Walter Benjamin

>The no-man’s land between scholarship and poetry

Posted on October 11, 2010. Filed under: Sign and Sight, Stephan Wackwitz, Walter Benjamin |

Stephan Wackwitz recovers Walter Benjamin from the academy @ Die Welt. Translated from the German at Sign and Sight.

In 1972 I was twenty, a supposedly not entirely untalented, deeply impressionable and utterly confused individual. One week it was maoism, the next it was poetry or fine art. The interminable vacillations of a young man. Ersatz military service in Bad Urach, holidays in Paris, a patchwork university degree in Munich. The obligatory hitch-hiking in Italy. The effects of Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra” and three cans of beer in a youth hostel in Milan. An old man holds his head in despair over the diaries of his younger self.

One day, on a marble table top in an Ulm cafe, next to a cup of coffee, lay a red and white Bibliothek Suhrkamp book. It was Walter Benjamin’s “One Way Street”. The effect it was to have on me in the months and years to come echoed that experienced by it author in the 1920’s, who could only read Aragon’s “Paysan de Paris” one page at a time because it made his heart race and kept him awake for nights on end.

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>Striving toward the moment of waking

Posted on September 20, 2010. Filed under: Charlotte Gray, George Packer, Lapham's Quarterly, Lydia Davis, Paris Review, The Walrus, Walter Benjamin |

>In his essay “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century,” Walter Benjamin reflects on the specific qualities of the city as it emerged as the center of cultural and economic life–from the flaneur to the arcade, from Hausmann’s rational plan of the city to Daguerre’s panoramic visions. He writes a powerfully prophetic comment at the conclusion of the essay: “Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking. It bears its end in itself and unfolds it–as Hegel already saw–with ruse.” In this intriguing idea, the very vision of the future holds in it the demise of the present. The grandeur of Paris, the capital of a colonial empire and the center of art and culture and to a great extent technology, held in it a certain decay.

I thought of this as I was walking near the Eiffel Tower the other day, itself a monument to the modern 19th century, when a stream of men, African immigrants mostly, came rushing toward me, bearing sacks of tourist trinkets, running from a barrage of police cars that has swarmed on the sellers in the shadows of the tower. As I got closer to the police cars, they were rounding up a number of men, handcuffed and empty of possessions. While the men rushing towards me were boisterous and chatty, talking to each and calling others on cell phones, the ones in handcuffs were quite and reserved. For the tourists, the scene of arrest was less spectacular than the monument they traveled to see.

“Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking.” The 19th century may also be a fantasy dream that we return to at moments as we, in the West, continue to wake from that past.

At The Paris Review, Lydia Davis is writing a series of short essays about her work on translating Flaubert’s 19th century masterpiece Madame Bovary. Davis’s new translation is due out this month.

But in the case of a book that appeared more than 150 years ago, like Madame Bovary, and that is an important landmark in the history of the novel, there is room for plenty of different English versions. For example, 1) the first editions of the original text may have been faulty, and over the years one or more corrected editions have been published, so that the earliest English translations no longer match the most accurate original; 2) the earliest translators (as was the case with the Muirs rendering Kafka) may have felt they needed to inflict subtle or not so subtle alterations on the style and even the content of the original so as to make it more acceptable to the Anglophone audience; with the passing of time, we come to deem this something of a betrayal and ask for a more faithful version. 3) Earlier versions may simply not be as good in other respects as they could be—let another translator have a try.

At Lapham Quarterly, George Packer finds Charles Dickens in the industrializing city of Rangoon.

Two years ago in Rangoon, I met a toothpick-thin, boisterous young Burmese man called Somerset. He had conferred this nickname on himself at age sixteen, after renting a collection of stories by W. Somerset Maugham from one of the bookstalls on Pansodan Road. By memorizing sentences from the collection, Somerset taught himself a somewhat formal and archaic English. Then he moved on to Charles Dickens. His identification with the works of these long-dead British writers was total. “All of those characters are me,” Somerset explained. “Neither a British nor American young man living in the twenty-first century can understand a Dickens as well as I can. I am living in a Dickens atmosphere. Our country is at least one or two centuries behind the Western world. My neighborhood—bleak, poor, with small domestic industries, children playing on the street, the parents are fighting with each other, some are with great debt, everyone is dirty. That is Dickens. In that Dickens atmosphere I grew up. I am more equipped to understand Dickens than modern novels. I don’t know what is air conditioning, what is subway, what is fingerprint exam.”

Charlotte Gray at The Walrus rediscovers the life and times of Sam Steel, one of Canada’s pioneering figures of the late 19th century.

The story of Sam Steele and the race to secure his record raise two difficult questions: How was he forgotten so quickly? And why does Canada do such a poor job of securing its history? Both questions cause Dr. Merrill Distad — the associate university librarian at the University of Alberta who threw his considerable energies into the Steele papers acquisition — to roll his eyes with frustration. “If this were an American hero,” he insists, “every schoolchild would have heard of him, and there would already be a television series and several movies about him. He is our Wyatt Earp.”

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