问答题 The theory of translation is very rarely—how to put this? —comical. Its mode is elegy, and severe admonishment. In the 20th century, its great figures were Vladimir Nabokov, in exile from Soviet Russia, attacking libertines like Robert Lowell for their infidelities to the literal sense; or Walter Benjamin, Jewish in a proto-Nazi Berlin, describing the Task of the Translator as an impossible ideal of exegesis. You can never, so runs the elegiac argument, precisely reproduce a line of poetry in another language. Poetry! You can hardly even translate "mamma. " And this elegiac argument has its elegiac myth: the Tower of Babel, where the world’ s multiplicity of languages is seen as mankind’ s punishment, whereas the ideal linguistic state would be the lost universal language of Eden.无