On the Translatability of Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary: A Critical View from the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

On the Translatability of Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary:A Critical View from the Twenty-First Century Susan H. Gillespie (bio) Scene 1. Moscow, Russia, and Princeton and Philadelphia, USA. September 2015–January 2016. The Moscow Biennale and American Slought Foundation hold a series of events under the title "Straying. An itinerant project exploring urban errors, discrepancies, and territories in Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary (1926)." The project begins with an exhibition and accompanying events in Moscow and continues with symposia in New York and Princeton, and an exhibition and several events at Slought's Philadelphia gallery, featuring historical artifacts, projected media, and research. Scene 2. St. Petersburg, Russia. December 2016. Donald Trump has just been elected President of the United States. The "Critique of Humanities" and "Human Rights" Joint Seminar of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University holds a conference: "Art and Political Engagement. Walter Benjamin's thought in XXI century." The paper reprinted below is presented, in an earlier version, at that conference. Scene 3. St. Petersburg, Russia. November 2022. The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University is in the process of being closed; some of its professors and students are already in exile, others are just getting ready to leave the country. [End Page 871] Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary is a uniquely personal document full of candid reflections on the author's relationship to the 1917 Russian revolution and its reactionary aftermath, his unrequited love for Latvian revolutionary theater-maker Asja Lacis, his career as a bourgeois intellectual and critic, and the future possibility, for him, of writing. First published only in 1980, the journal provoked a spike of interest in 2015–16, in the form of an international series of art events hosted by the Moscow Biennale and the Philadelphia-based Slought Foundation. Does the Moscow Diary have something important to say to contemporary thinkers? The American sponsors of the series of events and exhibitions certainly thought so: Slought Foundation Executive Director and Chief Curator Aaron Levy found it "incredibly contemporary, a manual or a toolbox to navigate the current situation."1 In the following, I will draw on Benjamin's earlier essay "The Task of the Translator" (1923) to think with him about the translatability of the diary, and the experiences it reflects, into contemporary readers' understanding of the historical reality we confront now, almost exactly one hundred years later. "The Task of the Translator," I will argue, offers an approach to thinking about meaning in history that we can use to construe for the diary a uniquely and persuasively contemporary significance. We may do this, Benjamin would have insisted, only by paying explicit, concrete attention to the work's historicity. In employing one of Benjamin's most cited and difficult works to unpack the contemporary significance of a relatively obscure and personal text, I also hope to shed light on underappreciated aspects of the essay on translation. Method, here, is to think through the content of the diary based on the context of its creation and of what I deem to be Benjamin's understanding of the translatability of experience into thought and art, and the readability of the resulting works across time. The fact that, for Benjamin, this time is conceived as "eternal" and that the truth of "pure" language has a redemptive character, is paradoxically what allows him—and his sympathetic readers today—to make philosophical and ethical sense of the crisis Benjamin experienced in the 1920s and of the crisis that faces intellectuals a century later, as we confront the implosion of global capitalism and the violent aggression of Russia within its historical sphere of influence. In his opening salvo in "The Task of the Translator," Walter Benjamin insists: "Nowhere, when it comes to cognition of a work of art or an art form, is consideration of the recipient fruitful. For no poem is meant for the reader, no painting for the viewer, no symphony for its listening audience."2 Nor, for Benjamin, do artworks communicate content. Other forms of writing—journalism, advertising, popular literature—communicate content. Artworks do something greater, and the measure by which we recognize their...