Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

In Search of Walter Benjamin's Berlin

2009-10-20T12:17:30-04:00

Here at HUP, where we try to keep the flame for Walter Benjamin in some respects, we maintain connections with legions of Benjamin devotees throughout the academic world. One of them, Rachel Jacoff, Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literature and Professor of Italian at Wellesley College and the editor of John Freccero's book of essays on Dante (HUP, 1988), wrote to us about a recent trip to Berlin during which she set out to locate some of the sites remembered by Benjamin in "A Berlin Chronicle" and Berlin Childhood around 1900, his extraordinary psychic inventory of the lost spaces of his childhood. Jacoff detailed her efforts as follows.

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When I agreed to take part in a Dante conference in Berlin this fall I found myself almost at once thinking about Walter Benjamin. I reread "A Berlin Chronicle" in Reflections and then read the whole of Berlin Childhood around 1900. This was going to be my first trip to Germany, a place I had scrupulously avoided, and the idea of turning the trip into a pilgrimage to Walter Benjamin’s home gradually took over my imagination. I thought about how he had not been able to return, and how he had written Berlin Childhood around 1900 precisely as a way of dealing with the irrevocable loss of the world of his childhood and its security. I thought, too, about another exile, Dante, whose cruel banishment from Florence comes to mind whenever I am in Florence and see that anyone can go there now, while he was never able to return. I was going to be able to visit Berlin, something Benjamin knew by 1932 that he would never be able to do again. Both Benjamin and Dante immortalized the cities that had rejected them, both writing bout their memories of earlier and safer times. When Dante meets with his great-great-grandfather at the center of Paradiso, Cacciaguida recalls the Florence of his time as "peaceful, sober, and chaste" (15. 99), a reposeful, beautifully civil and trustworthy community (15. 130-32) that no longer exists. This is the same ancestor who will predict Dante’s exile, defining it as "the loss of everything most beloved" (17. 55-56). Even though the Commedia is saturated with fierce attacks on the Florence, it is clear that Dante remains obsessed with it, longing to return to his "bel San Giovanni," the baptistery at which he imagines receiving the laurel crown. Benjamin, like Dante, is recalling a lost world. He selects a variety of places and spaces that contain or prompt memories of his childhood and the high bourgeois world that nourished his fantasies and predilections. By 1932 this world was gone, or at least inaccessible to Benjamin and other Jews like him.

Carmerstrasse, one of the several streets in Berlin that Benjamin called home.

Benjamin’s descriptions of the places dear to him in childhood made me eager to find the neighborhoods and the houses in which he had lived. Everyone assured me that the houses no longer existed, and it was difficult to find specific information. The neighborhood was Charlottenburg, still a wealthy residential area. From several sources I was able to gather that the family had lived first in Kurfurstenstrasse, then in Nettelbeckstrasse, and later in Carmerstrasse. It is easy to find Carmerstrassse since it runs out of Savigny Platz, a beautiful, leafy square with an elegant Spanish restaurant and a few upscale stores. Carmerstrasse is tasteful and serene, its domestic architecture both cozy and stylish. Walter Benjamin Platz is located in Kurfurstenstrasse, a commercial area west and south of Savigny Platz. As Benjamin’s father prospered the family kept moving further West, ultimately residing in Delbruckstrasse in the Grunewald district that bordered on the royal hunting preserve. It was to this parental villa that Benjamin, his wife and son, returned when he was unable to support the family in later years. Still later, in 1930, Benjamin came back to Berlin and lived in Prinzregentstrasse 66 in the neighborhood of Wilmersdorf where there is now a plaque in his honor.

Many of the other places about which Benjamin wrote—the Tiergarten and the zoo, the Victory column, and certain streets where various relatives lived—are still there. Whatever aura they have for me comes from their existence in Benjamin’s memory and his prose.

||| "A Berlin Chronicle" is published in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 2, 1931-1934, and Berlin Childhood around 1900 is published as a standalone paperback.

Resurrecting a Renaissance epic

2009-10-08T12:21:27-04:00

This month, we're publishing a new verse translation of a Renaissance epic, a poem that inspired Borges, Calvino, Vivaldi, Hayden, Handel, Shakespeare, Spenser, Byron, and a host of others. Its significance in Western literature simply cannot be exaggerated. But Orlando Furioso ("Mad Orlando," sometimes translated as "The Frenzy of Orlando"), Ludovico Ariosto's sprawling sixteenth-century masterwork, lies strangely neglected (part of the reason has to do with the poem's extraordinary length; we've offered here just over half of the total poem, and the result is a book of 672 pages). David Slavitt's new verse translation, the first in thirty years, restores the impishness and the sheer comedic energy of Ariosto's poetic language, rendering the Italian courtier's ottava rima into an English as playfully outrageous as the original. Below is Slavitt's short preface to the poem, "the greatest cock-and-bull story in literature," in which he explains why Ariosto deserves our attention and why he needed a translation as merry and mirthful as the one he's now got.

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Translator's Preface to Orlando Furioso: A New Verse Translation, by David Slavitt

In the early Renaissance, while the visual arts were traveling from Italy northward, there was also a reverse motion in which the telling of the tales of Charlemagne in the Chanson de Roland became popular in Italy. Luigi Pulci published Morgante Maggiore in 1482, and Matteo Maria Boiardo wrote two parts of Orlando Innamorato. (He died in 1494, with Part III only just started.) Ludovico Ariosto followed upon these two and published the first version of Orlando Furioso in 1516. The third and definitive edition, in 46 cantos, appeared in 1532, a year before Ariosto’s death. It has been said that Ariosto took Boiardo’s minuet and turned it into a symphony. It is one of the great monuments of Renaissance literature, inspiring Vivaldi (with Orlando Furioso), Haydn (with Orlando Paladino), and Handel (with Rinaldo, Ariodante, Orlando, and Alcina) as well as Edmund Spenser and Lord Byron, whose Faerie Queene and Don Juan are both enabled by Ariosto’s poem and tributes to it.

What makes Orlando Furioso particularly appealing to the modern sensibility is its sense of fun, its self-consciousness, its attitude toward a series of already established characters from the English Arthurian poems and the French poems about Charlemagne and Roland. Ariosto’s object is to have fun with this huge cast, with their characteristic scrapes and Perils-of-Pauline escapes, but also to find ways of making relevant observations about the trials of life and the ways in which stylistic conventions (courtly love, primarily) form our ideas and our behavior. It is also a great show-off piece, with its ottava rima stanzas that are easier in Italian than in English—but I do them anyway, because in English one can have rhymes that are more startling and impish than in Italian, as Byron shows us. This seems to me altogether in consonance with the spirit of the piece.

The great lesson this work can have for students, and the one that they probably need more than any other, is that poetry can be fun. Of all the "great works" of the Renaissance, this is certainly the most enjoyable—the greatest cock-and-bull story in literature, but dazzlingly accomplished and endearing. It was Italo Calvino’s favorite book; as Cesare Pavese observed, there is virtually nothing in Calvino’s work that is not redolent of a sapore Ariostense. Or, putting it quite another way, it is very long and if I hadn’t loved it, I wouldn’t have knocked myself out for years bringing it into English in what I take to be its original playfulness.

There are other English versions. The best is that of Sir John Harington, whose mother, Ethelreda, was an illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII. Sir John, a godson of Queen Elizabeth, is best known for having invented the flush toilet. Apparently he annoyed the queen, who could have banished him for life but, in a friendlier way, sent him off to translate Orlando Furioso, saying that he could return to court when the job was finished. She never expected to see him again. But he actually completed most of it, and his version is lively and witty, although not easy to get hold of. It is also rather . . . Elizabethan. More recently William Stewart Rose, a friend of Sir Walter Scott, did a much too romantic and respectful version that lapses, often, into Scottish. Guido Waldman and Allan Gilbert have versions in prose that are handy as trots but are not the poem. They were both useful to me, but are of no conceivable interest to a reader unless he or she is working along with the Italian text. Finally, there is a version in verse by Barbara Reynolds, but it isn’t funny enough, or sprightly enough. Ariosto’s poem is often outrageous, sometimes serious, but often quite silly, and it wants to be fun in English. The ottava rima stanza is inherently humorous. Excessive earnestness, I’m glad to say, is not a defect I’ve often been accused of.

What we have in this volume is slightly more than half of what Ariosto wrote—primarily because the production costs of an enormous and unwieldy volume (or volumes) would have made for a discouragingly expensive book, which would have defeated my purpose of broadening Ariosto’s Anglophone audience. It is also true that with nearly seven hundred pages here, most appetites will be satisfied.

Pamuk delivers first Norton lecture; five more to come

2009-09-23T11:24:38-04:00

The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925 by C. C. Stillman to honor the university's first Professor of the History of Art. In accordance with Stillman's desire that "the term Poetry shall be interpreted in the broadest sense, including, together with Verse, all poetic expression in Language, Music, or the Fine Arts," Norton Professors have included not just poets in the narrower sense, but novelists, critics, musicians, and accomplished polymaths of all stripes, including Umberto Eco, John Cage, Leonard Bernstein, Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino, Northrop Frye, Lionel Trilling, Jorge Luis Borges, R. Buckminster Fuller, E. E. Cummings, Thornton Wilder, and a host of others.

And so Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk delivered the first of his Norton lectures yesterday afternoon in Harvard's Sanders Theater. Pamuk, the author of The White Castle, The Black Book, My Name is Red, Snow, Istanbul: Memories and the City, The Museum of Innocence, and many others, spoke primarily of what makes the novel a unique form and how we are to determine what happens to our minds as we read them. Pamuk, who started out as a painter, elaborated on Schiller's distinction between the naive and the reflective poet as it applies to his own experience with novels, both the Turkish ones he read in his youth (he once "raged" against those naive, unselfconscious storytellers as Schiller raged against the serene, untroubled genius of Goethe) as well as the classics that have shaped him as a novelist and as a person (Anna Karenina is his all-time favorite, we learn; he quoted extensively from the passage where Anna reads an English novel on the train back to St. Petersburg). He offered as well a set of nine points on what distinguishes the novel from other forms, the last and most forceful of which being that novels offer (and we seek in them) "a secret center," a buried object that we feel compelled to search out via clues in the narrative. This, of course, provoked questions about where exactly lies the periphery and how are we to locate that bit (hey, it's an audience of academics!), which Pamuk, a self-described autodidact, promised to address in future lectures.

The lectures, we should point out, are free and open to the public, and there are five more coming; here's the schedule, courtesy of the Humanities Center (each lecture begins at 4pm):

Norton Lectures: Orhan Pamuk on "The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist"

Tuesday, September 22 - "What Happens to Us as We Read Novels"

Tuesday, September 29 - "Mr. Pamuk, Did You Really Live All of This?"

Tuesday, October 13 - "Character, Time, Plot"

Tuesday, October 20 - "Pictures and Things"

Monday, October 26 - "Museums and Novels"

Tuesday, November 3 - "The Center"

||| Norton Lectures at the Humanities Center (PDF link)

Barbara Johnson remembered

2009-09-17T12:50:29-04:00

The renowned literary critic and many-time HUP author Barbara Johnson died on August 27. Johnson was Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard, and the author of numerous books, including Defigurations du langage poetique, The Critical Difference, A World of Difference, The Wake of Deconstruction, The Feminist Difference, Mother Tongues, and her latest book, Persons and Things, published last year. Johnson's groundbreaking theoretical contributions to the study of literature made her one of the most respected critical minds of her generation, and her scholarship helped to establish the importance of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives as central to contemporary inquiry into literary meaning. Below is a personal reflection on Johnson and the significance of her life and work by HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters, who had the good fortune to work with Johnson on several important projects over the years.

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On Barbara Johnson

Before I was offered a job at HUP in 1983, I had fairly deep connections with a number of Harvard professors—Hilary Putnam, Stanley Cavell, Werner Sollors, Roman Jakobson, Helen Vendler, Barbara Lewalski. I had never met Barbara Johnson, but we had one key friend in common—Paul de Man. I was publishing de Man’s books at Minnesota. So, when I was offered the job, I made a return trip back to Cambridge to size things up once more. I saw just a few people on campus, including Barbara, whom I spoke with for the first time. My question to her in a nutshell was: "Is it safe to work here?" By then I knew Yale a little, but Harvard not at all except for a memorable visit to Jakobson in 1979. These schools seem to be as convoluted as the Vatican, but I was raised in the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church, and such East Coast schools and the Pentagon share something of the Byzantine structure of the Vatican, so I was not totally ignorant of complex social structures. It was December 1983, days before de Man would die. Barbara's answer to my question was "yes." She had just moved from Yale to Harvard the previous year, so she knew whereof she spoke.

Some months after I got here, HUP's director, Arthur Rosenthal—one of the greatest American publishers in the era after World War II and founder of Basic Books—suggested to President Derek Bok that Barbara be appointed to HUP's Board of Syndics, and together Barbara and I got a chance to discover whether it was safe to be at Harvard. Arthur liked to "mix things up" in the world at large and in the little world around Harvard Yard. Bok supported him through thick and thin. I presented a number of projects to the Board of Syndics that led to what the Catholics call "baptism by fire" for Barbara and myself. She was ingenious, charming, indefatigable as a supporter of unusual projects of merit. But there were members of the Board who were allergic to certain names—"Heidegger," for instance—so any book having much to do with his ideas needed good reasons before we could win approval for it.

Our most beautiful achievement was the publication of Patricia Williams’ Alchemy of Race and Rights. Our grandest was A New History of French Literature, of which Denis Hollier, then at Berkeley, was the chief editor—but Barbara was the editor from Harvard. Her renown and daring won the day with Arthur Rosenthal and then with the faculty Board. Despite the objections of members of the Romance Languages Department, who took issue with the book's nontraditional slant, the volume came out and was a great success in the English-speaking world, winning rave reviews in the New York Times Book Review and the TLS. Of course, we were denounced in France because we were Americans, and because more than half of the editorial board was female, as were about half of the contributors. A decade later, the French themselves stopped opposing feminism and changed the composition of their parliament so that it was 50% women.

Barbara was a superb editor of the New History. She later contributed to the Norton Anthology of Literary Theory, all the while keeping up her writing. Among American academics, she was the key collaborator of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. She gave their ideas a local habitation inside the United States. Along with other scholars, such as Gayatri Spivak and Shoshana Felman, Barbara developed the ideas of de Man and Derrida so that they worked on American intellectual ground—exploring them and discussing them in American English. "The Heidi of the avant-garde," one wit called Barbara, and it’s true that she appeared the ingénue. If there had been no Barbara Johnson to figure out that the use-value of deconstruction was in the United States, it would never have passed the Pragmatist’s Test: what can you do or make with that idea as a tool for life?

In the hands of most converts to deconstruction, the ideas of de Man and Derrida turned to mush. Barbara was unusual among American deconstructionists in that everything she wrote had the elegance of simplicity and economy. The beauty of deconstructive thought is that it pursued simplicity. The New Criticism that preceded deconstruction wanted complexity, but first-rank deconstructionists sought to achieve the simplicity of Socrates, who asked impossible questions in the simple language that children use. Certain cognitive styles, of which deconstruction is one, lead to simplicity. Why must we accept the fact that all people before us have divided the world into binary oppositions? Where structuralism thrived on such oppositions, deconstruction called them into question. What really caused deconstruction to take off in America was that it arrived at a moment of huge social change in the post-World War II period, when most Americans had become reluctant to maintain the old binaries of black/white and male/female. Before Barbara Johnson, deconstruction in America was just theory. But theory has to be actualized in the corporeal world to effectively come to life; one must bring it to bear first on the male/female binary and then on the black/white binary. At Yale first and afterward at Harvard, Barbara joined forces with brilliant students and colleagues as these ideas took off in America. She collaborated with Henry Louis Gates, developing a way to question that rigidities of black/white divisions in American society, and she inspired the work of the writer and law professor Patricia Williams. So deconstruction spread, enlivening the intellectual discourse in the United States.

Barbara’s relation to deconstruction changed a great deal over the years. Rachel Jacoff, a dear friend of Barbara’s and the editor of John Freccero’s Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, puts it this way: "Rereading The Critical Difference (1980) and A World of Difference (1987), one can see Barbara moving from literature to life. Her textual analyses, always brilliant and anti-binary, then start becoming ways of dealing with issues whose real-world consequences become apparent. Back in the day, many people thought of deconstruction as a kind of game played by French and francophile insiders. You know, the 80s equivalent of berets and Gauloises bleues. Barbara opened it out in a different and profoundly meaningful direction." What I saw was that in her latest book for HUP, Persons and Things (2008), Barbara fully declared her independence from de Man. In this book, an opening in a poem is not the aperture that a de Man would use to unravel the entire thing, but a cavity like the one inside the jar that Wallace Stevens "placed ... in Tennessee" ("Anecdote of the Jar")—an entry point into a world made whole again. And what did our work on A New History of French Literature lead to? Was that a dead end? Hardly. It inspired me to develop with David Wellbery A New History of German Literature (2004), and also to develop with Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors A New Literary History of America, published this month and christened with a two-day symposium September 25-26 at the Barker Center at Harvard.

There has been a backlash against deconstruction by humanities professors who want to turn the teaching of the arts into something like Sunday school. If there is one thing deconstruction is not, it is Sunday school. Deconstruction's leading lights have always been those who, like Arthur Rosenthal or Walt Whitman or Barbara Johnson, are eager to mix things up. Barbara was a great contributor to the making of modern-day Yale, Harvard, and Harvard University Press. "Safe" I would not call Harvard—but lively, much more lively, thanks to Barbara’s work here.

One last personal note: as Barbara, because of her disease, progressively lost motor control, it became more difficult to converse with her and to understand her speech. Her brain was functioning—it seemed in overdrive—but the tongue was not. I found it easier and more interesting to visit her with other friends, so I went once with Helen Vendler and again with Gayatri Spivak. And one special time, we had a publication party for her translation of Mallarmé's Divigations, a party that included Skip Gates, Rachel Jacoff, Marc Shell, and others. But my favorite visit during those difficult days was the time I went to her house to pick up the manuscript of her Mallarmé translation. I read parts of it to her slowly, enjoying the force and wit of her renderings, and in that context a conversation between us flowered because her written words provided the background against which we could play. And for that brief time, all the intelligence and grace of her writings came into motion. Beautiful.

The Idea of Justice

2009-09-11T14:02:15-04:00

From The Economist:

In the courtliest of tones, Mr. Sen charges John Rawls, an American philosopher who died in 2002, with sending political thinkers up a tortuous blind alley. The Rawlsian project of trying to describe ideally just institutions is a distracting and ultimately fruitless way to think about social injustice, Mr. Sen complains. Such a spirited attack against possibly the most influential English-speaking political philosopher of the past 100 years will alone excite attention. The Idea of Justice serves also as a commanding summation of Mr. Sen's own work on economic reasoning and on the elements and measurement of human well-being...Mr. Sen writes with dry wit, a feel for history and a relaxed cosmopolitanism...The Idea of Justice is a feast...Nobody can reasonably complain any longer that they do not see how the parts of Mr. Sen's grand enterprise fit together...Mr. Sen ends, suitably, with democracy. It can take many institutional forms, he says. But none succeeds without open debate about values and principles. To that vital element in public reason, as he calls it, The Idea of Justice is a contribution of the highest rank.

||| The Idea of Justice is available now from HUP and at your favorite bookstore.

Reprise -- Kennedy, Dukakis, Patrick read the letters of John and Abigail

2009-09-08T11:33:23-04:00

Since we're publishing this month a collection of the wit and wisdom of one of our most formidable and literate First Ladies, thought we would re-post a link to the video of an event we put on in 2007 to celebrate the publication of My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, in which we solicited the help of a few of Massachusetts's most well-known contemporary public servants, including Governor Deval Patrick, former Governor Michael Dukakis, and the late Senator Edward Kennedy, in sharing some of John and Abigail's most revealing and affecting correspondence. Video courtesy of Boston's WGBH.

||| The Letters of John and Abigail Adams -- Faneuil Hall, November 17, 2007.

Affectionately Abigail

2009-09-04T09:25:52-04:00

This month we're publishing The Quotable Abigail Adams, edited by John P. Kaminski. For the book, Kaminski mined Abigail's writings--including letters to friends, neighbors, family and even heads of state--and selected quotations that best embody her wit and wisdom. The selections are arranged by topic, ranging from health, family and religion to travel, foreign affairs and government. As many of the quotations in the book are of a Twitter-friendly length, every Thursday there will be a new thought from Abigail on the HUP Twitter account. And since Abigail signed many of her letters "affectionately yours," we've named this project Affectionately Abigail. You can find yesterday's selection here.

The Quotable Abigail Adams comes two years after My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, an expanded collection of the letters of John and Abigail that covers the complete span of their correspondence.

Michael Hardt discusses Commonwealth - September 17, NYC

2009-09-01T14:51:23-04:00

[click image for full size]

Michael Hardt is the author, with Antonio Negri, of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. Commonwealth is available from HUP late-September 2009.

Du Bois the political philosopher

2009-08-31T17:05:30-04:00

Just got the first finished copies of an exciting book from our Fall list. With In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America, Robert Gooding-Williams describes the contours of a distinctly Afro-modern tradition in American political thought and examines Du Bois’s own orientation to that tradition, one to which, as both theorist and practitioner, Du Bois considered himself rightful heir. In this, the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois’s thought, Gooding-Williams, Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, takes Du Bois’s landmark work, The Souls of Black Folk, and subjects it to the same sort of rigorous analysis we often reserve for Locke, Kant, and Rousseau—the “classic” theorists of the social contract tradition. But Souls, in Gooding-Williams’s opinion, constitutes a contribution to American political philosophy that’s as important as the work of those better-known thinkers, all the more so since we find it rooted in and framed explicitly as a response to the distinctly American system of racial apartheid that went under the name Jim Crow.

Gooding-Williams places Du Bois in a long line of contributors to what he calls the “Afro-modern” strain in American political thought, a line that includes Equiano, Delany, Crummell, James, Fanon, and Rodney. But most crucially, it includes Frederick Douglass, whom Du Bois considered his intellectual forefather and who stood as one of the progenitors of the tradition of “assimilation through self-assertion” to which Du Bois considered himself heir. In setting himself up thusly, Du Bois was able to enlist Douglass’s ideas against what he considered to be inferior responses to segregation and white supremacy, such as the “assimilation through submission” ethos that he decried in his now-famous attack on Booker T. Washington, the outlines of which reverberate to this day.

Indeed, in subjecting Du Bois’s thought to the critical analysis it deserves, Gooding-Williams is able to reveal the degree to which modern discourse on race in America takes the shape that Du Bois gave it, and, further, to question the usefulness of some of the more problematic aspects of Du Bois’s philosophy in the debates on race that continue to occur. As the principal theoretical defense of the “politics of uplift” that animated the ideas of African American elites throughout much of the twentieth century, Souls is as much with us today as it ever was. By utilizing Du Bois’s work as an interpretive lens through which to view Afro-modern political thought, and the competing strains within it, as part of a distinct and distinctly American philosophical tradition, Gooding-Williams shows us how we have, perhaps unwittingly, been doing the same thing all along.

||| In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America

HUP Display Room, 1966

2009-08-26T10:55:10-04:00

The HUP Display Room as it looked in 1966:

The Display Room, located in the Holyoke Center arcade in the heart of Harvard Square, closed on June 17 of this year. More on the display room plus a few more photos from Harvard Magazine.