Short-Form: Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore is far more well-known as a Bengali writer (among other things) than as a translator. And shouldn't he be? He was the first non-European to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature. In addition to literature, he was skilled and insanely influential to Bengali music and art. As an Indian nationalist, you'll find his compositions as national anthems.

But resources on his views of translation are fairly scarce. He did, however, write to the Spanish translator Joan Mascaró on his translation of the  Upanishads, a collection of Hindu philosophical texts.

Short-Form: Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator"

The philosopher Walter Bendix Schoenflies Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892 to an assimilated Jewish family in Berlin. While a bulk of his writings is directed towards exploring history and art, he also wrote about translation.

“The Task of the Translator” is dense, packed full of complex theory. It wouldn't be difficult write a dissertation based on one or two lines of the text.

This, however, will not be a dissertation. Instead, I’ll summarize and try to explain the most basic elements of Benjamin’s theory. Granted, it's nearly impossible, and it would be very easy to write a thesis on one or two lines from this article. Keeping that in mind, let's dive into the basics...