Fence

Did you ever lose someone you loved, forever? Walter Benjamin did, and wrote 80 sonnets to remember him by. As the Third Reich advanced on Paris, Walter Benjamin entrusted his unpublished writings to George Bataille. Eighty fervent, mystical, lyric sonnets, produced over ten years in a sustained response to the suicide of his college friend in protest of the First World War, were among those writings, and were discovered in Benjamin's archives in the 1980s. This first English translation, a bilingual edition, features extensive context and commentary by the translator, as well as a foreword by poet and translator Donna Stonecipher. Waking were his glances my sole light For errant traces and the starlight Of his eyes the only beam Bestowed upon my sleeping places Now such companions are no more Mute did the mirrors of all Spirit shatter In these heavens which their glistening laugh More blessedly transfigured with each morrow Even when they wept they stood as pools Themselves to nourish by the fall of heavy drops Whose fragrance would outlast the shower And in the fullness of their tears Would those things speak which yet lacked names Much as leaves may speak in gardens. This queer text weaves the deeply personal materials of longing and loss together with Benjamin's evolving religious and philosophical perspectives in ways both mysterious and recognizably Benjaminian--shedding new light on the emergence of the man and the thinker. Carl Skoggard lives in Ghent, New York, and is a former editor and contributor to Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors , an influential magazine of design and style.