*T*here’s a piano in the corner of Howard Eiland’s Sharon home with numerous musical scores strewn not too haphazardly across the instrument.
Lovely art pieces grace the walls of his beautiful high-ceiling living room on Cowhill Road in Sharon. And piled high on the coffee table are books by German-Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin.
Eiland, with a flop of thick gray hair and earnest eyes, is youthful at 58. He spends his days as a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also teaches a graduate course at Boston University. He has lived in Sharon for more than 20 years.
Benjamin, whom Eiland pronounces with the German accent, "Benyameen," is Eiland’s 10-year scholarly passion.
In the past year, he has translated two books on Benjamin now available in bookstores: "Berlin Childhood" and "On Hashish."
It took Eiland 9 years to translate a work called "The Arcades Project," an eclectic and philosophical work more than 1,200 pages in length, in which Benjamin explores one of the first shopping malls in the modern world located in Paris.
"The work is centered on the Arcades in Paris, an architectural creation done in the 19th century... The Arcades became the haunt of all kinds of disreputable people," Eiland said.
http://www2.townonline.com/sharon/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=585385