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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
Tasks
Translator
Pure
Translators
Creation
Imprisoned
Language
Liberate
Another
Spell
Work
Spells
Task
Release

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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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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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The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say.
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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The distracted person, too, can form habits.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
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You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
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The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
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Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
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All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
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