That a translation is a kind of compromise, in which something is given up so that something else may come across, is, despite its frequent invocation, a less informative observation than it pretends to be. It admits the loss without specifying what is lost; it credits the gain without specifying what is gained; and the language of compromise, while doing useful work in the market for unhappy choices, can obscure what is genuinely at issue when one literary text is set in the place of another in a second language.
A more demanding tradition, of which Walter Benjamin's essay on the task of the translator is the most famous instance, has insisted that the translator's work is not the carrying of meaning from one container to another but the rendering audible of something the original text already has, which a foreign tongue is uniquely positioned to bring forward. On this view, a translation is not a substitute for the original — to which one resorts when the original is inaccessible — but a transformation in which the translated work, the original work, and the second language are placed into a relation that did not previously obtain. The translator, in this account, is closer to a maker than to a courier.
The view is exhilarating and easy to overstate. To deny that translation is in part a service to readers who do not know the source language is to deny something obvious. To claim that the best translations are those that maximise foreign strangeness, on the ground that strangeness is what the second language was meant to bring forward, is to license a practice whose results are sometimes admired and sometimes simply unread. The honest position resists collapsing the two roles into one: a translation can serve, and can also transform; what it cannot do is be evaluated by criteria proper to the other role.
What the more demanding tradition does well, then, is to refuse a flattening of the translator's work into mere transfer. What it does less well, in the hands of its more excited disciples, is to forget that some readers approach a translation because they do not know the source language, and that nothing in the more demanding picture renders that approach unworthy. To hold both thoughts at once — that translation is a service and that translation is a making — is the small but rigorous discipline the field requires of its critics.
The primary purpose of the passage is to: