Walter Benjamin - Language Quotes

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Every expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of language, and this understanding, in the manner of a true method, everywhere raises new questions.

Walter Benjamin

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.

Walter Benjamin

Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.

Walter Benjamin

The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence.

Walter Benjamin