Figure of the constellation
Walter Benjamin
Berlin, 1892 — Portbou, 1940
Critic, translator and philosopher of language whose Aufgabe des Übersetzers (1923) reframed translation as the afterlife of the original.
- Themes
- Translation · Aura · Messianism
- Languages
- German · French
- Places
- Berlin · Paris · Portbou
- Dates
- 1892 — 1940
Biography
Benjamin's life moves through Berlin, Capri, Moscow, Ibiza and Paris, and ends on the night of 26 September 1940 at the border post of Portbou. The unfinished Arcades Project, the late Theses on the Concept of History, and the fragmentary correspondence with Scholem and Adorno form the spine of his afterlife.
Phil-Tragen reads Benjamin's work not as a closed corpus but as a research programme handed forward — by the people who carried his suitcase across the Pyrenees, and by every translator after them.
