Reviews for Correspondence 1930-1940

The average rating for Correspondence 1930-1940 based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-06-13 00:00:00 Brenda Fredette This is a devastating collection. It is a catalogue of a deep friendship built on love, mutual respect, and moments of joy, paradoxically made stronger by distance and time spent away from each other. And distance predominates, along with isolation, estrangement, longing, loneliness, anxiety, and fear. "Felicitas" and "Detlef", as they refer to each other, both suffer from migraines and other long bouts of illness, moving about the continent (and, in Gretel's case, across the ocean) only as allowed by visas, permits, passports, nationalities, and all the other bureaucracies affected by the rise of Nazism. Mutual friends and acquaintances, dozens if not hundreds of them, equally displaced, interned (like Benjamin), exiled, stateless, trapped or adrift (if there's even a difference), come and go, passing along news of one to the other, while Gretel and Walter are able to meet in person only a handful of times across a harrowing and ultimately tragic decade. Their letters were what they had and what remains. Perhaps the last letter he ever posted is addressed to her: "It is possible, even probable, that we have only a limited time at our disposal." Here you will find the famous letter from Detlef to Felicitas, dated 12 October 1939 at Nevers (Nièvre). Despite his internment, or perhaps because of it, Benjamin experiences a state of pure joy following a dream, in which he spoke that now-famous phrase "Il s'agissait de changer en fichu une poésie", inspiring Derrida's "Fichus" and, in turn, Cixous's Hyperrêve (Hyperdream). It is unfortunate that Hoban did not include this phrase in its original French, instead offering only an English translation: "It is a matter of changing a poem into a scarf." My only other criticism is that some of the letters from or by both Adornos appear in, in my opinion, slightly better form in the collected correspondence of "Teddy" and Benjamin translated by Nicholas Walker, which makes me wonder about Hoban's translations in general. These are minor issues, though, in a work that is otherwise a true testament to the human condition, marked as it is by joy and despair, hope and hopelessness, but above all, a sense of friendship that ignores the boundaries that otherwise determine our fates.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-09-04 00:00:00 Matthew Whitty "You asked so kindly how I am. And the only sincere answer I can give is: pitiful …" "… and as ever I am turning to you when there is something special on my mind that I cannot quite deal with by myself." "It is not so much books that I lack as someone with whom to exchange a few words." "I have the feeling you understand me, even if I do not talk a great deal about myself, your friendship is so unegotistical. And where, ultimately, is the fine line between friendship and love ?" "there is no one to whom I feel so close in letter, and there is nothing in the world as tender as the words you merely hint at." "It is a great shame that I cannot speak to you, there is so much to say and to clear up, and everywhere nothing but obstacles." "I would like to write more. But I fear that such a letter would exhaust the recipient no more than the author. And what could I add that has not already been sown between its lines as if they were furrows ?" "… being together for only a few weeks and then separated once more for months is a state that will sadly continue for years in our case." "Every word I say is connected to him, and if I lose that bond I will no longer exist." "My nervousness, which has a variety of causes, has reached a level that can hardly be surpassed; the impossibility of written communication of any prospect of change completely deadens, and I fear you would not have much joy with me." "I know that one cannot, unfortunately, escape from one's own life, but it is only now that I have reached the point where I am prepared for anything, any loss, and without any joy at all."