The Gift of Babel

Abstract

This chapter focuses on modernist poetry, especially on those aspects of its nature that translation reveals. Translation should be understood yet another face of mimesis. This chapter offers an extensive discussion of the authenticity of translated poetry that hinges on concepts of translation that follow from the insights of Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig. The legitimacy and authenticity of Bible translations reveals the legitimacy of lyric poetry in translation. The final part of this chapter focuses on two modernist poets, Osip Mandelstam and Paul Celan and returns to the question of modernist “difficulty.” Simplicity and opacity are not mutually exclusive. Even the simplest classical poetry is obscure. This obscurity, though often suppressed, is a permanent feature of all literature. In modernism this feature is closer to the surface than in most poetry.