The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire by Walter Benjamin

The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire Reviews

• 
  Jonfaith

  Modernity has changed most of all, and the antiquity it was supposed to contain really presents a picture of the obsolete.
  
  As noted the holidays present personal challenges. The rituals and kinship don't connect with me and somehow my Prime member status hasn't yielded a more enriching experience. What this year’s Thanksgiving patch did provide was a couple days to sit and read. I worked yesterday and briefly Thanksgiving night but the rest of the time was devoted to brooding, I mean reading. Imagine then the effect of that happy scholar Walter Benjamin writing on spleen and its champion Charles Baudelaire. This isn't a contained book or finished project but rather myriad essays culled from across Benjamin's life and at least two of them are but notes. The early ones are only oblique with reference to the poet. The advent of newspapers and advertising are a tantalizing subject. Prostitution as an endeavor of mass production is also an interesting thought. The course appears corrected in The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire which is more a Marxist textual analysis, the one I suspect many were expecting all along. There is a slight mention of Brecht and then Benjamin retreats. What mediation that is! There is also a remarkable digression on the nocturnal walks of Dickens which I found most engaging.
• 
  Robert

  It took a very long time to read but that is because it was a pleasure to read and who rushes through pleasure. (Perhaps too many of us.)
  I found the discussion of Baudelaire useful, difficult and often even lovely. As Walter Benjamin looks back nearly a century to understand his own time, so I find much in his thoughts helpful not only to better understand and so read, Baudelaire, but also Benjamin. Benjamin, along the way, offers some insights into our own confused/comic/tragic times.
  
  I find Benjamin persuasive: Baudelaire is not simply the poet of Modern LIfe, but the poet of the psyche of Modern Life—the last lyric poet before lyric poetry was silenced by incessant noise. ( A condition that defines both Hell and life as we know it.)
  
  By Benjamin's time, the notion of modernity lost whatever positive strains it once possessed as it passed from a grim industrial, into the global. Benjamin's radical conception was that it was possible to find in the life of a man and his work, who lived a century earlier, a guide to understand his own time. In the same way, we would profit, by reading Benjamin, dead now for 70 years, to understand something of our urban, if not urbane existence. The shock has not gone away in spite of the cushion of personal digital technology.
  
  Niccolo Machiavelli, in another City, in the early 16th Century, wrote: " If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples, there are always the same desires and and the same passions as there always were." Here, as elsewhere, Machiavelli is prophetic.
  
  We may transition, but we don't change. Benjamin sought to understand the impact of industrial life on the experience of the urban dweller, we might find him useful in understanding the effects of the digital revolution on our consciousness. Who, I wonder, will be our poet, the one, who in the manner of Baudelaire, manages to see inside the "works," from the privileged position of being on the outside?
• 
  Маx Nestelieiev

  мистецтво говорити про Бодлера, не говорячи про Бодлера. важливі для автора думки про фланерів, ганчірників і (найголовніше) пасажі, але обмаль важливого про Поета.
• 
  Islam

  لم تعجبنى المعالجة الطبقية لبودلير وشعره، لكن الدراسة بها استبصارات غاية فى الروعة عن البوهيميون وتعريفهم ودورهم فى المجتمع وقت بودلير وحكومة نابليون الثالث، كما تحدث عن الكسندر دوماس وظهور الملاحق الأدبية مع الصحف فى فرنسا والروايات المسلسلة القائمة على التسلية، كما تحدث فى فصل آخر عن "المتسكع" والفصل بينه وبين المتطفل وفى نفس الفصل أقام دراسة عظيمة عن المدينة متمثلة فى باريس وتطورها العمرانى بعد دخول "البواكى" على يد هاوسمان. والفصل الذى يليه تحدث عن الحداثة بسماتها المتمثلة فى صناعة البطولة وسط حشد الجماهير الغفيرة ثم الانتحار كسمة أساسية وان كان لم يظهر بصفة مادية وانما يكفى تمظهراته المعنوية ثم الخنوثة بالسيولة والهلامية فى الحد الفاصل بين الذكر والأنثى.
  
  وان سلّم فى النهاية بلاإنتمائية بودلير وازدواجيته وتذبذبه بين النقيضين وتنازله عن بعض الأفكار التى اعتنقها فى بداية حياته
  
  الدراسة بها جانب مدينى كبير - عن المدينة- متمثلا فى باريس القرن التاسع عشر، لم يترك تفصولة صغنونة إلا وذكرها فى بناء فكرى تفكيكى تركيبى هندسى. أنا فى الأساس أحب فالتر بنيامين مفكرا وأحبه كأخوة انسانية
  
  ربما هذه أفضل ترجمة لأحمد حسان من بين الثلاث كتب التى ترجمهم لفالتر رغم أنه ترجمها عن الانجليزية، ترجمته لـ"شارع ذو اتجاه واحد" لم تكن احترافية رغم أنه أيضا ترجم "بريخت" عن الألمانية وكانت ترجمة جميلة
• 
  Reem Alharbi

  من أجمل الدراسات والكتب النقدية التي قرأتها في حياتي إن لم يكن الأجمل ولكني في الحقيقة لا أرى أن فالتر بنيامين أنصف بودلير في نقده بل أراه أحياناً يبتعد عنه ويغوص في قلب مدينة باريس ..
  
  ولكن الملفت حقيقة في هذه الدراسة كيف استسقى فالتر من الأدب سواء من بودلير أو بلزاك أو فلوبير وغيرهم حقائق عن الحياة الباريسية ونقدها بشكل مذهل الثورة والسياسة الأدب والصحافة الاقتصاد والعمال الشرطة والثوار وشكل الشوارع والمقاهي أستطيع أن أقول أن فالتر بنيامين عرى المجتمع الباريسي في هذه الدراسة الفريدة من نوعها والتي صورت لي فالتر بنيامين في شكل الناقد الحاد دون تجاوز هذه أول مرة أقرأ دراسة نقدية لفالتر طبعاً مع شُح الترجمات لدراسات الرجل وقلة الاهتمام بفلسفته للأسف.
  
  أحببت الترجمة فقد كانت بديعة ولكن الطباعة والورق والإخراج كان رديء جداً لدرجة أن الكتاب تمزق بين يدي أثناء القراءة.
• 
  Tosh

  It takes one to write about another one. Walter Benjamin, the poet of the urban landscape writes about another poet of the urban landscape. The only thing missing is Benjamin wearing a velvet cape before he wonders around Paris in the early hours before dawn. Benjamin is one of the great critical writers of his time - in fact he's head of his time!
• 
  'Izzat Radzi

  I actually read this hand-in-hand with another book. Though different translation, good to read both version. As some paragraph here (translation by Harry Zohnare better elucidated on the other book. Not sure if I should cross-compare the text, maybe later.
• 
  Emma Iadanza

  I remain unclear on why any of this has to do with Baudelaire.
• 
  Pam

  Re-reading Benjamin on Baudelaire to re-examine la flãnerie in the light of my late (recent) discovery of Hope Mirrlees' 1919 chapbook, PARIS : A Poem - who wrote her Modernist poem when it was practically impossible for a woman to be a flãneuse.
• 
  Ben

  Shoot. This book is ostensibly the "English" translation, but, if you French is rusty, Benjamin'll whip you right into shape, haha. Very good though. I actually found it more accessible than "Illuminations," which I didn't expect.
• 
  Blair

  Mmmm. The intersection of my two favourite early modern thinkers on art. A perfect marriage!
• 
  Lukas

  Baudelaire: Symptom des Hochkapitalismus, Erreger der Moderne, Dialektiker ohne Synthese, warenfeindlicher Fetischist. Benjamin lohnt sich immer.