Intention: Centroid of Benjamin’s Poetics

Walter Benjamin is a thinker standing on the edge of the frontier of the tradition and modernity, and attempts to interpret the modern dimensions of human existence in the traditional statement. By using literary techniques, he mixes metaphysical justification with objective facts, and creates an unusual language that is not easy to understand. We believe that one of Benjamin's key concepts that has been neglected so far, is the intention; and this has led us to fail to grasp the understanding of his ideas on language and literature. This term generally refers to the agency and subjectivity, and so words and texts cannot have intention. According to him, the denotation of “brot” (in German language) and “pain” (in French language) is “bread”, but their intentions is different. For this reason, they cannot be equivalent. In a wider perspective, the intentions of all the words of each language is different from that of the other language. This article tries to get a clearer understanding of this concept using authentic sources, and show that the correct perception of this concept can bring together his disconnected ideas around a single axis.
For this purpose, we will use several sources in Persian, English and French. We first see how Benjamin describes the language; then we look at his definition of poetry; finally, we examine his conception of translation. Based on the interpretation given in this article, we can understand the key concepts of Benjamin, namely, language, poetry and translation only if the intention is recognized. We will present the results in the conclusion section.