OF all the century's indisputable geniuses, Walter Benjamin has proved one of the most elusive and uncategorisable. Born in Berlin in 1892, he was an essayist, translator, Marxist political philosopher and Jewish mystic. He was the greatest critical intelligence of his age, but had his Habilitation thesis rejected as incomprehensible by Frankfurt University. Endlessly productive as a literary journalist, he published only two fullscale books in his lifetime, on tragic drama, or Trauerspiel, and German Romanticism.
A move to Paris in 1933 saw his immersion in Surrealism, a study of Baudelaire and an ill fated cultural history of the 19th century known as the "Arcades" project. Subsidies from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's institute for Social Research helped to alleviate the poverty of these years, but could not save him from the all engulfing tragedy of the war: he died by his own hand attempting to flee the Gestapo on the French Spanish border in 1940.
Most people's introduction to the oeuvre came in the form of Illuminations, published in 1973 and featuring "The Task of the Translator", "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and the "Theses on the Philosophy of History", whose observation that "There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" was the siren call that drew a generation of readers to Benjamin.
All but one of the essays in Illuminations, however, date from after the period covered by Selected Writings I, which makes the appearance of the new volume all the more significant. Benjamin was a connoisseur of the literary fragment, and until now his readers with no German have had to be the same: fully five sixths of the pieces in this book are appearing in English for the first time. These range from jottings on Duns Scotus, Socrates and Dostoevsky to nionograph length essays on Holderlin, Calderon and the great essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities. There are travel sketches of Naples and elsewhere and pieces which draw on a lifetime's obsessive book collecting, such as the charming "Notes for a Study of the Beauty of Coloured illustration in Children's Books".
Underlying everything, though, is Benjamin's lifelong meditation on questions of knowledge and language. In a fragment on Baudelaire, Benjamin insists approvingly on "the old idea that knowledge is guilt"; knowledge of good and evil is bought by Adam and Eve at the price of "eternal remorse". In "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man", Benjamin invokes the "higher language" in whose "translation" of human speech and "ultimate clarity ... the word of God unfolds".
Benjamin knew a lot about translation, having produced masterful versions of Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens and Proust's A l'Ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, and in "The Task of the Translator" he contributes one of the densest and most influential essays on the subject ever written. For Benjamin, the task of the translator is not to preserve the meaning of the original but to reproduce its essential strangeness in the target language, even at the cost of readability. The reader's comfort was the last thing on Benjamin's mind, since "No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience."
This sense of lonely intellectual imperative contributes to the air of melancholy which hangs around so much of Benjamin's work in "One Way Street", the collage like miscellany which ends this volume, it can be seen in some of his most dazzling aphorisms: "The public must always be proved wrong, yet always feel represented by the critic"; "The only way of knowing a person is to love that person without hope"; "Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby."
Coming so soon after Momme Brodersen's biography, Selected Writings I increases our understanding of this most important of writers exponentially. There is nothing like Benjamin, and I can hardly imagine a more rewarding book being published this year.