Benjamin saw translation and cultural critique as recovery of a pure, prelapsarian language.

Evidence

To Benjamin, formal logic was the barrier that separated the language of Paradise from its human counterpart. Man tended to overname things by abstractions and generalizations. It was in fact “the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.” 29 Similarly, the function of the cultural critic was the recovery of the lost dimension of God’s speech by hermeneutically decoding man’s various inferior approximations. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 787

Categorization

• XREF: Benjamin’s translator-as-redeemer idea connects to his later ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and its aura-of-original concept — same theological residue in secularized form.
• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘pure language’ means for Benjamin: an uncorrupted divine speech that critique must recover.