HQ. WALTER BENJAMIN LIVE! "storytelling" (complete, 102 min). The writings of Walter Benjamin are a bridge linking the Jewish hassidic mysticism of Nachman of Breslav with today's secular avant garde cultural scene. In this 102 minute video my project is to bring to life Benjamin's essays "The Storyteller" and "Unpacking My Library", by making use of Gestalt Therapy dreamwork that I personally do on one of my own dreams. The dreamwork serves as a means to illustrate how Walter Benjamin's ideas find expression in typical human situations. My main thesis is to demonstrate that what Gestalt Therapists label "dreamwork" is one example of what Walter Benjamin labels "storytelling", what Nachman of Breslav labels "torah" or "prayer", and what Bertold Brecht labels "epic theater". In this dreamwork (or storytelling or dvar torah or prayer or brechtian theater performance) I am dealing primarily with my relationship to my deceased father, Henry Wepner, may his soul rest in peace even in spite of my artistic shenanigans. Benjamin was a colleague of both theater director Bertold Brecht and Torah scholar Gershom Scholem. Benjamin's work relies heavily upon Nachman of Breslav's "Collected Essays" ("Likutei Moharan"), which fall within the Platonic stream of dialectical thinking. I like to think of Nachman of Breslav, Walter Benjamin, Fritz Perls and Lee Breuer (of the Mabou Mines Theater) as "rebbes of the avant garde". This project combines new dreamwork on my own life with excerpts from 20 hours of my other videos, and also with fragments of 1500 pages of my essays, all of which you can find in their original complete form at my website. TO VIEW OR DOWNLOAD ALL MY VIDEOS OR ESSAYS (ALL AT NO CHARGE), PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE: franklynwepner.com. ALSO PLEASE NOTE MY NEW EMAIL ADDRESS, IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WITH ME ANY COMMENTS ABOUT MY WORK: fwep@earthlink.net. IN THE LISTING OF VIDEOS THE LETTERS (HQ) REFER TO A HIGHER QUALITY VERSION OF THE VIDEO, WHICH IS AVAILABLE TO YOU IF YOUR COMPUTER CAN HANDLE IT. FRANKLYN WEPNER franklynwepner@gmail.com JULY 2006 GESTALT DREAMWORK AS "TRANSLATION" GESTALT DREAMWORK CONSIDERED FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF WALTER BENJAMIN'S "THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR" FW: What is a translation, in its broadest sense? Think of angels or saints travelling up and down from earth to the heavens, on a ladder or whatever other means of transportation they have available. That is one sense of the term "translation". Then, think of a set of Russian Dolls, or an inverted stack of bowls with the smallest on the bottom. Translation implies moving up or down the stack, from smaller to larger envelopes, or from larger to smaller envelopes. Now think of a stack of inverted gestalts or monads in a monadology, such as comes to pass during a Gestalt dreamwork session. Here again the motion is from smaller to larger and more encompassing envelopes, or the reverse. This time we are talking about envelopes of awareness or the circumference of a contact boundary. This also is translation. But what does this sort of translation have to the translation of a text from one language to another? FW: Especially relevant to this discussion is a remarkable essay on "translation" in all the above senses by the literary critic Walter Benjamin. The essay is entitled, "The Task Of The Translator: An Introduction To The Translation of Baudelaire's Tableau Parisien". The original was written in 1923, and recently it was republished as part of an anthology of Benjamin writings called "Illuminations". Walter Benjamin was a friend of the Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem, and he availed himself of the latter's library of Kabbalistic sources. Like Scholem, Benjamin made use of a mix of idealistic philosophies: Gnosticism, Plato, and Aristotle, all from a Kabbalistic point of view. In addition, there are in Benjamin's work obvious references to alchemical lore, perhaps that of Paracelsus. What follows are some selected passages from Benjamin's essay on translation, along with by my own commentary. WB: A translation issues from the original - not so much from its life as from its after life. For a translation comes later than the original. In translation the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air. FW: The translation or "after life" of a text, is, dialectically speaking, its final cause (Aristotle) or the good which comes from it (Plato) or the Word of G-d which is revealed through it (Kabbalah). This is a pietistic point of view which places the spirit of the law above the letter of the law, and hence puts great value in the role of a translator or interpreter of texts as a prophet of the Word. A literary translation, therefore, is a spiritual ascent of both text and interpreter to the level of divine immanence and universal man, man who thinks in encompassing Platonic ideas. The translated text resides in a