator approaches the poem

18At this juncture it is worth providing further contextualisation. In “Exodus”, Fondane employs multiple voices to sing three interwoven narratives of exile: the biblical exoduses of the Jews, the 1940 flight of millions of French people displaced by the German invasion, and the metaphysical exile of man from God. The figure of the wandering Jew comes to stand as an existential motif, the permanent, unsettled, post-Nietzschean condition of modernity, where there are no certain values to take refuge in (nor certain words in reach):

Because we are strangers amongst each other/our language is not the same/even though there may be only one language in the world, / only one single word in the world.6

19This theme is also addressed formally. In one section, Fondane imitates the biblical Hebrew acrostic poem, giving a lyric voice to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, comparable to Psalm 119, transposing the appeal to God and the attempt to bring belief into one’s consciousness through ritualised prayer into a context where God is starkly absent. The same ideal centre which remains out of reach in Benjamin’s exposition of the elusive perfect language or perfect translation figures here as an absence both for the prayer, which is completely destabilised by this loss, and for the poem which replaces it, in its own inherent incompleteness.

20In Psalm 119, the verse beginning with Koph ( ק ) (line 145) is a plea for God to hear the speaker. ‘I cried with my whole heart; hear me O LORD… I cried unto thee; save me… I hoped in thy word’7. Fondane, reducing the music of the psalms to bare quatrains in order to underline the sense of starkness and loss, updates this plea with the assumption that no one will hear:

Qu’elle soured
belle Sourde
hors des gonds
des visions !

21The acrostic technique displays an awareness of the need to go beyond the sentence, as Benjamin says, not only to the Word but to the letter (something George Steiner also develops in commenting Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles, which so fascinated Benjamin, in After Babel):

Hölderlin’s art of translation always derives from literalism, almost, in fact, from a literalism not only of the single word but of the letter… paradoxically, therefore, the most exalted vision we know of the nature of translation derives precisely from that programme of literalism, of word-for-word metaphrase which traditional theory has regarded as most puerile’. (Steiner 1975: 333)

22And here is our translation:

To your cohering,
lovely Unhearing,
beyond the bounds
of visions!

23In making ‘unhearing’ a noun we have modified English grammar in a fashion which surely tallies with what Benjamin describes, ‘forcing’ a new noun form into the English, ‘frenchifying’ it, in Pannwitz’s terms. Yet in finding a rhyme in the first two lines and ‘compensating’ for the chiming of elle / belle with the alliteration of the third line, we have also reworked the lines into an English poetic idiom, as it is arguable Valéry would approve of, attempting to employ the ‘best’ aesthetic potential of English. But we have also arrived at our translation through a close negotiation with the sense, whereas both Benjamin and Valéry imply it could or even should be cast almost completely aside. In doing so we have therefore, probably, neglected further aesthetic possibilities in English and also gone less far than, say, Hölderlin in recovering the ‘value and dignity’ of the work, the ‘essence of [its] form’ as Benjamin puts it (Benjamin 2009: 43-44). In negotiating between unleashing the new energies offered to English by the French text, utilizing something of the aesthetic potential already present in English and still maintaining a (subjective) connection to the sense of the original, we have, as most translators do, attempted to find a point of balance. This point is, of course, imperfect, the tension between the different poles persists and the task remains ‘incomplete’.

5. The theological horizon of meaning

24For Benjamin, the ‘escape’ from sense or its dissolution into the pure being of pure language depends upon a theological Logos: in practice, until this Messianic guarantee is manifested, the translator can only gesture so far beyond the constraints of human language before language breaks down and he or she is ‘imprisoned in silence’. This Messianic concept of the Logos is hardly incidental to Fondane’s poetry, which carries in it what he names ‘le cri humain’: the traumatised and tragic attempt to articulate meaning in a world where its theological guarantee has been replaced by nothingness. “Exodus” foregrounds this fruitless cry and its echo in silence: ‘I cry. The world comes back to me in a cry. / Nothing! Nothing but the sob of time denied’8.

25Both Benjamin’s essay and Fondane’s poem, then, approach the central absence of God from different directions, meeting in the space of emptiness underlying language. Fondane begins from a place of anguish at God’s absence and therefore at the cruelty and senselessness of the world, and creates a lament which reflexively mourns its own inability to sing in a full, unbroken language, estranged as it is from a central authority: ‘human cries fall to the ground like chestnuts… without disturbing the peace of angels’9. Undercutting its own powers of signification, the poem contains a Messianic longing for a language which would bridge the gap between the human and the divine. This is the same longing contained in Benjamin’s vision of an interlinear language existing between all the world’s actual languages, the ultimate goal of translation being not only the ‘perfect’ translation of a single text but the ‘energising’ or hybridization of all languages by one another, a pre-Babel-like language filling all the gaps between existing languages, mapping the world as Borges’ map does in his short story “On Exactitude In Science”.

26At the beginning of his poetic career, Fondane had seen a refuge in aesthetics, in beauty as compensation for the meaninglessness of the world, which is how he would characterise the Art pour l’art approach associated with such as Valéry and Mallarmé, beauty compensating for le néant, for nothingness. After his encounter with Dada, this view was shattered, and in the face of nothingness he fell into silence and wrote no poetry for four years, from 1924 to 1929. Beauty was no substitute for God: ‘le langage des dieux’ was an illusion. This is also the context of Sartre’s (relatively) contemporary essay on Mallarmé, which concludes that poetry is therefore absurd and its time is over, that the world should be given over to ‘rational’ prose. The fact that Fondane started writing poetry again was not a wilful ignoring of absurdity but a rejection of the primacy of rationality as a means to papering over the loss of a fundamental and unifying logos. It represents a courageous engagement with the world and with language in a context of despair: a despair which included, not least, the impossibility of the theological guarantee Benjamin’s pure act of translation would depend upon.

27Within this context, sense became all the more urgent and impossible. Fondane’s poetry manifests a modernist lack of confidence in the ability of language to fix meaning in the first place. Benjamin held that a great original contained ‘something final, something decisive… beyond any kind of communication’. For a poet like Fondane, this ineffability was evident in the creation of the poem, in the gulf between language itself and whatever it seeks to represent. Language represents a movement towards the ineffable, but never, evidently, a communication of it. With his insistent, fragmentary, self-questioning verses, he lays bare his primary uncertainty in his utterances. Form and content are indissociable, but those who have not received the divine revelation of pure language can have only limited confidence in the word. Who or what, exactly, is the ‘belle Sourde’ from the earlier example? God, or something else? The blank space of unhearing is an attempt to point up the impossibility of comprehending the unutterable experience or signification which is not expressed but only gestured towards by the word God. In interpreting such a line, the translator goes beyond their critical or linguistic resources and participates in the same impossible attempt to bring the ineffable into language as the poet.

6. Catastrophe: poetic and semiotic instability

28Let’s take another example from “Exodus”. Another formal aspect of Fondane’s work is the way he draws on fixed forms, mixing them amongst his free verse, suggesting a half-formed order which does not succeed in coalescing into full coherence. Or, perhaps, a breakdown of traditional orders, without their actual disappearance: a rejection of the path of nihilism in the face of the loss of meaning, language going on despite the death of meaning, as life does. One form he employs is the sonnet, subverting poetic expectations by using its traditionally personal lyric form for his most fragmentary and abstract verses. It is worth quoting a full sonnet in order to give a flavour of this.

29In our translation, faced with the difficulty of finding English rhymes, Dr King and I have used tactics such as slant rhymes and consonance to try and create an English sonority which approximates the French to some extent. We have also changed the rhyme scheme to one more familiar in English poetry, dropping the couplet at the start of the sestet and changing to two Italian-style tercets and separating the first line of the sestet to provide a symmetry which goes some way to compensating for the lack of a couplet.

30I would again like to focus on a single word: ‘seuls’. The English translation of ‘seuls’ poses an exemplary difficulty to this poetry which questions fundamental meanings and repeatedly plunges into metaphysical anxieties lying behind utterances. ‘Individuals’ or ‘people on their own’, for example, don’t come anywhere close to the sense of isolation necessary to create tension with ‘tas’, ‘heaps’, and make the contradiction between multiplicity and ‘aloneness’ explicit. ‘The lonely’ doesn’t convey the absoluteness of the condition and papers over the plurality with a collective noun. Our working choice, ‘alonenesses’, is an undeniably awkward coinage, perhaps going against the polishing of language Valéry advocates. In employing a novel noun, we have ‘forced’ the grammar of French into the English, as Benjamin solicits, in a similar manner as with ‘sourde’.

31However, this was once more done very much in a spirit of engagement with the sense. Again, as with ‘sourde’, we find ourselves using language to feel our way towards a reality which language cannot encapsulate. The sense is unstable. And it is here that a concept in Valéry’s essay is a useful critical handle, despite his stated intention of leaving sense behind. He describes the work of translation as ‘returning to the moment [of the original work’s] creation’10, likening the moment of composition to an orchestra whose instruments call and respond to each other in tuning in order to feel their way towards harmony. To extend his metaphor, the translator has a different set of instruments at his or her disposal. The original meaning is unstable, as the reader of “Exodus” is continuously made aware by explicit indications in the text. The translator, therefore, must follow the poet to the original moment of composition, to the play of unresolved possibilities in the air, and choose which tuning will best fit, which harmonies between referent and expression to employ, though perfection is never achieved, an act of choosing which is more or less identical to the act performed by the original poet.

32Valéry considers the translator to have the potential to move from the ‘lively imaginary state’ to a ‘resolution’, an alternative but equally valid resolution to the original poet’s: “One must go back down to that lively imaginary state and towards its resolution in a work of a different language from the original.”11

33In his ideal, both ‘tune’ language into a perfect aesthetic. But poetry like Fondane’s questions this perfection in the original poem, underlining the lack of resolution in meaning by using unresolved poetic forms. In this his poetry moves in a similar field to the theoretical texts of another of his contemporaries, Maurice Blanchot, especially The Writing of Disaster – Fondane’s poetry is certainly ‘catastrophic’ in both its focus and expression – and prefigures ‘post-structural’ approaches to the operations and limits of language. Not coming to a conclusion and comprehensively offering us the object of the poem in a refined form, but ‘knowledge… as disaster and through disaster’12.

34It follows that the translator is always and already implicated in this unresolving interplay of meaning, his or her intervention only a temporary attempt at harmony or poise and not a final resting place. Let’s not forget that Jacques Derrida (in his Letter to a Japanese Friend) stated that deconstruction ‘is also through and through the question of translation’. If the sense is unstable in the first place, there is no resolution. Instead, the translator extends the engagement of the poet – an engagement Fondane considered to be a form of existential affirmation, an expression of life in its dynamism and uncertain purpose.

7. The translator and the quest for poetry

35To modify or broaden Valéry’s analogy, this lack of resolution (though not of resolve) is fittingly paralleled in experiments in dissonance in modern music (Fondane himself was particularly interested in ravel, another artist who broke open established forms and redeployed them). We could also think of Valéry’s musical-metaphor breaking-down of the original elements of the poem before their reconstitution in terms of jazz, where standards are taken apart and reinterpreted until there is no longer a version considered definitive, with all versions considered to complement each other but no single take reaching perfection. Thus, if we choose to interpret Valéry’s declaration of the poet and translator’s task as refining language into the ‘language of the Gods’ as offering multiple (possibly infinite) possibilities (which is perhaps subtly supported by his choice to refer to Gods in the plural, rather than the monotheistic God whose word is inseparable from that which it names), it would seem to offer a fittingly open-ended model of (re) composition which does not contradict the ‘impossible task’ of the translator as Benjamin outlines it.

36However, in a final example will come from the musicality of the Bible. Fondane weaves lines of biblical song into his verses, counterpointing the sorrowful beauty of Hebrew choruses with his own pained questioning of existence. Perhaps the most obvious and affecting instance of this is the lament of the Jews in exile on p. 169 (with our translation alongside):

37Fondane has his ‘chorus’ repeat the ‘stranger in a strange land’ line many times throughout his long poem, and repeats the word ‘étranger’ almost as a musical motif. The translation into English of this word is far from straightforward (witness the various translations of the title of the novel by Camus). This example ties together various aspects of the workings and limitations of language which the translator faces: form (its repetition works on one level as a pure aesthetic effect), sense (the French term covers a larger semantic field than any English approximation and therefore perhaps calls for different translations on different occasions within the poem), the tension between the two, and also the going beyond of both into an entering of the poet’s ‘imaginary state’, as Valéry calls it.

38As the lines just quoted explicitly make clear, the exile of the Jews recalls the scattering of humanity and of language at the fall of Babel – ‘we are strangers amongst each other / our language isn’t the same’ – and the biblical context takes us to the limits of language, to the horizon of pure language or of its absence. Although in the example above we went with what may seem the straightforward choice, stranger, in our discussions concerning how to translate ‘étranger’, like Hölderlin Dr King and I went past the surface meaning of the poem and deep into etymology. Within the Hebrew Bible, around sixteen different synonyms of stranger or foreigner appear, referring both to one’s own people being in a foreign land and one’s own condition of foreignness: outsider, sojourner, another, an alien, etc. The translator of these lines can hardly ignore the biblical context, and finds themselves alongside Fondane in a process of interrogation beyond the limitations of the word itself: what exactly does it mean to be foreign, to be in exile?

39The word alone cannot answer, which is what paradoxically spurred Fondane to continue writing his poetry: life becomes the search, a quest without hope of an end. ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’, as Samuel Beckett’s narrator says, referring both to life and to speaking. The translator, then, surely performs and extends the search of the original poet, collaborating with him in the unending effort to reconcile reality and representation. In this respect, the translator has a similar relation to the poem’s original subject, as Valéry implies. The translation is a poem about the original poem, both treating its subject as the translator interprets it and using its form and content as the starting-point for that interpretation. In a sense, the translator performs the original poem, interpreting it in their own manner like a jazz musician or a composer doing a rearrangement, such as ravel’s rescoring of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Every reading is an act of interpretation, but the translator’s reading is a performative one. Yet in retaining some formal relationship with the original, he or she also acts upon his or her own language (be it subtly) as Benjamin advocates.

40Though they address ideas of literalness and freedom from different directions, Benjamin and Valéry’s approaches are not inherently contradictory. They both hold that the essence of the work, its ‘value and dignity’, lie beyond its sense, though Valéry emphasises the task of conferring formal beauty on the specific translation without touching on the ultimate ‘interlinear’ task of translation in general as Benjamin describes it. The hidden affinity of the two approaches is revealed in Benjamin’s metaphor of the tangent, the translation ‘touch [ing] the original fleetingly and only at that vanishingly small point of sense before… pursuing its unique course in the freedom of linguistic usage’ (Benjamin 2009: 43). For both, poetry is the crucible of value and dignity, and Valéry asserts that the easier a poem can be converted into prose – is ‘communicable’, in Benjamin’s terms – the less of these it has (Valéry 1957: 210).

41The task of fashioning language into ‘le langage des dieux’ is Valéry’s chosen focus. The difference between him on the one hand and Benjamin and Fondane on the other is that Valéry holds that language can indeed approach the locus of divinity or its cipher. Benjamin makes it clear that his theological condition is one of actual theological revelation. Fondane rejects even the best human aesthetics as no adequate replacement for the fulfilling of this condition. His poetry proclaims the extra-rational and messianic nature of pure language, the apparent impossibility of its attainment, and poetically performs this proclamation, this cry.

42As the messianic condition is never fulfilled, each translation always remains a testing, an exploration of the boundaries of language, and is never final. In the translation this exploration is re-energised by the language of the source text, which offers fresh modes of perception. As ‘languages are not ‘foreign’ to one another but instead are a priori and regardless of any historical links related to one another in what they are trying to say’ (Benjamin 2009: 33), the effort of saying on the part of the translator is surely an extension of that of the original poet, with a new set of forms available. The source language offers new modes to the translator’s own tongue, and the expression of ‘what is trying to be said’ is extended into a new domain. Benjamin’s ‘forcing’ of the target by way of the characteristics of the source does not change it utterly but expands it, the energies of language coalescing in hybridity. The ‘trying to say’ of the translator extends the ‘trying to say’ of the poet, who, as Valéry contends, begins by attempting to translate life into words.

43Both poet and translator begin within language, and in effect novelty depends upon hybridity, upon an alchemical process of new combinations, reinvigorating well-worn materials. Both may seek to go beyond or between language in the attempt to bring closer what lies behind it. The translator of poetry can follow the poet’s moods, but must experience and interpret them in his or her own manner, as the jazz musician hears and interprets the standard. A ‘living connection’, in Benjamin’s terms (ibidem: 31), which also describes the ultimate inadequacy of language and the endlessness of the task. Poetry itself may never achieve the ‘true’, ‘divine’ language, the dreamed-of language of roland Barthes’Writing Degree Zero, but it is the ultimate realm for translation, concentrating as it does, as George Steiner says, the ‘energies of covertness and of invention which are the crux of human speech’ (Steiner 1975: 233). The great value of post-Dada modernist poetry like that of Benjamin Fondane is that it lays bare the genesis and the limits of these energies, offering the possibility for new ways in which to consider how the task of the poet can inform that of the translator.