NOAH ISENBERG
On Walter Benjamin's Passages
I
N
1968,
a modest selection of Walter Benjamin's writings appeared
in English translation. With its now-famous frontispiece, bedecked
with a black-and-white portrait of the brooding European intellec–
tual-about which Susan Sontag would have much to say in her early
essay on
Benjamin-Illuminations
was destined to become a classic for
generations of Anglo-American readers. Edited and introduced by Han–
nah Arendt, the volume included such hallmark essays as those on
Proust, Kafka, and Baudelaire, alongside Benjamin's musings on the
decline of storytelling, his widely anthologized "The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and his so-called theses on the phi–
losophy of history. The collection managed, in due time, to reach an
audience not only among members of the New Left, who were given to
Benjamin's more political work, but also among countless writers and
critics, students of the humanities and social sciences, and non-academic
readers eager to learn from one of the twentieth century's most gifted
and original thinkers . In the years since,
Illuminations
has continued to
remain in print, and can still be spotted on bookshelves and course syl–
labi around the globe.
At first, Benjamin's Anglophone reception was admittedly small .
There were, of course, scholarly journals and magazines, such as
New
German Critique
and
New Left Review,
that offered a forum for criti–
cal discussion of Benjamin's work (and also a home for the occasional
translation of pieces from his vast
oeuvre).
Yet, it wasn't unti l ten years
after the publication of
Illuminations
that a second installment, a com–
panion volume titled
Reflections
(containing such texts as "A Berlin
Chronicle," excerpts from
One-Way Street,
as well as Benjamin's city
portraits of Marseilles, Moscow, and Naples, and the
1935
expose of
his magnum opus, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century"),
appeared in English. And although the seven-volume critical edition–
with several of the volumes containing two or even three books-of
Benjamin's collected writings began to appear in Germany starting in
1972,
the lag time for an English translation spanned close to three
decades. Now that Harvard University Press has published two volumes
