Walter Benjamin, Sonneteer

At Hyperallergic, Barry Schwabsky has been thumbing through Walter Benjamin's Sonnets and committing his reflections to his "Reader's Diary." Translated by Carl Skoggard, and published in English only last year, Benjamin's poetical efforts seem to have received scant attention. Schwabsky begins his reflection by delving into the tragedy that drove Benjamin to poetry:

In 1913, the young Walter Benjamin struck up an intense friendship with the poet Christoph Friedrich Heinle. As Benjamin’s biographers Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings remark, “Benjamin’s relationship with Heinle — which would last for little more than a year — is one of the most enigmatic episodes in Benjamin’s enigmatic life. At once epochal and impenetrable, the encounter with Heinle would leave a deep mark on Benjamin’s intellectual and emotional physiognomy for years to come.” Benjamin was immediately taken with Heinle’s poems and did his best to get them published — unsuccessfully. In 1914, when war broke out, Heinle and his girlfriend killed themselves. Benjamin was deeply shaken, and he began committing his mourning to a sequence of sonnets, at first fifty in number, though eventually there were more than seventy. They were the writer’s main preoccupation for three years, and their style is deeply reflected in his first major literary essay, “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin” (1914-15). Yet the sonnets are little known or discussed — Eiland and Jennings barely mention them — and despite so many decades of insatiable hunger for all things Benjamin in the literary and academic worlds, they were published in translation only last year, in versions by Carl Skoggard, who has already has two other richly commented translations of works by Benjamin to his credit (Berlin Childhood Circa 1900, 2010, and The “Berlin Chronicle” Notices, 2011).

Read on at Hyperallergic.