Fascinating indeed. My own guess — (I guess we’re all guessing) — is that Gertrude, a political naïf capable of only rough calculation re: nuance in current (’39, ’40, ’41 etc) winds of doctrine, and with very genuine affection for Fay — a very affable gentleman indeed, (if you remember our brief meeting with him in Paris), and his returned affection for her, his persuasion to do a friend a favor and say nice things — stretching conscience no more than her willingness would permit — to help his dear friend by translating speeches that might show him in his best light for Americans (faced with defeat and Nazi military invasion, Petain was, after all, saying nice things to shore up his nation’s continuing pride in itself even in a time of terrible adversity), and not until the reality of the Occupation, the deportations, the clouds of war, and its meaning for her, given her lifelong American at-one-ness did she lose enthusiasm and feel distaste for the task and took occasion to let the obligation sort of fade away.
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Unpacking Walter Benjamin's iterations
Walter Benjamin is perhaps the writer we most commonly associate with the recognition of the changes induced in the work of art by the “age of mechanical reproduction” in the modernist period. In that essay, Benjamin’s focus is primarily on visual and auditory reproduction, but he begins the essay with “The enormous changes brought about in literature by movable type, the technological reproducibility of writing.” He then goes on to state:
Around 1900, technological reproduction not only had reached a standard that permitted it to reproduce all known works of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but it had also captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.
Benjamin has in mind here phonography, lithography, photography, and cinema. But, as a quotation from Paul Valéry immediately prior to this passage suggests, these changes––along with those directly bearing on print, such as the rise of the typewriter––affected the way writers like Stein, Valéry, and Benjamin approached the printed book’s already established place among literary processes.