Paolo traduttore. Sulla distinzione tra spirito e lettera

What did the apostle Paul mean when he wrote to the Corinthians that “the letter kills, while the spirit gives life”? How can the Pauline distinction between letter and spirit be seen as a founding device for Western discourse on translation? And what is the red thread connecting Paul’s enigmatic statements on Moses and the messianic interpretation of Scripture to Walter Benjamin’s seminal pages on messianic language and the task of the translator? Paolo traduttore: Sulla distinzione tra spirito e lettera (“Paul the Translator: On the Distinction between Spirit and Letter”) invites readers to undertake a double archaeological investigation: first, by reinterpreting Paul’s letters in light of modern translation theories; and second, by demonstrating how the history of the Western concept of translation cannot be fully understood without reference to the apostle’s paradigmatic figure. As Benjamin suggested, religion and translation are so deeply intertwined that they can scarcely be conceived of apart from one another – and this book reveals how the entire trajectory of Judaism and Christianity is marked, from its origins, by a complex and persistent interplay of translation experiments.