In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault argues that around the time of the Enlightenment a decisive shift occurred. Prior to that period, he suggests, Western culture sustained a reciprocal kinship between knowledge and language. The nineteenth century dissolved that bond, leaving in its place two estranged realms: a knowledge turned inward and a language rendered opaque and independent. What we now call literature begins here, when language no longer guarantees access to truth.

It is difficult to imagine a time when readers took the Book of Job or the Iliad as factual accounts, untroubled by the distinction between myth and history. Yet this transition (from story as faithful record to fiction as a form apart) marks the elevation of literature. Once disassociated from reality, literature was tasked with something more ambitious. Through another consciousness, it offered the reader a glimpse of what could be true. The project was always, in some way, a failure. It could never fully translate what it sought. But that failure became the measure of its reach.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the act of translation. The translator approaches a buried form of language, one that must be unearthed, never perfectly carried over. Walter Benjamin wrote that translation aims to release in one language the pure language hidden within another. It is not transmission, but liberation. The translator breaks through the decay of their own tongue in order to reach something that remains hidden, but not silent.