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“The Mississippi Flood of 1927: A Multimodal Translation of Walter
Benjamin”

In his intellectual persona, Walter Benjamin embodied a tension between
infinitizing thought and the earthiness of every medium. At once a
prophetic, even messianic, voice and a relentless interrogator of the
media through which human being emerges and finds meaning, Benjamin was
a contradiction in terms: an enlightened cultural commentator rejected
by the university and left to fend for himself on the radio. 

Among his eighty-four radio programs were several dozen pieces written
and delivered for children. These pieces comprise a crucial—and
still understudied—element of Benjamin’s oeuvre. Ranging from
the banal (“True Stories about Dogs”) to the disastrous sublime
(“The Mississippi Flood of 1927”), Benjamin’s radio programs for
children exemplify the generative force of multimodal adaptations.
In shifting from high academic style to stories for children, and from
the written text to the constrained orality of radio (the limitations
and affordances of which were of particular interest to him), Benjamin
performed the sort of translation that he describes elsewhere as the
very essence of language.

For an encounter with these pieces to be possible today, some
constructive work must first be accomplished. For one thing, we have no
extant recordings of Benjamin’s voice, only transcripts. For another,
neither text nor radio has for contemporary audiences the sort of medial
force that radio had for Benjamin and his listeners both. Accordingly,
we offer here a novel translation of one of Benjamin’s radio
transcripts, presenting “The Mississippi Flood” as a multimodal
composition that integrates English text into an interactive display.
The aim is, in translating both words and technological medium, to
provoke an engagement with the questions of infinitude that moved and
motivated the lost original, Benjamin’s voice on the radio.