Translation and the Archive in the Continental Tradition workshop, Senate House, London, 19 May 2023 – organised by Henry Somers-Hall with Julia Ng, Alan Schrift, Daniel Smith, Charles Stivale and Stuart Elden

On 19 May 2023 I’ll speaking at a workshop on Translation and the Archive in the Continental Tradition, organised by Henry Somers-Hall for Royal Holloway, University of London. It will be held in central London at Senate House. Registration is free, but required via Eventbrite.

The other speakers are Alan Schrift on Nietzsche, Daniel Smith and Charles Stivale on Deleuze and Julia Ng on Benjamin. My talk will be “From the Archive to the Edited Translation: Lefebvre, Foucault, Dumézil”.

We have put together this workshop to explore those aspects of the project of philosophy that are often seen as simply the groundwork or condition for the philosophical project itself, namely those processes of translating, editing, compiling, and those of the archive, both its constitution and consultation. This workshop will explore themes of the nature and operation of these processes in the continental tradition, both in terms of how they constitute the territory of philosophical thought, but also the ways in which the specificity of continental philosophy affects the process of translation, and how these projects of translation have affected the philosophical work of the translators themselves. 

The workshop brings together a number of internationally recognised researchers to discuss the role of these themes in their own work, both as translators and editors, and as thinkers. 

The workshop will take place in Senate House, Central London, on May 19th, 2023. 

Walter Benjamin’s translators on translating Walter Benjamin

Esther Leslie, Sam Dolbear, Sebastian Truskolaski on Translating Walter Benjamin

In 1923 Walter Benjamin published The Task of the Translator, a seminal essay in which he considers what is obscured and what is elucidated through the process of literary translation.

The translators of his short stories approached the task beautifully, and their talents and insights mustn’t go uncelebrated!

“In translating Walter Benjamin’s stories, it was important to capture rhythms, cadences, the lilt of a storyteller in the market square passing on lessons for life or unfathomable mysteries that will become the talk of the town” — Esther Leslie on the task of the translator.

“If the original text defies definitive interpretation, the translator’s task has to be one principally of deferral – the transferal of the task to the reader. To bring an incomprehensible text into the realm of comprehensibility is to kill it.” — Sam Dolbear on the anxiety of the translator.

“Benjamin introduces a distinction between “what is meant” by a text and its distinctive “way of meaning it”, a relation of disjunction between what and how.” — Sebastian Truskolaski on the labours of translation.

Walter Benjamin’s book The Storyteller has just been reissued by Verso