Zygmunt Bauman and the Task of theTranslator

Abstract

The author presents the figure of Zygmunt Bauman as a public intellectual
and a translator. Following Walter Benjamin and his essay
“The Task of the Translator” and Jacques Derrida and his text
“What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation,” the author concludes that a public
intellectual as a translator is persistently confrontedwith the task
of translatingstatements and postulates from the “language of politics”
into “language of practice” and “individual experience”, from
the “language of science” into the “language of collective action”, and
from the “language of sociology” into the “language of the media.”
The author claims that the key category in Bauman’s thinking was
neither “liquidity” nor “modernity”, but “socialism as active utopia”.
For Bauman, socialism is impossible without a socialist culture, but
culture is a practice, i.e. it is anattempt to attune our collective goals
aimed at improving the social world. This alignment comes without
resorting to the idea of a collective conductor (a program), but by
means of resorting to the idea of a translator.