5 ideas
An original artwork's authority comes from its unique presence in one time and place, its 'aura', which rests on a history of ownership and ritual use. Technical reproduction such as photography and film detaches the work from that singular existence and multiplies it. This shifts art's social function from ritual and cult value to exhibition value and, ultimately, to politics.
The storyteller passes on experience that has proven itself across lives: counsel woven into a tale and handed from mouth to mouth. Once information must be instantly verifiable and self-explanatory, stories lose their open, unexplained quality that lets listeners retell them. Soldiers came back from World War I silent, not richer in experience they could share, and this marks the collapse of experience as something transmissible.
Benjamin describes himself unpacking his book crates at midnight after two years in storage, surrounded by torn paper and stacks of books before they return to the shelves. Each volume calls up the city, auction, or bookshop where he found it. For the collector, ownership is the most intimate relation to objects: the collection holds memories together, and the collector stays alive inside the things he gathers.
Using Klee's 'Angelus Novus', Benjamin pictures history as an angel turned toward the past. Where we see a chain of events, the angel sees one catastrophe piling wreckage at his feet, while the storm called progress blows him backward into the future. The lens rejects history as linear advance and asks the historian to rescue the defeated past from the victors' account.
A translation's task is not to convey information or meaning, which is the mark of bad translation. Its task is to reveal the kinship between languages, pointing toward a 'pure language' that no single tongue contains. The best translation is therefore literal and 'transparent': rather than smoothing the foreign text into the target language, it lets the original's syntax reshape its own.