Carl Skoggard was trained as a musicologist and for many years served as an editor for the music bibliography Repértoire International de la Littérature Musicale (RILM), New York, where he was responsible for German materials. More recently, he was also the staff writer for Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, an award-winning magazine created by his partner Joseph Holtzman. Over the last decade Skoggard has prepared translations with extensive commentary for the three major autobiographically-oriented writings of the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. His bilingual edition of Benjamin’s Sonnets has made this little-known but important body of poetry available to readers of English for the first time.