CORRESPONDENCES AND AFFINITIES

Abstract

3 6 Y C O R R E S P O N D E N C E S A N D A F F I N I T I E S M A R Y M A X W E L L The figure of Walter Benjamin has haunted the American imagination ever since his translated works arrived on U.S. shores some fifty years ago. In addition to Benjamin studies in diverse scholarly fields, his life and death have inspired creative works as wideranging as operas, novels, and documentary films. The influential Benjamin has even invaded the more bookish precincts of popular culture, such as in the title of a collection of essays by Larry McMurtry, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Benjamin as ‘‘culture hero’’ is the starting point for a chapter of Leonard Barkan ’s travelogue, Berlin for Jews. Published in 2015 was David Kishik’s The Manhattan Project, a volume which presents itself as the commentary to a text that Benjamin, after faking his suicide at the Spanish border in the midst of World War II, might have written had he moved to New York City, ‘‘assuming the position of a kind of specter living an afterlife.’’ But the ghost of Walter Benjamin has also been a presence in my own writing life. It is a little-known detail of his biography that as a young man Benjamin was the author of a set of seventythree sonnets, poems that were found among a cache of papers vouchsafed to Georges Bataille and kept in Paris during the war. 3 7 R After I came across German versions of these in a Heidelberg bookstore soon after their publication, Benjamin’s sonnets became something of an obsession. I was particularly taken with a central section composed of nine enigmatic poems. This past fall, in preparation for a conference talk about poetry and translation, I found myself back at them again. It was when he was writing his sonnets, I newly realized, that Benjamin was also translating Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal into German; the dates of the two sets of poetic texts overlap almost exactly. Given that the introduction to this privately printed 1923 translation, titled Tableaux parisiens, is the now-canonical essay ‘‘The Task of the Translator,’’ there is considerable irony to the fact that the slim volume of Baudelaire translations attracted no contemporary interest whatsoever. Yet despite his personal disappointment at the book’s reception, Benjamin hardly dropped the subject. Not only would the great French poet inspire a number of important essays begun in the thirties, Baudelaire would also form the core of Benjamin’s monumental Arcades Project. As late as 1939, the year before his death, Benjamin would write of Les Fleurs du mal, ‘‘My thoughts are now focused on this text day and night.’’ And as soon as I finished Kishik’s elaborate intellectual fantasy, an alternate specter came into view. Benjamin would not, as Kishik imagines, have lived as an anonymous figure hanging out at the 42nd Street library, eschewing contact with friends and émigré colleagues such as the Adornos, Max Horkheimer, and Brecht. And no, if Benjamin had ‘‘escaped’’ to New York, he would not have written an additional theoretical work about Manhattan along the lines of his unfinished Parisian masterwork. Instead, the middle-aged Benjamin would have continued to write about Baudelaire . There are even indications (his correspondence to Gretel Adorno, as well as the nature of the materials he left with Bataille in Paris, to name but two) that this was Benjamin’s actual intention . As Michael W. Jennings poignantly notes about ‘‘Central Park,’’ a collection of preparatory passages for the Arcades Project, ‘‘Benjamin’s title points to the central importance he ascribed to these fragments in the context of his work on Baudelaire, as well as to his hopes for resettling in America, where his friends spoke of finding an apartment for him in proximity to Central Park in New York.’’ 3 8 M A X W E L L Y In my own imaginative projection the American Benjamin would most often be found, via the A train, in Greenwich Village’s postwar cafés. There...