Quote

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.

Walter Benjamin

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Walter Benjamin
Age: 48 †
Born: 1892
Born: July 15
Died: 1940
Died: September 26
Art Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Translator
Writer
Berlin
Germany
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
Another
Spell
Work
Spells
Task
Release
Tasks
Translator
Pure
Translators
Creation
Imprisoned
Language
Liberate

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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
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Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
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As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
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During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
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Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
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Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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The work of memory collapses time.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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