Les soixante-treize sonnets inédits en français de Walter Benjamin, écrits en mémoire de son ami Fritz Heinle - poète suicidé à 19 ans par désespoir ou protestation face à l'avancée de la Première Guerre mondiale -, dévoilent une dimension méconnue de son oeuvre et de sa pensée par le prisme de la poésie (édition bilingue).
De Walter Benjamin, le lecteur français est surtout familier des essais, des proses à caractère biographique et de la correspondance, mais pas des poèmes. La disqualification contemporaine de l'écriture poétique est un des facteurs de cette longue ignorance. Voici qu'un traducteur, Michel Métayer, s'est attelé à la tâche d'introduire dans notre langue les soixante-treize sonnets écrits par W. Benjamin à la suite du suicide à vingt ans de son ami Fritz Heinle en 1914. Ils constituent une intense et soudaine « crise de vers » au sein de l'oeuvre benjaminienne.
W. Benjamin fut aussi un traducteur (Baudelaire, Proust, etc.) et un théoricien de la traduction. Antonia Birnbaum commente ici son essai sur La Tâche du traducteur.
One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly - and what the troubling social and political implications of this are. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.
This fresh translation by Carl Skoggard of philosopher Walter Benjamin's (1892-1940) engaging memoir remains faithful to the author's voice. Readers are offered glimpses of an anonymous Berlin childhood which might have been Benjamin's own, with recollections of an affluent Jewish home in Berlin's West End, circa 1900. Focusing less on events and characters than on places and things, Benjamin vividly reimagines a young child's idiosyncratic private world. Written in the months before and after the Nazi takeover of Germany, these recollections served as a coping mechanism for Benjamin, a way of working through irrevocable loss.
This edition is illustrated with 30 black-and-white images and comes with a foldable color map of Berlin circa 1900 as well as a translator's essay and an extensive commentary.
Les sonnets de Walter Benjamin, écrits pour le deuil de son ami Fritz Heinle, constituent un élément important mais peu connu de la réussite littéraire du philosophe et une contribution unique à l'histoire du sonnet allemand.
Ce texte constitue un ajout aux mémoires de Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) intitulées Berlin Childhood circa 1900. Il fait ici l'objet d'une nouvelle traduction de Carl Skoggard.
Benjamin's early attempt to understand a nascent technology, remarkably prescient and topical even today
"The illiterate of the future ... will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph." So declared Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) in his essay A Little History of Photography, originally published in the periodical Literarische Welt in 1931. Beginning with the early experiments of Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce and concluding with the work of August Sander and Germaine Krull, Benjamin moved beyond the medium itself to address the artistic, societal and political capabilities that photography foretold. A Little History of Photography contains the inklings of his thoughts on "reproducibility" that he would later flesh out in his best-known text, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Benjamin's view of photography gave early credence to the medium and its practitioners and shaped the methodology by which it can be analyzed.
