The Afterlife of Texts in Translation

Book excerpt: The Afterlife of Texts in Translation: Understanding the Messianic in Literature reads Walter Benjamin’s and Jacques Derrida’s writings on translation as suggesting that texts exist within a process of continual translation. Understanding Benjamin’s and Derrida’s concept of ‘afterlife’ as ‘overliving’, this book proposes that reading Benjamin’s and Derrida’s writings on translation in terms of their wider thought on language and history suggests that textuality itself possesses a ‘messianic’ quality. Developing this idea in relation to the many rewritings and translations of Don Quijote, particularly the multiple rewritings by Jorge Luis Borges, Edmund Chapman asserts that texts consist of a structure of potential for endless translation that continually promises the overcoming of language, history and textuality itself.