Benjamin, part 2

I'm reading "On some motifs in Baudelaire" in German with the English translation in hand— it really seems clearer to me in German; the thoughts aren't as counterintuitive and contorted.  This is the old Illuminations translation by Harry Zohn, which renders "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" as the splendid, blazingly Hegelian-Marxian "Theses on the Philosophy of History" with which I assume many of you are acquainted.  Who was Harry Zohn, I wonder?  (This tells me little.)  Somehow, in English, something about the tone throws me off: it's fastidious, yet conceptually bold, in a combination I've never seen in a native speaker not actively trying to write like a translation.

Someone is playing with guitar effects in the next room.  I DON'T CARE I DON'T CARE I LOVE ACADEMIA THIS IS PARADISE WRITING LITERARY CRITICISM IS THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION of my entrails

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Miranda Gaw
i kind of want to tattoo "WRITING LITERARY CRITICISM IS THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION of my entrails" on my arm. it'd probably be a bad idea in case i ever go to grad school, so i think i'll just use ballpoint.
Adriana
because of some stupid copyright privileges that harry zohn secured, no retranslations of the illuminations texts can be officially published. i don't read german so i know that this is true for my own work. curiously, even when i was first confronted with zohn's "errors in translation," i didn't panic thinking that perhaps i would have to reacquaint myself with b. all over again. instead i just accepted this "in (mis)translation" benjamin and kept on going. that being said, i would love to see a collaborative translation of "the task of the translator" that would attempt to correct some of zohn's more egregious errors.

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