Arrival and “The Task of the Translator”

Arrival and “The Task of the Translator”

Amresh Sinha

School of Visual Arts, New York

Abstract

Denis Villeneuve’s film Arrival (2016), based on Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” has made a great impact on intellectual and academic culture. While the stature of the film has grown to mythical proportions over its uncanny use of past and future memories, intertwined with its nonlinear temporality, my approach to the film is different, taking up an issue surprisingly ignored by most reviewers: the issue of translation.

I explore the film from the perspective of Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay, “The Task of the Translator.” This is the first step to explain the radical nature of translation of the foreign language, which transforms the limits of understanding and meaning of our own language by the alterity of the “other” language, the foreignness that can only be grasped by the dynamics of a nonlinear translation, a method developed by Victor Longa in his 2004 essay, “A nonlinear approach to translation.” Rather than focusing on the film’s nonlinear temporality, I introduce a novel and unconventional framework of nonlinear translation to analyze the alien language’s nonlinear and nonalphabetic properties, which are devoid of any temporal dimension.

Keywords: Film, Translation, Nonlinear, Foreignness, Language, Kinship, Walter Benjamin, Victor Longa

About the Author:

Dr. Amresh Sinha teaches film at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City. He has taught Film and Media Studies at several institutions, including New York University, The New School, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and College of Staten Island. He is the co-editor of the anthology Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Films (2011), published by Wallflower/Columbia University Press. His articles have been published in various journals such as Film and Philosophy, Film-Philosophy, Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Films, The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory, Filmmakers on Film; Derrida & Film Studies (Bloomsbury Press), and Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. His most recent peer-reviewed publications include: “The (Im)possibility of Friendship in Fassbinder’s Fox and his Friends: A Derridean Perspective,” “Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of Language and Translation,” “The Primacy of Sound in Robert Bresson’s Films,” “The Impact of Peter Brueghel’s The Hunters in the Snow on the Worlding of the Cinema,” and “From Photographic Servitude to Cinematic Emancipation: The Poetics of Maya Deren.”

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Published: 2026 – 02 – 01