Cosmopolis

 Last week I mentioned that my paper on Auden at the RAWW conference dealt with the genre of the diplomatic sonnet. This fits in a larger project that I have been working on, in which I am examining how literary intellectuals have responded to actual international threats and tensions. One of the case studies that has occupied me deals with the fin-de-siècle journal Cosmopolis. Although certain works published in this journal would have a lasting impact on twentieth-century literature (in particular, 'Un coup de dés' by Mallarmé), the principles behind its design have escaped critical attention.

In an article that was published earlier this year, I posit that Cosmopolis anticipated a form of modernism that Walter Benjamin would later conceptualise in his ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921) and ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923). The interplay between Benjamin’s two essays suggests that translation allows one to reach a nonviolent resolution of conflict through language: a translation’s mediation between an original work and pure language presents a nonviolent form of coexistence. 

The editors and writers of Cosmopolis had already put this idea into practice: a significant number of contributors wrote in a language that was not their own, while those who did write in their own language addressed a non-native audience. The geopolitical implications of this multilingual approach come to the fore most emphatically in a case of pseudo-translation that deals with the case of Alsace-Lorraine. More subtly, the periodical creates echoes and reverberations between articles on international politics and works of literature. Through these translational practices, Cosmopolis was designed to foster a ‘diplomatic’ form of cosmopolitanism, a fact highlighted by the diplomatic credentials of a number of contributors, including the main editor, and thematised in short stories by Joseph Conrad and Henry James.