La traducción como metáfora

Walter Benjamin, in 1923, wrote “The Task of the Translator”, in which he describes the translator’s endeavour and argues that this task is more complex than the quest of equivalence between two texts. Meanwhile, Emmanuel Levinas, in his 1962 lecture “The Metaphor”, claims that, when it comes to metaphorizing, one must look beyond similarity. From both visions, this essay intends to show how these two authors have had common ground on their conception of language, its evolution, and the mystery it holds. And proposes that the translation of literary works finds its foundation in the metaphor to account for the difference of each language as otherness, and how the translator must allow himself or herself to be destabilized by the foreign language, to give survival to the original, and, simultaneously aim for an ethic of the other in their task.