translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

egarded as suspicious. Both Barnes and Benjamin are the adepts of an
apocalyptic philosophy of history, which implies a repudiation of the
concept of historical progress, a concept that means, according to Benjamin,
the privilege of the winners’ perspectives and interests.
For Barnes, the history of the world is a continuous series of ironic
coincidences and unhappy accidents. It may be represented by the voyage
of a fleet of shipwrecked arks, floating randomly on the ocean of time; thus,
the human voyage is an uncoordinated floating from one disaster to
another, disaster representing, for Barnes, the engine of the historical
continuum. “The concept of progress should have as its basis the idea of
catastrophe. The fact that things continue to happen represents the
catastrophe. Hell is not something that waits for us in the future; it is this
very life, here and now.” (Benjamin, 1969: 64) Barnes’s theses refuse the
meliorist trajectory promoted by classical historicism, the writer rejecting
the concept of progress associated with the cause-effect logic; his
historiographical approach is ark-ologic. (Buxton, 2000: 116)
The official, totalizing and authoritative history is opposed to the
revisionist perspective of the apparently insignificant character that
manifests his will of being recognized as the protagonist of history and that
proposes the integration of the omitted fact within the ‘coherence’ of the
historical events.
With Benjamin, the role of quotation/quoting is essential in reading,
writing and making history, consisting in making a past moment approach
a present one in an illuminating constellation that plays a revolutionary
role and determines a better understanding of history. With Barnes, the
web of ironic repetitions, of auto-reflexive quotations makes out of quoting
the way in which history functions. Barnes differs from Benjamin in that,
with him, quoting means farce (e.g. the sinking of the Titanic is an echo of
the sinking of the ships from Noah’s fleet; the archetypal journey of God’s
chosen ones becomes a journey of the cursed). Yet, with Barnes, farce
appears at a large historical scale: “Does the world progress? Is there a
benevolent divine plan? Or just chaos?” (1989: 190) The logical consequence
of all these questions is the lack of certitude and safety, both sustaining the
pessimist outlook on history, reflected in the essay on the work of art,
where a catastrophic perspective on the history of mankind is put forth
(Shipwreck). Gericault’s painting becomes the transcendent allegory of
human history: “We are lost at sea, floating between hope and despair,
acclaiming something that will probably never come to save us.” (Barnes,
1989: 207) The vision upon the past is dominated by an accumulation of
shipwrecks that make up a unique and huge historical catastrophe; that is
why salvation/redemption is mentioned from a caustic perspective. The
history of repeated disasters ends parodically with an image of heaven that
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