"Transit-Text". How Walter Benjamin stood godfather to the development of a translation-multimedia-product and helped dialect poetry to an 'alter-life'

This article tries to show how nowadays dialect poetry, as almost a “natural” screen- and audio-suitable subgenre because of its brevity, pregnancy and subsidiary orality, can be prepared and presented on a digital medium like a CD-ROM, not just for reading but also for teaching a foreign language in its varieties through translation or as a means for teaching literary translation. In his famous essay The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction Walter Benjamin argues that in this age what withers is the “aura” of the work of art. Furthermore, he claims that the technique of reproduction by making many reproductions substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique essence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the “recipient” in his own particular situation it updates the object. These considerations in connection to the endless possibility of varying a text in real-time by writing with the computer, about ten years ago led me to suggest a change in the current terminology of many languages where the process of translation is often referred to with terms proper to a journey (in Italian the “source” is the “departure text” and the “target” is the “arrival text”). Since any competent reader [recipient] can theoretically manipulate almost every digitized target text on the screen, thus, in Benjamin’s view, updating or reactivating the reproduced object [the translation] in one’s own particular situation [reading on the screen], I introduced the concept of “testo di scalo”(transit text) . But my idea wasn’t just a theoretical or terminological proposal. I first applied it to a multimedia hypertext on contemporary German poetry in different dialects. Surfing within my hypertext an Italian competent reader can, among many other things: a) read a poem in a particular German dialect b) read a literal version of the poem into the German standard comparing it with the original one c) listen to the author’s voice reading his own text d) read a suggested translation into Italian e) listen to the translator’s voice reading his own text f) modify the suggested translation in real-time g) write a completely new translation h) compare her own translation with the suggested one i) replace the suggested translation by her one