242 15 11MB
English Pages 232 [234] Year 2018
Maria Teresa Costa and Hans Christian Hönes (eds)
MIGRATING HISTORIES OF ART
Self-Translations of a Discipline
Studien aus dem Warburg - Haus , Band 19
Herausgegeben von Uwe Fleckner Margit Kern Birgit Recki Cornelia Zumbusch
Maria Teresa Costa and Hans Christian Hönes (eds)
MIGRATING HISTORIES OF ART
Self-Translations of a Discipline
Table of Contents
7
Lost in Translation A Foreword Uwe Fleckner
11
Self-Translation – Translation of the Self An Introduction Maria Teresa Costa and Hans Christian Hönes
21
Self-Translation and Its Discontents Or: The Translational Work Lost in the Theory of Bilingualism Sigrid Weigel
37
Feminine Inscriptions in the Morellian Method Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes and the Translation of Connoisseurship Francesco Ventrella
59
Aby Warburg’s Literal and Intermedial Self-Translation Maria Teresa Costa
77
Edgar Wind’s Self-Translations Philosophical Genealogies and Political Implications of a Cultural-Theoretical Tradition Giovanna Targia
91
American Panofsky Irving Lavin
99
Frederick Antal or a Connoisseur Turned Social Historian of Art Jennifer Cooke
111
Strangers in a Foreign Language Writings on Art and Architecture in Turkish Exile Burcu Dogramaci
125
‘Always living in a foreign tongue ...’ Carl Einstein and the Language of Exile Uwe Fleckner
135
Translating Art History, Transmitting Humanitas Mingyuan Hu
149
Seductive Foreignness Gottfried Kinkel at University College London Hans Christian Hönes
165
Identity, Voice and Translation in the Life and Work of Leon Vilaincour Linda Sandino
179
Notes
225
Index
230
Picture Credits
231
Acknowledgments
232
A note on the cover illustration
Lost in Translation
A Foreword Uwe Fleckner
Erwin Panofsky once said that the German language allowed ‘a fairly trivial thought to declaim from behind a woolen curtain of apparent profundity and, conversely, a multitude of meanings to lurk behind one term’. Yet the author, himself never one to camouflage trivial thoughts with opaque drapery, only came to this realization during his American exile, when in 1953 he published an essay – significantly, in English – on the story of art history in the USA as seen from the perspective of a ‘transplanted European’. His lucid insight describes very exactly the challenges that faced – and still face – a German art historian who in a situation of exile, or the freely chosen emigration of a long period of research abroad, has to use the lingua franca of the modern world. Indeed, the linguistic essence of the acute observation by Panofsky, who after being expelled from Germany quickly learned to write, if not speak, excellent English, can be very usefully transferred to the various challenges that arise whenever people have to find their bearings in new linguistic settings, and not only as researchers. Quite apart from the supposedly down-to-earth, pragmatic character of the English language, being forced to cope with a foreign idiom entails loss, and perhaps also enrichment – but in any case a deep intrusion on the way in which thoughts, observations and indeed deeper insights are turned into communicable statements. Even if, through study and practice, we do eventually succeed in mastering a foreign language, this does not necessarily lead to the gratifying experience that is probably only possible in what we – quite rightly – call our ‘mother tongue’: the experience of being mastered by our own language, of relying on a sense of language that reveals conceptual complexes only when they are actually uttered in speech or writing, and transcends what has only been thought to a degree
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that can scarcely be achieved in a language we have merely learned. To be sure, there are exceptions – but what art historian would seek to compete in his academic use of language with a Samuel Beckett or a Vladimir Nabokov, who were given the benefit of more than one mother tongue by what may be deemed propitious linguistic fortune? Like other humanities, art history is a discipline that is particularly dependent on linguistic expression; yet, unlike other humanities, it is by its very nature a discipline that depends on translation from one idiom into a completely different one. Of course, written sources and historical contexts, methods and factual information can be processed without too much trouble by means of simple linguistic reconstruction; but when dealing with an artwork, a visual phenomenon that both conveys and generates meaning, the art historian always has to transfer the language of the image (painting, sculpture, architecture) into his own language. Indeed, as an investigator of images, the art historian is invariably also an interpreter who attempts to impart to the professional and outside world the often very strange, barely comprehensible and at times hermetic statements contained in an image. Whether forced into exile, like Panofsky and many who shared his fate, or enjoying the opportunities of global networks that lead him to visiting professorships and fellowships in foreign countries and continents, the art historian’s resulting loss of his mother tongue inevitably means he has to become a ‘self-translator’. The bilingual existence in which verbal and visual languages are interlinked soon becomes a tri- or multilingual existence – an existence involving both linguistic and cultural translations, with hazards for which the apt metaphor ‘lost in translation’ has been used by Eva Hoffman in her autobiographical reflections and Sofia Coppola in her film of the same name. This topic – self-translation in a discipline of migrating experts – was the subject of a conference held in October 2015 at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz by the ‘Bilderfahrzeuge. Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology’ research group. Conceived and directed by the editors of this volume, Maria Teresa Costa and Hans Christian Hönes, the conference brought together researchers from various disciplines at an institution that is itself a result and a driving force of multinational knowledge transfer, in order to approach this set of themes from a historical angle and, at the same time, reflect on the researchers’ own situation – for all those that attended the conference, and have published their insights in this volume, have experienced the challenges of changing linguistic settings at first hand. The topic of the conference thus treated Warburg’s graphic metaphor of the ‘automobile image vehicle’ in almost introspective terms: originally coined for such volatile artifacts as postage stamps, medals, flyers and so on, the term shows how the most varied visual information is activated not only by actual physical movement in space and time, but also by transport via media, copies, paraphrases and quotes, film and photographic documents – how motifs, iconographies and other visual impulses are thus released and take effect in new contexts with evernew aspects of meaning (which are occasionally even misunderstood or turned into their
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opposites) on their transfer routes or in various destinations. Yet the phenomenon of migration of mobile artifacts can also be described from the point of view of the actors – artists and copyists, dealers and collectors – and not least also in the light of the now truly global migration of people whose academic work not only contributes to the international transfer of images and their content through translation and self-translation, but itself also benefits from such transfer and is affected by the many associated shifts in meaning and misunderstandings. So it was only to be expected that the results of intensive thinking about the past and present of a constantly self-translating discipline would be published in the Studien aus dem Warburg-Hause series; for Aby Warburg, the founder of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek, which itself had to go into exile and now has a flourishing legacy in the Warburg Institute in London, had devoted much of his own life to the migration of artistic and cultural images and ideas. And the Hamburg institution that bears his name and seeks to be more than just the architectural shell of the former library has likewise long since opened up to global challenges, and in recent years has established numerous partnerships with research institutions in places including the USA, China and Taiwan. The ‘Bilderfahrzeuge. Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology’ group, which this year will embark on a second phase of its successful work, has helped to flesh out the current and future research profiles of all the institutions involved. Collaboration between the Warburg Institute in London, the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg, the Kunst historisches Institut in Florenz, the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte in Paris and the Humboldt University in Berlin has allowed a fruitful scientific exchange between scholars from Britain, Germany, France, Italy, the USA and Mexico. Aby Warburg’s legacy has made very clear to all of us that the future of iconology will receive a particularly decisive boost from the study of the pressing research questions about global migration phenomena.
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Self -Transl ation – Transl ation of the Self An Introduction Maria Teresa Costa and Hans Christian Hönes
Contemporary academia is, undoubtedly, highly international.1 Both editors of this volume do not live and work in their country of birth; consequently, we frequently write in a language other than our mother tongue and have been faced numerous times with the task to translate our work form one language to another. All authors of this volume share similar experiences: they have lived or worked, periodically or permanently, in a foreign country. As contributors to international publications, such as the present volume, they are also regularly writing in foreign languages – mostly English –, translating and disseminating their ideas to an international audience. This is nothing unusual, and certainly not exclusive to contemporary academia. Over the centuries, a certain degree of bilingualism was omnipresent in scholarly communication; authors from Josephus Flavius over Leon Battista Alberti to Athanasius Kircher and Frederick the Great all wrote in at least two languages, their vernacular and an international lingua franca such as Latin or French. 2 The phenomenon of self-translation – an author translating his or her own text into another language – is the norm, not the exception in scholarly discourse. 3 This ubiquity of scholarly self-translation is perhaps the reason why historiography has not paid much attention to it. In 1998, Rainer Grutman stated that the topic is ‘frowned upon in literary studies’ and concluded: ‘translation scholars themselves have paid little attention to the phenomenon, perhaps because they thought it to be more akin to bilingualism than to translation proper’. 4 Self-translation sits uneasily between the chairs. In 2002, Mary Besemeres called the practice in a slightly derogatory manner a ‘subtractive bilingualism’ – a state where one is not in full command of the second lan-
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guage, yet dabbles with it, thus necessarily falling short of using its full potential. 5 In 2006 Julio-César Santoyo still counted ‘self-translations’ among the ‘blank spaces in the history of translation’.6 In recent years, this opinion has been revised: ‘once thought to be a marginal phenomenon […], it has of late received considerable attention in the more culturally inclined provinces of translation studies’. 7 In our times of globalisation and intensified migrations – politically, economically, intellectually or culturally motivated – the phenomenon of living between languages and the negotiating of identities it entails has become a pressing issue, which also lead to a re-evaluation of phenomenon of working between languages. 8 Though self-translation has become a boon and expansive field of study, the main focus of scholarly attention lies undeniably on the phenomenon of literary self-translations, above all in the context of migration literatures and postcolonial studies, and the discussion focuses mainly on a canon of established self-translators such as Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Nancy Huston, and Ibrahim Tagore. 9 Scholars writing and translating their own texts in more than one language seems to have been widely regarded as too common and too functional a practice to deserve further attention.10 But precisely this ubiquity vouches for the phenomenon’s importance. For a discipline like art history, the adaption and processing of foreign-language texts and their corresponding methodologies has been fundamental. Especially after the end of the republic of letters and the rise of the modern university systems, the communication between national academic traditions depended heavily on individuals acting as interlocutors, bridging methodological traditions. Focusing on how authors themselves navigate between these spheres will shed new light on how autobiographical self-perception and disciplinary conventions intersect. Such an approach can impact on the understanding of the phenomenon of self-translation more broadly. The rootedness of most theoretical approaches in the conditions of literary writing puts emphasis on the poetics of self-translation, focusing on the creative power that often blurs the boundary between self-translation and rewriting.11 As Sigrid Weigel shows in her essay, the booming field of translation studies has aimed to replace the complexities of multilingual experiences with a ‘romantic’ notion of plurality and freedom where authors switch seamlessly between languages in which they express themselves fully and freely. Weigel thus calls for a renewed attention to the biographical and social-historical preconditions of each act of self-translation: a focus on context as much as on text. This methodological agenda is what the essays of the present volume, discussing a range of case studies from the mid 19th to the late 20 th century, from the US to China, aim to put into practice. The historiographic focus on scholarly self-translation might help to shift attention away from the (literary) act of creating, to the socialhistorical contexts, constraints and practical implications of moving between different Sprachräume.
12 | Maria Teresa Costa and Hans Christian Hönes
The aim of this volume more specifically is to explore the contribution of self-translations for the disciplinary discourse of art history, since the earliest days of its professionalization. The emphasis of the book’s chapters lies nevertheless, and necessarily, on individual cases. Already the term self-translation indicates that it is a phenomenon that has to be studied on a biographical level, tracing an author’s lives between places, languages, and academic approaches. The following chapters thus revolve around the tension between the borders of a disciplinary discourse and the highly personal and biographical motivations behind a self-translation, often confronting authors with problems such as the untranslatability of certain concepts and ideas – but also affording them with the productive possibility of revising their thoughts.12 Questions such as the adaptation to new habits of thinking, national traditions, and linguistic conventions are a perennial problem in all cases discussed; studying self-translations often highlights less what authors wanted to express, than what they were able to express, and how such limitations influenced their conception of self. To put it differently, this book aims to be a study of how individuals negotiate biographical change within disciplinary conventions. This is where the study of academic self-translations specifically can help to nuance and expand our understanding of the phenomenon of an author revisiting his or her own writings. Scholarly self-translations are often done in collaboration between authors, professional translators, and editors. As part of an academic discourse, they are a peculiar polyphonic creation, as Francesco Ventrella argues by analysing the case of a 19th century female translator. By combining the study of a translation with a network analysis, Ventrella’s essay explores how such an approach can help to uncover subdued voices, for example of female collaborators, who invested a lot of knowledge into a text yet received little credit for it. Stressing such borderlines of the phenomenon of self-translations, and teasing out the traces of an individual under multiple layers of translational work puts an emphasis on what Weigel calls the ‘sounding through’ of other voices in a self-translation – voices of collaborators, or of one’s own old self. In such a collaborative translational process, the voice of the original author thus frequently becomes a marginal undercurrent. This danger is especially present in the case of idiosyncratic writers such as Aby Warburg, as Maria Teresa Costa demonstrates. This is not only a problem when working with a thirdparty translator: when Warburg later in life worked towards a highly sophisticated intermedial self-translation by presenting his arguments in image-lead arrangements, such as his famous Mnemosyne Atlas, he struggled, again, with finding equivalents for his terms and to illuminate the liminal space between words and images.
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Why Art History? This book takes art historiography as a test case for exploring this tension in selftranslation, between disciplinary discourses and individual biographies. Art history might be particularly suited for such a revision of the notion of self-translation for at least two reasons. First, it is a discipline where a certain language scepticism is particularly widespread. Innumerable books and essays reflect on ‘pictures and the words that fail them’.13 Although the practice of art history is fundamentally based on an intermedial ‘translation’ – the (ekphrastic) description of images – the viability of this very process is regularly put into doubt.14 Already Johann Joachim Winckelmann, often regarded as the founding father of modern art history, stated that at least all modern languages necessarily have to fail in describing the beauties of ancient art: ‘I could have said more if I were writing for the Greeks and not in a modern language, which imposes certain restrictions on me.’15 For him the ‘natural’ language of art, the one adequate to its aesthetics, seems to be (ancient) Greek; a translation of the visual experience in a modern idiom is bound to remain incomplete at best. Winckelmann tried, and many others followed him in that respect, to overcome this deficit by using a particularly engaged, enthusiastic language of description.16 A common reproach against this strategy was, already in Winckelmann’s time, that such texts were too poetic, too florid – a problem similar to what Warburg faced 150 years later, and many authors still do today. These attempts, written in order to evoke something parallel to the visual phenomenon (and thus to provide a ‘translation’ of it) were often dubbed as being ‘untranslatable’ themselves. As Ernst Gombrich, maybe justly so, once wrote: ‘if you take the writings of my colleagues, particularly the critics or the art historians, many of the things they say are untranslatable, they are metaphors, like poetry. Nothing but emotion’.17 What Gombrich demands is a quasi-scientific treatment of art that necessitates a comprehensive, intelligible and thus objective vocabulary. One of the reasons why translation studies often regarded scholarly self-translation as more or less unproblematic is founded on the belief that an academic discipline possesses a certain technical terminology and genre conventions: a disciplinary lingua franca that is known to all practitioners in the respective field and shared over language borders. In many disciplines this is indeed the case, and for authors with English as their second language it is often perfectly feasible to write an academic text in this language – because they know the terminology of their discipline, and the writing conventions it entails.18 Art history, however, seems to have struggled with agreeing on such a technical terminology, or a hegemonial language. It is not only a certain propensity for ‘poetic description’ which stood in the way of terminological scrupulousness. The discipline even seems to have progressively lost some linguistic certainties during the 20 th century. In 1955, Erwin Panofsky still claimed that art history’s mother tongue was German.
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In many countries, such as Turkey or England, art history as an academic discipline was indeed introduced by German exiles; they founded the first university institutes in the respective countries, and their methodologies dominated the debate for the foreseeable future. The astonishing success of Panofsky’s iconology is just the most remarkable example for how exiles shaped the discipline worldwide. Yet, this international success did not go along with the establishment of a universal terminology of any kind. Exiles in countries without a significant art historical tradition such as Turkey fared better in this respect, as the essay by Burcu Dogramaci shows. They encountered a linguistic ‘blank slate’ and succeeded comparatively well in establishing a new vocabulary, often imbued with loanwords from their mother tongue. But in most cases, it was precisely the technical terminology that proved simply untranslatable and thus had to be abandoned. For many migrants, this was a painful process: there are numerous anecdotes about luminaries such as William Hekscher who, in the 1950s, apparently still presumed that there was some kind of lingua franca of erudition. When teaching at the University of Iowa he cracked jokes in Latin – and earned, predictably, nothing but puzzled faces from his students.19 The old certainties held no sway anymore. In English, there was a lack ‘of terminology […] to find adequate names for your five styles’, as Leopold Ettlinger in London wrote to Paul Frankl in Princeton in 1943. 20 The fate of such terms in the vein of Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History, which were often used for providing easy shortcuts and definitions for certain stylistic phenomena, is just the best-known example for how technical terminology, in the case of art history, became a hurdle for translation. Paul Frankl is perhaps the most striking example for an author whose writings – probably exactly due to the reliance on untranslatable technical terminology – ‘lost’ their sense ‘in transit’, as Nikolaus Pevsner wrote in a review of Frankl’s book The Gothic. ‘Raumbild’ became ‘view of space’; ‘Reduktionsgotik’ (a term coined by Georg Dehio) was translated as ‘reduction gothic’.
Transl ating the Self Translations never afford complete equivalence. Languages differ in the ways they denote and describe things, and thus make us think in different ways. This becomes apparent when we think about the term ‘translation’ itself. If, for instance, in English translation denotes both the act of translating itself and its result, both the material transformation and the transfer, the French traduction and the Italian traduzione allude to the act and result of the process of transposition. In German Übersetzung (or Übertragung) indicates the double movement of translating from one thing into another. Here, a text (the original) and the translating language are both placed beyond themselves. Each term implies a different cultural context: the English word ‘translation’, rooted in the Latin term ‘latum’ (‘carrying’), emphasizes the very process of communication and its
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object. French and Italian insist on the action of translating, on the ductivité of the traduction; German poses the common and liminal space between the texts at the very centre. 21 None of these words can be interchanged without changing the essence of meaning at least in some nuances. It might seem a commonplace, but one cannot speak about language if not in one particular language. While already using one language, one is not at a sufficient distance that would allow for speaking objectively about this very subject – language itself. The existence of a plurality of languages implies not only that there are different words and grammars to speak about something, but also that they differ in the ways they allude to this ‘something’. These differences indicate that a crucial aspect of the essence of what the translator tries to convey will alway elude. But equivalence of meaning is not necessarily the main objective of a self-translator, and it thus makes little sense to discuss self-translations in terms of the binary logic of source/target text. 22 A self-translator’s work is always autobiographic, even if assisted by others. One is necessarily revisiting a text one has written before and is thus, maybe involuntarily, scrutinising what the former self has written. Self-translations open up new perspectives on one’s own intellectual and personal self. If we take the term selftranslation at face value, it signifies nothing less than the process where the writer translates both language and self. Self-translation, one might claim, ‘c’est se récrire’ – it means re-writing oneself. 23 In most cases, self-translation is neither a process that happens without any frictions (as the frequently used term ‘autotranslation’ might suggest), nor a sovereign act where the self-translator is in full control of the different, bicultural contexts of both texts they produce. 24 Self-translating rather necessitates a reflective process of revision and reformulation. Before translating one’s own texts, one has to reread them first – which might allow for encountering them as a slightly more objective beholder: as a reader, not as an author. Such a re-reading affords, as Hans Blumenberg has written, the ‘opportunity to see with different eyes, to objectify the subjective’. 25 Self-translations allow precisely for such a space of self-objectification when looking back on one’s own use of language in the past. One might even be surprised by what one reads, puzzled by phrases and trains of thought. Verbiages of expression and stylistic figures that one inevitably grows accustomed to over the course of time might not translate seamlessly into the new language; new formulations need to be found and old questions worked through again. 26 Translating one’s own text bears the potential to revisit and revise one’s own opinions. Self-translations allow for a sort of estrangement – a space to think again and to think differently. Studying the historiography of self-translation shows, however, that many authors were not willing to concede to such a ‘plurality’ of identities. The German-Japanese author Yoko Tawada once wrote ‘Fremd sein ist eine Kunst’ (‘being a stranger/foreigner is an art’) – yet many authors were unwilling to master it. 27 The history of self-translation often speaks of the desire to acculturate, to find a new home – linguistically and
16 | Maria Teresa Costa and Hans Christian Hönes
intellectually. Especially for many migrants, the arrival in a new country and a new language meant the beginning of a new life, implying a renunciation of their old identity. Arguably, this was especially strongly felt by members of the generation that left Europe in the wake of National Socialism, for whom the old Europe they had left had ceased to exist anyway. Their old roots did not hold sway anymore, linguistically and otherwise. They tried to find new roots elsewhere, and for many academics self-translation played an important role in this process. The re-visiting of one’s old texts afforded the possibi lity of equipping them with new intellectual genealogies. In such cases, self-translation resulted in a peculiar estrangement from the old, other self and might truly tell the story of an attempt of ‘becoming the other’, as Aurelia Klimkiewicz named it. 28 A good example is the case of Richard Krautheimer who left Germany for the United States in 1935. When writing in English, frequently chose, as Andreas Beyer has shown, specifically those words that were classified in his dictionary as ‘antiquated’. Krautheimer apparently tried to find roots in the new language, which he barely knew when arriving in the States. He was looking for a new past and (linguistic and intellectual) tradition that he sought to adopt through the vocabulary. 29 Consequently, he emphasised time and again that what he did was precisely not a self-translation – even though he translated, without a doubt, some of his old texts into English. In his own perception, however, he had ‘learnt English: speaking, writing, thinking; not translating’. 30 Apparently, he wanted to re-root, not ‘just’ translate himself. This phenomenon of re-rooting, and the hope to equip one’s own academic itinerary with a new intellectual genealogy is discussed in the essays by Giovanna Targia, Irving Lavin, and Jennifer Cooke. By analysing Edgar Wind’s self-translation of his methodological preface to the Warburg Institute’s Bibliography on the Survival of the Classics, Giovanna Targia demonstrates how the author explicitly furnished the Warburgian Kulturwissenschaft – a concept seemingly ‘untranslatable’ into English – with a new, Anglophone intellectual genealogy, rooting the Institute’s agenda firmly in its new surroundings. The author who found the most memorable metaphor for such an endeavour was Erwin Panofsky. Irving Lavin discusses his self-characterisation as a ‘transplanted European’, who took new root in the United States where he discovered a different, but equally productive tradition of art historical research. Panofsky thrived on this new soil, but not everybody was so successful. A more tragic case is represented by the intellectual biography of Frederick Antal. Jennifer Cooke describes his career and methodological development as a frantic search for new and different intellectual homes. While remaining essentially true to his own intellectual convictions, the accentuation of his approaches nevertheless shifted with the respective professional needs of local context: from being a connoisseur when in Italy, to being a Warburgian when in Hamburg, and a Marxist in England.
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The Hospitalit y of Languages In these cases, we encounter an identity politics by the means of language. The limitations of such a strategy, hoping for a seamless re-rooting to a new context, are pro bably all too apparent. Consequently, the biographies of many self-translators confront us with cases where the inability to negotiate between one’s linguistic past and present results in a deeply felt personal crisis. Uwe Fleckner analyses the case of the German art critic Carl Einstein whose late theoretical key text on Georges Braque is written in an idiosyncratic language, intertwining German syntax with French semantics and thus, against all odds, insisting on the complexity of his Germanophone train of thoughts. Fleckner analyses how Einstein gave himself a broken voice, the only one suitable for an author who felt he had lost his linguistic home in exile. An intricate case of self-translation in the guise of a re-translation is that of Fou Lei, as discussed by Mingyuan Hu. In his later years, living isolated in Shanghai during the Anti-Rightist Movement, the author translated, again, a text he had translated in Paris as a young man: Hipployte Taine’s Philosophie de l’art. Instead of repeating the optimistic, forward-looking tone of his 1929 translation, Fou Lei now tried to conjure up the voices of a more remote past. Reinstating a humanist language akin to the Renaissance’s revival of the classics, he sought to remedy a perceived collapse of civilisation around him. All these cases tell of a sense of belonging that is associated with the mastery of certain languages, each representing a (linguistic) community. However, as Jacques Derrida has pointed out, thinking that one can have a language is wishful thinking. 31 Even if language deludes us about the contrary by suggesting that one can ‘master a language’ (or ‘maîtriser une langue’, ‘padroneggiare una lingua’, ‘eine Sprache beherrschen’), it is not possible to take possession of a language, but only to live in it and to be hosted by it. A language always precedes a speaker, having a foreign provenance that does not translate to an ownership. On the other side, languages are hospitable and live, in a certain sense, on transformations; they do not look at the origins of their speakers, but are open to be modified and to accommodate their speakers. 32 Only few authors seem to have embraced this transformative potential of languages and even used it for their professional self-fashioning in exile. An example for the latter is the case of Gottfried Kinkel (discussed by Hans Christian Hönes) who gave the first ever art history lecture at a British university in 1853. Given his thick German accent, he probably merely made a virtue out of necessity – there was no point in denying his foreign descent anyway. For many émigrés, the most material reminder of their status is, in fact, their own voice. Linda Sandino analyses the role of palimpsestic accents for the narrative identity of a speaker, whose voice necessarily situates them in an in-between state. Here, the book’s argument goes full circle, taking up Sigrid Weigel’s hypothesis of the ‘sounding through’ of old layers of identity in any given act of multilingual writing. From this point of view, self-translations inhabit a dialectical tension between creation
18 | Maria Teresa Costa and Hans Christian Hönes
and repetition, terms that are not fixed poles of a binary or Hegelian dialectic but rather, in a Benjaminian sense, the poles of a ‘dialectic at stillness’: each innovation passes through a repetition of something original, which is not intended to be taken as a given once and for all, and then duplicated or reproduced. 33 On the contrary, an original precedes its repetitions only from a logical and not from an ontological point of view; both coexist in a space of plurality: creating a second original by translating one’s own texts produces a plurality of texts, meanings and personal identities. The most fruitful practice of self-translation thus seems to be embodied by those authors embracing such a plurality, willing to transform themselves in the double movement of hosting the other and to be hosted by them. As Ernst Gombrich once wrote: ‘those who – as I apparently do – happily relinquish control to a language, and do not fight against it, will experience language as something very creative’. 34 Arriving at such an attitude is, again, an art in its own right. The essays of this volume give evidence of the struggles of coming to terms with this plurality of voices and demands, internal and external alike.
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Self -Transl ation and Its Discontents Or: The Translational Work Lost in the Theory of Bilingualism Sigrid Weigel
The word self-translation is furnished with a significant semantic ambiguity. Used as a concept within the register of philological terminology, self-translation denotes the process of translating one’s own text into a different language than it was written in. But the word also implies the possibility to read it as translating the self, that is, transferring the self into another situation or condition. This potential dittology raises interesting questions: how do the interplay and interdependency between both processes function, and how are they conceptualized. Evidently, both meanings cannot be separated, for an author who translates his or her own text into another language is necessarily personally involved in a translational process. However, most of the existing theoretical approaches to self-translation tend to put emphasis on one of the two aspects, either on examining the relation between the original and the translated text with respect to their characte ristics and differences, or on the subject position of the author and his or her relation to the cultures involved. It is as if the equivocality of self-translations functions epistemically as a kind of weighing scale that leans either to the one side or the other. The more systematic study of self-translation in the humanities has for the most part emerged at the beginning of 21st century. If it was still reasonable during the 1990s to describe self-translation as somewhat ‘neglected’ by translation studies, this is no longer appropriate today.1 As a prominent field of scholarship, the recently augmented attention to self-translation is obviously a somewhat belated response to the increasing phenomenon of bilingual authors or authors who do not write in their first language, but in the predominant language of the country where they live in exile or migration. Studying the characteristics or problems of self-translation as well as the varieties, possibilities
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and limits of practicing it, the whole field is to date mostly a result of the cultural turn in translation studies. It has received its relevance and popularity in the wake of the theoretical approach of cultural translation, and today it is strongly influenced by concepts of post-colonial theory, especially by the idea of hybrid cultures, languages, and identities. The existing scholarship on self-translation consists of both an intense theoretical discourse and innumerable case studies, the latter situated nearly exclusively in the literary field and dominated by studies on famous authors of modernity such as Samuel Beckett (French-English), Vladimir Nabokov (Russian-English), and Karen Blixen alias Isak Dinesen (English-Danish), all three of whom are outstanding figures that regularly practiced self-translation; they are complemented by studies on Julien Green (FrenchEnglish), Joseph Brodsky (Russian-English), Raymond Federman (French-English), and others, and more recently by articles on bi-lingual authors from non-European cultures, for example African or South-American authors and many Indian-American, AfroAmerican or other English-writing authors of a so-called hyphenated identity. 2 Selftranslations by philosophers and scholars still play a marginal role in the whole field to date.
The Emblematic Figure of the ‘ Transl ated Man’ Due to the cultural-theoretical background of the field’s scholarly expansion, the current examination of self-translation is positioned at the intersection between the growing impact of multiculturalism, migration, and post-colonialism on the one hand and the institutionalization of translation studies as a discipline under the heading of ‘translatology’ on the other. ‘In the late 1970s a new discipline was born: Translation Studies’, as the publisher’s preface to the third edition, from 2002, of Susan Bassnett’s Translation Studies (1980) states. 3 This discipline received its main impulse from the aim to open the field of comparative literature in US-American academia to non-European cultures, as proclaimed paradigmatically in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003).4 Its formation as an academic discipline is indicated by the publication of basic introductions or textbooks and several encyclopedias, for example the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (2001), the Handbook of Translation Studies (2005, published by the Indian publishing house Atlantic), the Encyclopedia of Literary Translations into English (2000), and more recently the four volume Handbook of Translation Studies (2009–2013), to mention just a few. 5 The precarious scholarly position of self-translation studies between the two aforementioned discourses yields a symptomatic contradiction. On one side there exists a tendency towards canonization typical of an academic discipline, on the other side there is an emphatic commitment to bilingualism at work which produces a certain terminological register; this is as much metaphorical as programmatic in that it formulates ideas
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of an ideal position of hybridity. This contradiction has not sparked reflection, but rather the opposite: it lead to a metaphoric discourse of a somewhat idealized if not romantic version of self-translation. Therein, the so-called ‘translated man’ embodies an outstanding position invested with the faculty of a ‘double perspective’ or a ‘stereoscopic vision’ – as explicitly claimed for himself perhaps at first by Salman Rushdie in his novel Shame (1983), an ascription later repeated in the collection of essays Imaginary Homeland (1992) where he characterized the generation he belongs to and claims to represent as follows: ‘Having been born across the world, we are translated men.’6 This title has turned into an emblematic figure of theoretical discourse. In an academic article on Rushdie with the programmatic title Rushdie the translated man, the Romanian scholar Dana Ba˘dulescu writes: ‘Translation, like metaphor, is a journey. It is the territory covered by the journey, a space between here and there, neither here nor there. Moving in and out of language, culture, and place, or rather across them, the translated man comes into a space of hybridity, disjunctions, cleavages and fissures, which is bridged over by translation and metaphor. Rushdie’s condition of “translated man” implies self-translation. Any translated text is a mirror of the original text. Rushdie’s texts multiply mirrors, and the writer translates as much as he lets himself be translated by the languages he speaks.’ 7 Against the backdrop of ‘translation’ conceptualized as topos, self-translation functions obviously as an ideal solution to heal the wound of being separated from one’s own place, culture, and first language. Since the theoretical arguments of the article are based on the authority of Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture (1994), it is important to be aware that there is a remarkable shift of emphasis in the way of dealing with theoretical ideas and rhetorical topoi ascribed to post-colonial theory. When Bhabha’s book put forward the concept of hybridity in the 1990s, it was engaged with the examination of ‘border lives’, described in terms of expulsion, disturbance of direction, and disorientation, ‘where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion’. 8 However, in the course of the enormous impact of this book and the global circulation of Bhabha’s theory under the heading of post-colonialism, the aspect of difference seemed to get more and more lost in a metaphorical understanding of translation, often discussed under the heading of ‘cultural translation’. While in the beginning of the 1970s it was self-evident for George Steiner to discuss questions of exile and language under the title of Extraterritorial, thus emphasizing geographic-cultural displacement, the discourse has changed totally in the wake of globalization and the dominance of post-colonialism. 9 The idea of migration has replaced the concept of exile – often with a programmatic intention. In this way, the theory of
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migration triggers the fading of one of the tasks of self-translation studies, namely to examine the very constellation of exile, of being expelled from one’s country of birth, its language and culture, as the specific precondition that is different in each historical case. It has often been stated how difficult it is to make ‘general statements on the matter’ of self-translation because we have too few comparative studies at hand yet.10 But the latter would have to include not only examinations of studies of the process and the product of self-translations and of comparisons with other (ordinary, or so-called second-hand) translations, but also concrete analyses of different kinds of migration as historically, culturally and politically specific and quite distinct preconditions of living and writing in another language, and the ensuing demand of self-translation. The methodological alternative for studies of self-translation to refer to either the concept of exile or migration must be grounded in a historical analysis of the given situation of each single author-translator. It is not a meer theoretical question, it cannot be decided voluntarily, as the discourse of identity-politics assumes. To give an example of the latter, I quote once more from the article on Rushdie the ‘translated man’: ‘Since the 1980s some exiled postcolonial writers have reconfigured their identity by rejecting the status of exile and embracing that of migrant instead. […] Moreover, they no longer write of their “displacement” as obsessively as the previous generation. The shift from exile to migrancy is indicative of these writers’ significantly new perception of their own cultural location as interstitial and hybrid.’11 Since an exiled person, in most cases, has left his or her country involuntarily, whereas the concept of migration alludes to aspects of will, voluntariness, or decision ascribed to an autonomous subject position, it is obvious that the replacement of exile by migrancy functions as an act of empowerment for the individual writer concerned. As part of the process and politics of different modes of self-translation, it is therefore part of the object of research in self-translation study. The study of self-translations cannot just repeat this replacement. Thus, the idea of migration is not an innocent one within the theoretical discourse of self-translation.
Self -Transl ation of Minor Literat ures Self-translation – as any translation – is always involved in the politics of languages and in the hegemony of certain languages. In addition, scholarship on self-translation – as any concrete examination or case study in translation studies as well – is limited by the language skills of the individual scholar. The fact that to date a great part of the research literature deals with translations either from or into English is a symptom of the increasing tendency of English to function as the global idiom of both critical theory and
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scholarship. One effect is that translation and self-translation studies not only repeat but even tend to augment the hegemonic role of English. Authors writing and translating in other languages appear quite seldom in the discourse of self-translation studies.12 The literature of Yoko Tawada, for example, who writes both in Japanese and German and selftranslates in both directions, could just as well be described as a ‘bilingual laborator[y]’ as the oeuvre of Samuel Beckett that occupies the position of a model for self-translation studies since decades.13 An often-cited, influential, and controversial article by the Scottish poet, translator, and critic Christopher Whyte, entitled Against Self-Translation, discusses the problem of linguistic hegemony from the view-point of a poet of ‘minor literature’, stating that ‘the practice of self-translation is never innocent’.14 His article points out the implications of certain translation politics and their impact on the appreciation of self-translation. Probably due to the provocative title, the rhetorical gesture of which suggests a radical negation of self-translation, Whyte’s article is received amongst scholars as a fundamental questioning of, if not attack on, self-translation. However, his argument clearly runs quite differently. It emerges from the perspective of a ‘minor literature’ (Deleuze/ Guattari) since he addresses the danger of marginalizing poetry written in a language of a small population – his example is Scottish Gaelic – by means of its self-translation into a hegemonic language, in his case English.15 His whole argument is twofold, consisting of a poetic aspect and a cultural-political one. Referring to his own experience, he admits that translating his Gaelic poetry into English has always been done under duress: ‘It has never been done with either pleasure or satisfaction.’16 For him, it is the very language of the poem that essentially constitutes poetry – he defines the poetic language as the content of poetry. This is the reason for his skepticism towards self-translation, since it is, as he puts it, ‘an activity without content, voided of all the rich echoes and interchanges I have so far attributed to the practice of translation. It is almost a question of voiding the poem of its content, which may, indeed, be the language in which it was written’.17 The political part of his argument brings exile explicitly into play: ‘If translation is about crossing barriers, contaminating one language with the experience and the rhythms of another, self-translation occurs in situations of exile or of crude subjugation, where one language is attempting to take the place of another.’18 Whyte’s reflection explains why self-translation – as well as any translation – is called ‘not innocent’ from the viewpoint of minor literatures or languages that do not work on a global scale. Exile understood as a tension-filled constellation may demand a ‘critique of violence’ with respect to translation as well. When taking a closer look at actual examples of translation, including printing and publishing conditions, translation turns into a topography of languages where not only cultural differences come into play but where historical-political implications of the specific relation between the participating languages are acted out as well. This means that translation as a site where diffe rent languages interact cannot only be regarded as a bilingual laboratory, but has also to
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be examined as a contact zone full of ‘highly asymmetrical relations of power’ or even as a battlefield, where cultural-political implications of the constellation at stake produce precarious relations.19 In Whyte’s article the political and the poetic aspects are brought together when he analyses the seemingly innocent print image of a publication as indicator of a hegemonic relation between the two languages involved. Here, he especially criticizes a bi-lingual publication of the Gaelic poet Sorley McLean (1911–1996), in which the English translation is printed on the right-hand side, the primary reading page of a book, with the ori ginal poem supplanted to the left page: ‘the author’s own English versions, like grimly haunting doubles from which his Gaelic poems no longer have any hope of being prised free, risks limiting and distorting the reception of his work’. 20
On the Fading of Self -Transl ation in Bilingualism Simultaneously to the substitution of exile by migration within self-translation scholarship, the paradigm of bilingualism has come to the fore. Although paradigmatic bilingual authors already played a central role in the initial phase of self-translation stu dies, a remarkable re-evaluation took place in the course of its propagation. In the beginning, there were no ‘translated men’ but Alien Tongues, as the telling title of Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour’s 1989 book on Bilingual Russian Writers of the ‘First’ Emigration runs. When previous scholarship often considered self-translation as a difficult task, sometimes even as a ‘self-inflicted torture’ that can best be avoided by the decision to write directly in the second language, as Beaujour wrote – in this way validating second-language authorship as a way out of the burden of self-translation – in recent scholarship the figure of the bilingual writer is, by contrast, the first and foremost subject; self-translation is used as a trope to describe the subject position of an author. 21 Whereas the current theoretical literature on self-translation values bilingualism as a profit or surplus, if not the ne plus ultra of cultural translation, former theories understood the task of the translator as an effort to cope with the problem of deficiency. Once more Beaujour: ‘Because self-translation and the (frequently) attendant reworking makes a text retrospectively incomplete, both versions become avatars of a hypothetical total text in which the versions in both languages would rejoin one another and be reconciled (as in the “pure” language evoked by Benjamin).’ 22 This depiction of self-translated texts as avatars of a hypothetical text is a seductive metaphor; however, a closer reading of the passage reveals a strong – frequently occurring – misunderstanding of Benjamin’s famous text The task of the translator (1921), indicated especially by the ideas of ‘incompleteness’ and ‘total text’. Both are concepts entirely alien to Benjamin’s theory of language. Whereas Beaujour’s diagnosis of a selftranslated text as being incomplete is measured in relation to the idea of a complete, per-
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fect translation, Benjamin considers any actual translation as a somehow ‘provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages’, which means that there will never be a total text at all, not even a hypothetical one. 23 He instead refers to the plurality of languages in history that produced a distance of all existing languages to revelation, so that ‘what is meant’ (das Gemeinte) is never to be encountered in relative autonomy but only concealed in the Babylonian variety of languages. And what Benjamin denotes with the term ‘reine Sprache’ refers not to purity; it does not mean ‘pure language’, but rather mere language, just language, nothing else. 24 However, the opposite of understanding self-translation as a deficiency, namely the recent advancement of bilingualism into the position of a cultural role model, is as pro blematic as the deficiency-paradigm. In the theoretical framework of bilingualism, the two languages concerned become parties within an equilibrated constellation, with the effect that their distance and differences get leveled. In the view of bilingualism, writing in different languages turns into a choice or liberty; as a consequence, the translational work itself becomes irrelevant or marginalized. This tendency to underestimate the inequality and the specific historical, cultural, and epistemological implications of different languages is inherent in the identification of self-translation with bilingualism, even if it gets described as a more complex constellation, as can be studied in the rich research on Beckett. The Canadian author Paul St. Pierre in his reading of Beckett, for example, conceptualized bilingualism, as ‘writing across languages’, understanding this as a method to escape any single linguistic system, whereas Brian Fitch in his classical Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work entitled Beckett and Babel (1988) interpreted this approach as an attempt to bring ‘two languages into a condition of reciprocal interfe rence and interplay that has nothing to do with that mere contiguity of languages that obtains between translation and original’. 25 From this comment it is quite clear that also the ‘writing across languages’-approach is based on an idea of two equivalent languages being involved, since this is the precondition of reciprocity. Already the bi of bilingualism confines the epistemology of translation and self-translation in a dualistic terrain and evokes the notion of an equal disposal of both languages, with the problematic tendency to render the reflection on self-translation redundant. In this way the fate of the efforts of translation in the discourse of bilingualism shares that of world literature, as Erich Auerbach analysed in his famous article on Philology and World Literature (1952): the very moment world literature gets realized by means of the international distribution of literature the underlying process of standardization results in its sublation. 26 Something similar happens to the concept of self-translation, when against the horizon of bilingual authorship the question of translation suffers a setback. In the words of an influential representative of the field, Susan Bassnett, the argument against the concept of self-translation runs like this:
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‘The term “self-translation” is problematic in several respects, but principally because it compels us to consider the problem of the existence of an original. The very definition of translation presupposes an original somewhere else, so when we talk about self-translation, the assumption is that there will be another previously composed text from which the second text can claim its origin. Yet many writers consider themselves as bilinguals and shift between languages, hence the binary notion of original-translation appears simplistic and unhelpful.’ 27 Although her critical intention is primarily directed against the concept of the ‘original’ that counts as the authentic text, this critique affects the concept of self-translation as such. When Bassnett wants to discard the original as a ‘previously composed text’, the difference between the first text and the second one – even more specifically: the difference between writing and translating – gets leveled. This sheds light once more on the tendency, inherent in the paradigm of bilingualism, to flatten the difference between two texts of different languages, which consequently relativizes the very work of translation in self-translation. Yet, the idea of re-writing as an alternative understanding of self-translation has not developed exclusively within the discourse of bilingualism. The topoi of re-writing, recreation, re-enactment, or double writing process have gained a prominent place in recent scholarship; they replace former descriptions of self-translation as a ‘second original’ or ‘new original’. In the entry on ‘Self-Translators’ in the Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English (2000), Kristine J. Anderson summarizes the discussion as follows: ‘According to some theories, translations are meta-texts – texts that interpret and comment on the original text. Normal translation, however, is the result of a twostage process of reading-writing, whereas self-translation is a re-enactment of the act of writing which produced the original text. In other words, ordinary translation is the reproduction of a product, whereas self-translation is the repetition of a process. As other writers on the topic have said, the self-translation is really a re-writing.’ 28 By way of re-conceptualizing self-translation as re-writing or re-enactment, a clear shift of attention from the product, the text, to the process, the translational work, takes place, putting emphasis on the creative character of translating. However, since Anderson’s argument unfolds by contrasting self-translation to so-called normal translation, the latter appears in a problematic light, when it is regarded as mere ‘reproduction of a product’. But should one not understand the work of so-called normal translation as a process as well? This problem challenges the very translation theory that always provides, whether explicitly or implicitly, the horizon for investigating self-translation. One symptom of this challenge is the term ‘original’. It wanders like a spectre through the whole debate
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on self-translation; its problematic epistemic position stems from theories of so-called normal translation. However, the notion of a translated text as the mere ‘reproduction of a product’, as well as the dualistic approach, clearly fall short of existing translation theories.
The Re verberation of Transl ation More sophisticated theories discuss the question of translation against the horizon of the plurality of languages. As Derrida argues in Des Tours de Babel (1985), translation theories reach their limits when they engage just with ‘passing from one language to another and do not sufficiently consider the possibility for languages to be implicated more than two in a text. How is a text written in several languages at a time to be transla ted? How is the effect of plurality to be “rendered”? And what of translating with several languages at a time, will that be called translating?’ 29 However, plurality not only concerns the transferral between two different languages or ‘several languages at a time’, but already any single language itself. Since language is not a stable, unified, or homogeneous system – that is, not just a register of words and rules – each language has its origins and history, its own internal heterogeneity, and its exophonic elements within it. 30 It is not only that the particular grades of heterogeneity in different languages refer to their particular histories, but all constitutive elements of a certain language have their distinct ‘historical index’ as well. Theodor Adorno’s essay on foreign words, entitled On the Use of Foreign Words (Wörter aus der Fremde, 1959), provides a convincing study of the symptomatic meaning of foreign words in the history of the German language in comparison with other languages: as for example French, which developed much more homogeneously, and the English language, in which the integration of its various origins (Germanic, Celtic, Latin et al.) and the formation of a common linguistic body took place much earlier. The development of German went quite differently. Due to the historically belated substitution of the socio-cultural duality of Latin and the vernacular by a homogeneous national language with a common grammar and vocabulary during the 18th century, accompanied by the invention of German equivalences for Latin words missing in the vernacular, a certain heterogeneity survived in this language. The conspicuousness of foreign words within a text that are not entirely assimilated into the ‘German’ vocabulary produces a phonetic tension and semantic difference that is a symptom of failed total unification and homogeneity. Precisely because of this lack, the German language possesses a certain plurality and variety that provides, according to Adorno, an advantage for any creative author, not just of poetry but also theory. 31 In translation, the internal foreignness or otherness of each language meets the external foreignness between different languages. Due to the historical index of any
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text, the process of translation always includes multiple translations: between different languages, times, cultures, registers, and idioms. In self-translation, in addition, the historic index of certain words and metaphors, of specific rhetoric and sounds blends with individual, biographic connotations – all of this resulting in a polyphonic reverberation of multiple connotations and references. When Walter Benjamin considers translation as a somewhat ‘provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages’, it is the foreignness of languages that is at the center of his essay The task of the translator – and not ‘pure language’. And when he understands translation as testing the distance of the existing languages to revelation, that is, to a pre- or a-historical state of language, the foreignness of a certain language is a characteristic of its specific historical condition. Therefore, foreignness indicates not only difference, but distance in time as well. Benjamin supposes that ‘it is up to the translation that catches fire from the eternal life of works and the perpetually renewed life of languages to put ever anew the holy growth of the languages to the test: as far as what is hidden in them (ihr Verborgenes) is removed from revelation, how present it may become by the knowledge of this remoteness’. 32 From this passage, it is clear that Benjamin understands translation as a way to engage with the historical condition of the very text to be translated. Evidently, he considers translation not as the ‘reproduction of a product’ but as a production of knowledge in itself. In Benjamin’s essay translation is not described in figures of transposing, substitution, exchange or interplay between two linguistic registers, but rather as a practice that illuminates the historicity of languages, and as a way of raising the sensibility and consciousness of the concealed meanings and connotations of its elements, because the latter become visible or audible when they are confronted with another language. The foreignness of the other language actualizes and unveils the internal otherness of the own language. Therefore, translation in Benjamin’s sense is quite contrary to the task of transposing the original into another language by assimilating the characteristics of the so-called ‘source language’ to those of the ‘target language’. Instead, he describes translation as a specific activation or awakening of certain elements of the original in the translational language, depending on the very place and situation of the translator. He describes translation in figures of echo and reverberation. In order to illuminate the tension-filled relation between language, the original, and translation, Benjamin sketches an intriguing constellation: ‘Translation, other than poetic literature (Dichtung), does not find itself inside the mountain forest of language itself, but outside of it, vis-à-vis of it, and without entering it, the translation calls in the original, from the only place where at a time the echo of one’s own language is able to produce the reverberation of the work in the foreign language.’33
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Knowing that the echo is never a complete rendition of the ‘original’ and that the specific atmosphere of the surrounding resonates in its very sound, this image provides a realistic scenario of translation. This constellation is conceptualized analogously to the theory of reading in Benjamin’s essay Literary History and Literary Studies (1931) written a decade later, in which he formulates, under the heading ‘microeon’, a similar epistemological insight: ‘What is at stake is not to portray literary works in the context of their age but to represent the age that perceives them – our age – in the age during which they arose. It is this that makes literature an organon of history [Geschichte], and to achieve this, and not to reduce literature to the material of historiography [Historie], is the task of the literary historian.’34 In analogy to Benjamin’s reading principle – to view our own age in the age in which the works we read were produced – one can summarize the echo-principle of Benjamin’s translation theory as follows: translation opens up a way to perceive the peculiarities of one’s own language through the foreign language. In this way translation becomes an organon of the historic-cultural specificity of languages, by way of understanding the language of the translated text through that of the original. This is exactly what Benjamin meant when quoting Rudolf Pannewitz on the principle of good translations of ancient Greek texts, namely ‘das deutsche zu […] vergriechischen’, to invest the German with Greek characteristics and not to Germanize the Greek. 35 What are the consequences of this specific theory of translation for the question of self-translation? If the foreignness of languages is at the center of all translation theory, this applies to self-translation as well. And the variety of different approaches of selftranslation is marked by their particular ways to treat foreignness. In this respect, selftranslation requires a stronger and more intense awareness for the historical index of the two languages at stake. Since both texts are produced and authorized by the same person in his or her lifetime, there is – at least in most cases – a relatively small time difference between the work and its translation, so that the historicity of the language is not so much noticeable. Due to this concealed historicity, cultural difference advances as the dominant paradigm. On the other hand, self-translation brings with it the potential to address the foreignness of the own language because the detour across another language may open one’s eye to its internal otherness and foreignness. Self-translation implies the chance to advance the sensibility for a symptomatic reading of single elements of the language that one often uses involuntarily, without being aware of their hidden inscriptions. In contrast, bilingualism – at least when understood as the capacity of equal access to both languages concerned – may produce the illusion of reciprocity. However, if the bilingual author feels fit to equally write in both languages, this circumstance demands an even greater awareness for existing differences and otherness, for the peculiar implicit
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meanings and connotations, because they do remain and count for his or her audience, even if the bilingual author thinks he/she can master both. It almost seems trite to mention that the principle of emphasizing the foreignness of languages in translation is the exact opposite to what the translation policy of Englishspeaking publishers demands from European and other non-native scholars if they want their works to be distributed on the globalized academic market, which is turning more and more into a monolingual one. Here, total assimilation to the contemporary AngloAmerican idiom is expected as the norm, with the consequence that any foreign diction and all traces of the otherness of the original should be erased. However, this is not the only possible translation rule, as may be studied, for example, in many German translations of French theory: they in contrast strive to make the echo of the author’s peculiarities in their specific use of the French language both audible and visible in the German version.
The Spectre of the Original Whereas the conceptual pairs of original-translation and author-translator are at the heart of translation theories, the object of investigation in self-translation theory is quite different, because here one actually has to deal with an author who is both writer and translator in one and the same person. Therefore, what is at stake here is the interplay between writing and translating, or re-writing, i.e. the relation between writing as a primary, creative process to express thought in words, to find formulations, to reject, erase and search other words and arguments on the one hand, and the translational work as a process of re-writing, working through, of adding modifications, supplementary expressions and commentaries, and of shortenings, condensations and the like, on the other hand. For this constellation, the concept of the ‘original’ does not play an equally central role as it does for ‘ordinary’ translation, since in the latter, only the original is vested with the authority of authorship. This hierarchy of authorship remains, even if the position of the translator recently has advanced to a kind of secondary authorship, according to certain copyright regulations that concede a percentage of the royalty instead of a fixed honorarium for the translational work. This legal and financial issue does not pertain to self-translation at all. So why does the spectre of the original nonetheless occupy such a prominent place in the discussion on self-translation? The skepticism against the concept of originality may probably be explained by the fact that in translation studies the transposition of an original into another language is often based on the opposition of mother tongue and foreign language. Here, the attribute of foreignness is ascribed from the viewpoint of the original, although the reflection on problems and ways of translation takes place on the side of the translator for whom the author’s language is the foreign one. Because of the priority of the author, translation
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theory is engaged with issues such as the author’s authority regarding the meaning of his or her text, the hierarchy of values, and the like. ‘What is at stake here is the old notion of authority, of which the original authors traditionally have lots and translators none’, as Rainier Grutman remarks, in an obviously critical tone, in an entry on Auto-translation in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. 36 Many debates in translation theory are implicitly motivated by the attempt to liberate the translator from the shackles of mere dependence and to enhance the creative aspect of his work. This debate also seems to overshadow the topic of self-translation, although it is de facto not relevant in this field, which rather had to deal with the author’s double-position of writer-translator. That the question of the original nonetheless seems to trouble self-translation studies a lot can only be understood as the symptom of an unsolved problem. Studies that replace the concept of the original by the writer-translator paradigm, as for example Fitch’s book on the bilingual Beckett, tend to consider the first written work and its auto-translation as mere ‘variants’. 37 Here, again, the paradigm of bilingualism relativizes the difference between the two texts and replaces the conceptual pair of ori ginal-translation by the idea of just two versions of the same text. However, the analysis of the works of those self-translators, who (still) distinguish between their first and their second language, requires a consideration of the asymmetrical relation between both texts rather than referring to the conceptual couple of original-translation (regarded as secondary). At this point an additional interesting question is at stake, namely the question whether the first text is written in the first language and translated in the second or the other way round. This question is of enormous relevance. Even for persons who grew up entirely bilingual, there exist differences between both languages, determined by the certain personal, psychological and social cathexis of one and the other language during childhood. Despite all gender criticism against the term mother tongue, there exists a mother tongue for any individual because of the enormous role the voice of the mother plays already in prenatal development. Obviously, the complexity of the self-translational constellation increases if a text was written in the foreign or second language of the author and afterwards translated into the first language. This practice is often mistakenly considered a kind of ‘reversetranslation’ (Rückübersetzung), an idea that implies the hypothetical existence of an invisible text to precede the text at first written in the second or foreign language. Here, the concept of original gets displaced in an inaccessible obscure inner realm where it leads a ghostly existence as a hypothetical pre-text, preceding any linguistic manifestation. In an analysis of self-translations (by Klaus Mann, Stefan Heym, Rudolf Arnheim and Hannah Arendt), Verena Jung argues against a common interpretation of self-translations as being simply ‘freer, less literal translation[s]’ 38 thus holding liberating creative potential. Instead, Jung assumes an ‘inner language version of the English original that preceded the writing process’. 39 This category of an ‘inner German’ or an ‘inner text’ corresponds to the construction of pre-written, but already clearly shaped meanings,
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thoughts and arguments that only need to get transposed in a verbal form – an idea that stems from an outdated linguistic approach to self-translation.40 In contrast, any serious language theory since Saussure emphasizes the constitutive role of language for the formation of thoughts and the expression of ideas. In Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch, one comes across an entry of April 1970, entitled ‘On the difficulties I have with my English readers’. Herein Arendt reflects on her experiences with the English-speaking public and discovers the problem she has to confront in this case in an attitude towards language that she calls a ‘thesaurus-philosophy’, that is ‘the notion that words “express” ideas which I supposedly have prior to having the words’. Arendt, in contrast, doubts ‘that we would have any “ideas” without language’. 41 When self-translation studies presume the existence of meaning already completed in a prewritten state, this motivates and legitimizes the goal of reconstructing a so-called inner pre-text, to make an inner invisible text visible and readable: ‘An author who edits his own text during the translation process by using his pre-text as a basis allows the pretext to resurface during the translation process’, Jung argues.42 In this way, the socalled inner German text, identical neither with the written English text nor with the translated German version, attains the position of the ‘true original’. 43 Through this construction, the text written originally in the second language becomes displaced into a secondary state, a sort of derived original. Based on the notion of a lasting and seemingly eternally fixed hierarchy of mother tongue and foreign language, any text written in the second language thus becomes a sort of distorted original. It may, as it were, be healed when – through the detour of a self-translation into the author’s first language – the ‘disfigured original’ gets in this way repatriated to the ‘true’ original that always already existed in a dormant, pre-verbal state, awakened through the analysis of the scholar. In contrast to such a construction, I suggest to take the belatedness of the selftranslation seriously and to use it as the point of departure for an alternative theory of self-translation. Referring to the description of the dream as a ‘translation without an original’ in psychoanalysis, one could consider writing in a second language as a translation without original – that is to say, as writing literally in an other language.44 There, the author can never be completely sure of acting as the master in the house of meaning/language; there, the author can never be entirely sure of actually saying what he/she wishes to express – at least less so than in the first language. In contrast to the psychological insult to the self, diagnosed by Sigmund Freud in 1917, that the ‘ego is not the master in its own house’, the uncertainty that comes with writing in a foreign language is not caused by one’s own unconscious.45 It instead comes from a linguistic unconscious, namely from a limited familiarity with the ambiguity and nuances, with the sub-tones and overtones of certain words, expressions, and sayings in the foreign language. The subsequent self-translation into one’s first language can thus not only be understood as re-writing, but as a process of working-through as well: working through the words, the concepts and metaphors, the arguments, examples and explanations.
34 | Sigrid Weigel
This process might well be described by analogy with the Freudian procedure of ‘remembering, repeating and working-through’.46 When remembrance in this case concerns the question of ‘what was it that I wanted to express’, it receives its colour and illumination not from the past writing situation itself but from the current desire of expression that casts light on the former, as happens in the therapeutic remembrance in psychoanalysis. Thus, the current situation of the author-translator – the now ( Jetztzeit) of translation – sheds light on the preceding writing procedure of the author-writer. The differences to occur between, for example, an English written text and the German selftranslation can thus for example be understood as symptoms of partially unclear and unsolved questions within the first edition. The aim in this case, however, is not to reconstruct a previous text (or experience or affect) but to overwrite a text written in a foreign language with a text worked-through in the first language. The result of this repeated working-through that always accompanies self-translation should by no means be confused with a supposed pre-existing original – rather, it is a belated text that repeats, reworks, and comments on the meaning of the first, written in the foreign language. Authors who are accustomed to practicing self-translation, as a working-through after the first publication of a book written in the second language, are able to profit from a kind of ongoing rewriting in order to differentiate, explain and specify certain aspects and meanings.47
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Feminine Inscrip tions in the Morellian Method Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes and the Translation of Connoisseurship Francesco Ventrella
‘I suppose you know something of Morelli’s protégée! A pretty young lady – a Miss Ffoulkes – with an enthusiasm for Italian art, & some for him too I think.’ Thus writes Lady Elizabeth Eastlake to her long-time friend Sir Austen Henry Layard: ‘He sent me a German letter the other day introducing her, & I have had two visits from her. She is bringing out an improved catalogue of the Dresden Gallery, in which he has much assisted her. She has got a publisher of the name of Allen to undertake it, for a rather stiff consideration. It is too bad of Morelli to be engaging a young lady’s affections under cover of teaching her how to view Art! I am sure a hint to you to chaff him on this point will be enough.’1 The convivial tone of the letter colourfully illuminates the social life of connoisseurship at the end of the 19th century as well as the rather uninhibited personality of some of the connoisseurs themselves. A senator of the Kingdom of Italy, Giovanni Morelli was often described as a charming gentleman and a ‘grand-looking man’ by acquaintances, but this depiction as an aged womanizer is quite a first (ill. 1). 2 By this time in 1887, Constance Jocelyn Ffoullkes was writing a Handbook of Italian Schools in the Dresden Gallery, which showed Morelli’s influence in the way she analyses the forms characteristic to each individual artist. 3 Neither a commercial success, nor a work of particular originality, the Handbook nevertheless represented for her a passport to the international circles of connoisseurship.4 As for Morelli himself, Ffoulkes was not so much a protégée as a ‘doctor in Fine Arts’. 5
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1 Ivan Lermolieff [Giovanni Morelli]: Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei. Die Galerie zu Berlin, Leipzig 1893, author portrait and title page
Morelli took Ffoulkes as his pupil and, in fact, entrusted her with the translation of the Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei that the publisher Brockhaus in Leipzig had started to collect in three volumes.6 In October 1890, while Ffoulkes was in Milan to study the painters of the Lombard School, Morelli again sung her praises to Layard: ‘I’ve never known a person, neither male nor female, who has shown such zeal and perseverance in their studies as this good Miss Jocelyn does.’ 7 After the death of her teacher, Ffoulkes was widely regarded as the executor of his legacy, and as a natural candidate to take responsibility for the translation of his writings. 8 Indeed, she became instrumental in the dissemination of the Morellian method in Britain, not only through two successful translations of his work, but most importantly through a specific interpretation of his methods and principles which heavily informed the process of translation. 9 This essay aims to illuminate the whirlwind stories behind the translation of Morelli’s Kunstkritische Studien and the network of women from the Victorian art world that made it possible. At the same time, it also sets out to explore two contiguous defi nitions
38 | Francesco Ventrella
of self-translation in art history. While I discuss the reasons why Morelli himself wrote in a foreign language to disguise his identity, I also want to argue that his self-translations, making the author’s identity porous and partially invisible, enabled a second selftranslation (and translation of the self ) performed by the (female) translator of the text. By analysing Ffoulkes’ contribution, I propose a feminist critique of the way in which the work of translation has been socially and symbolically feminized, and attempt to read, literally between the lines, for traces of the translator herself. Sherry Simon’s feminist study on gender and translation has incisively delineated how ‘whether affirmed or denounced, the femininity of translation is a persistent historical trope’.10 Since at least the 17th century – and even more prominently in Ffoulkes’ time, the Victorian age – the conventional view of translation presupposed the existence of an ‘active’ original, the product of a creative genius, and a ‘passive’ translation, the act of transmission devoid of originality.11 Thus, translation has historically been considered to be an act of reproduction, always defective and inferior in relation to an original text. In this sense, both ‘woman’ and ‘translation’ have conventionally been relegated to a position of inferiority in a patriarchal culture which becomes historically problematic when the gendered nature of work matches the sex of the worker. Many art-historical translators at the end of the 19th century were women, but what was the significance of this feminized labour for the history of art history? Inspired by Griselda Pollock’s analysis of the inscriptions in the feminine within culture, my purpose in this essay is also to disrupt the historio graphic rhetoric that uses gender as ‘an axis of hierarchy and power’, in order to ‘seek ways in which the difference of the feminine might function not merely as an alternative but as the dialectical spring to release us from the binary trap represented by sex/gender’.12 Pamela Gerrish Nunn’s ground-breaking enquiry into Victorian women’s art writing concluded that the additive project of feminist art history should be expanded to include a deconstruction of art historiography as well: ‘to expose the true worth of women’s work we must rethink the definitions and categories of a patriarchal history’.13 This historiographical exercise requires that we ask our questions differently. Translations had a vital function in the formation of 19th century art history.14 Indeed, no history of art history can be complete without an assessment of the politics of translation which were inherent to each national tradition of scholarship. However, the study of translation in art history has often served the ideological reinforcement of such national narratives, and has perhaps distracted historiographers from the networks that made such translations possible.15 It is therefore no surprise that a focus on national histories has not allowed room for the different and diverse roles occupied by translators, most of whom were women.16 In her illuminating analysis of art history’s myths of origins that merge nationhood and fatherhood, Elizabeth Mansfield concluded that art history still remains a ‘motherless’ discipline.17 The historical analysis of the position of women in 19th century art history demands for a reconsideration of the hierarchies of art writing and the discipline as well. As Hilary
39 | Feminine Inscriptions in the Morellian Method
Fraser has recently proposed, we need to look critically at feminized forms of art-historical writings, ‘such as the “low-status” arenas of translation and travel writing’ as they ‘enabled women to explore prohibited territory under cover and to find an authoritative voice’.18 Thus, in this essay, I strategically turn to translation as a feminine mode of art history writing in order to redress the gender imbalance of art historiography by deconstructing its hierarchies. By looking at the role of translations in the internationalisation of the discipline at the end of the 19th century, we not can only start to assess the role of female translators in the dissemination of key texts and ideas in art history, but we can also begin to gauge how women, in a time that relegated both their sex and their profession as translators into a passive role, constructed a modern form of critical authority which granted them a professional status. Rather than looking at translation as a passive or reproductive work, here I am interested in teasing out the ways in which the translator inscribes herself in the text: a strategy to expand her agency as art historian, but also, as I shall explain, an attempt to create a common ground for other women to embrace the methods of connoisseurship in spite of the field being perceived as masculine at the time. Reading the traces of Ffoulkes in the work of translation is interesting for me not to find the subjective expression of the translator, but to historically represent the way in which her translation contributed to transforming the perception of the profession. In order to map this ‘translation of the self ’, the gestation process of the translation is as important as the final product of her labours. Self-translation is never static, best studied by simply comparing different versions of a text, but it is a process of social negotiation that demands a praxeological approach to historiography.
Behind the Pseudonym: Transl ation as Masquerade Morellian connoisseurship radically redefined the boundaries between identity and authorship in relation to the old masters, but also most characteristically in relation to the figure of the connoisseur. Morelli’s publications abound with satirical cameos and fictional parables through which he enticed the reader towards his methods and principles.19 Between 1874 and 1876, Morelli signed a number of essays in connoisseurship which appeared in the Viennese Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst as ‘Ivan Lermolieff ’. By disguising his identity behind the pseudonym and through self-translation, he developed a polemical voice external to the German art world, which was also his target. When his articles on the German galleries were first collected into a single volume published by Seeman in 1880, Morelli retained the pseudonym with which his method had started to be associated with and was later mocked across Europe as ‘Lermolieffmania’. 20 It was building on the reputation of the connoisseur Lermolieff – and not of the politician Morelli – that the volumes would eventually be translated into English and Italian, though not without some complicat ions.
40 | Francesco Ventrella
Morelli’s principles and methods of connoisseurship were part and parcel of the fiction he created. The prismatic fragmentation of his authorial voice indicates that the use of the pseudonym was solidly intertwined with his decision to translate himself, a decision which cannot be understood unless we also take into account how his connoisseurship was socially translated into other languages. Layard explained that Morelli ‘felt that it was in Germany that the study of art was the most generally and seriously pursued, whilst in Italy the subject was one which created little interest’. 21 The decision to write in German was probably also an opportunistic choice, as no Italian publisher of the time would have been interested in printing his writings, let alone offering remuneration for them. 22 Furthermore, Morelli’s decision to both write in German and sign his articles with a Russianized pseudonym was not politically unjustified. On the one hand, the Italian senator needed to hide behind a mask, for he was dealing with the collections of some of the oldest Italian aristocratic families, and he was, after all, a senator of the Kingdom. On the other hand, these articles were intended to target a particular class of German art historians, championed by Wilhelm Bode, the director who was renovating the Berlin Museum and putting it on the map of the European art world. 23 Closely linked to museum collecting, connoisseurship held a strong political power in the current redefinition of national identities and borders during the 19th century. As Jaynie Anderson has already noted, the old senator Morelli’s influence on legislation for the preservation of the Italian patrimony represented a greater hindrance to the younger Bode than his reattributions. 24 Given these premises, Ffoulkes’ translation carried an important political mission for the Morellians in London to validate individual positions within the reconfiguration of the national art galleries across Europe. Morelli was not unaccustomed to simulations in his writings. He in fact opened the 1880 volume on the German galleries by telling the story of two gentlemen who visited Lermolieff in order to learn from him about Italian art before going on their travels: ‘I want it to be a Tartar to come and teach those conceited Germans’, he announced in a letter to Layard. 25 In the volumes of the Kunstkritische Studien, Morelli again illuminated his writing with narrative cameos. While we follow his Russian alter ego visiting the galleries of Florence, Rome, Munich, Dresden and Berlin we also encounter a number of secondary characters, instrumental for the pedagogical objectives of his method: a young and inexperienced art amateur in the Pitti, a female art enthusiast at Dresden, and one knowledgeable connoisseuse in the Doria Pamphili. The frontispiece of the 1886 Italian translation of the three studies on German galleries presents a multilayered masquerading of the author that intersects languages, nationalities and gender (ill. 2). A Russianized pseudonym, Lemorlieff was also the anagram of ‘Morelli eff’ which indicates a play on old masters’ signatures. Yet, the frontispiece also creates an interesting layering at an inter-linguistic level, for it fictionally presents the book as a translation from the Russian into German by a certain Dr
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2 Ivan Lermlieff [Giovanni Morelli]: Le opere dei maestri italiani nelle gallerie di Monaco, Dresda e Berlino, Bologna 1886, frontispiece
Johannes Schwarze, whose name indicates to the Germanophone ear the true identity of the Italian senator, and from the German into Italian by the ‘Baronessa di K… A…’. The anonymity of the baroness literally points at the invisibility of women in the translation of art history, but it also marks a feminine inscription in the Morellian method. In a twopage prefatory note for this translation, Morelli devises another fictitious story in which the Russian author sardonically apologises apologises to the Italian readers for sending to the press a book whose ‘dreary’ (uggioso) form was intended only for the German art students. 26 He informs them that it was the publisher Zanichelli who commissioned the translation to a German aristocrat living in Rome for many years, but the identity of the female translator is never disclosed to the reader. There is no evidence that the publisher ever engaged a translator, but we learn from a letter Morelli sent to his pupil
42 | Francesco Ventrella
Jean Paul Richter, that as early as 1881 the countess Killmannsegg of Hannover, who lived in Rome, had given him a translation which was actually very poor: ‘The translation is everything you want it to be, except Italian, and if I wanted to sit down and correct it I’d just have to do it all over again.’ 27 Did Morelli actually rewrite the translation and, therefore, pose as a woman on the frontispiece of his book, or did the Hanoverian countess want to remain unidentified? One possibility does not exclude the other and the crossing of languages, nationalities and gender performed on the frontispiece points once more to the need of critiquing the feminization of translation in 19th century art history. Three years earlier, the English translation of the same book was commissioned to another woman, Louise Richter, the wife of Morelli’s pupil Jean Paul Richter and an art writer in her own right. 28 In this instance, the author’s real identity was disclosed, leading inevitably to an omission of the drama that Morelli had staged for the opening of the original text in German. The press hardly took notice of this translation, which also happens to be very poor. 29 Like the Baroness A.K., Louise Richter too was not a native English speaker. 30 A bitter Eastlake lamented to Layard that ‘[t]he translation of Morelli’s book is very faulty in detail – tho’ the sense is tolerably given’. 31 Morelli too, though he approved of the choice of Richter as translator, was disappointed with the final result. 32 At the same time, Layard had started to convince Morelli to consider a new edition of his critical studies on the German galleries, although he appeared to be particularly reluctant about this possibility. 33 As Jaynie Anderson has already shown, in 1888 Morelli had instead started to work on another satiric piece on connoisseurship that, eventually, would partly be merged into his now famous methodological parable ‘Princip und Methode’ which appeared in the first volume of the Kunstkritische Studien published in 1890. 34 It is on this pamphlet that Ffoulkes tested her skills as a translator for the first time; as Morelli and Layard appeared satisfied with it, it was decided that she would take on the translation of the Brockhaus volumes. 35 The process of translating his work was, however, anything but a straightforward operation. In what follows I will show how Morelli’s self-translated voice slowly disappeared from his text, but opened up a polyphonic space inhabited by many editors. Indeed, his writings were undone and remade by a whole circle of friends, disciples and collaborators who amended, improved and, in some instances, even censored his original German text. While much of the success of the translation has been hitherto attributed to Austen Henry Layard, who allegedly made it possible, I will argue that equal importance should be given to a wider network in which Elizabeth Eastlake, Henriette Hertz and the nominal translator Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes played a pivotal role.
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Polyphonic Transl ation and the Politics of Connoisseurship In February 1890, Ffoulkes had already completed the translation of the section on the Borghese gallery from the first volume. After invitation by Morelli himself, she showed the 450 manuscript pages to Layard in order to obtain some feedback. Layard had already suggested to Morelli that Ffoulkes embraced a freer translation, although she remained unsure about the possible outcomes: ‘At first I was afraid of going too far from the original, not knowing how much license was permissible, yet feeling all the time how hopelessly stiff the English was; since then I have tried to follow your instructions and to make the translation more free, but it is impossible to judge for oneself whether the result is any more satisfactory than before.’ 36 Morelli generally agreed with Layard’s advice that, for the sake of the translator, the tone of his prose be changed. 37 After inspecting Ffoulkes’ manuscripts himself, he approved of the ‘traduction litérale’, but admitted that he was not equipped to judge ‘whether the little gas [le peu de gaz] that I have tried to put in the original is still to be found in this translation. But, alas, that’s maybe a bit too much to ask from this good and decent lady’. Morelli was aware of the fact that his sarcastic style made sense in German but could not be justifiable in English. Thus, he concluded: ‘For me, the most important thing, and that which I care about the most, is that in the translation of my book you don’t make me say things which I have not said.’ 38 Indeed, nothing was added to Morelli’s original text; on the contrary, the English translation presented many omissions to obv iate the ‘peu de gaz’ he had injected in his work. Judging from Ffoulkes’ letter to Layard, it becomes obvious that, already by this time, the manuscript of the translation must have looked like a palimpsest. She informed him that the ‘pencil notes at the margins [referred] to words or passages as to which I am in doubt’ and that the part from Pinturicchio to Perin del Vaga had been revised by Henriette Hertz, an acolyte of Morelli in Rome, so ‘to avoid confusion I have put her name next to her corrections’. 39 Ffoulkes was adamant that these pages ‘must be the criterion of what the remainder of the translation is likely to be. Signor Morelli’s writings are too valuable to be put to the English Public in a garbled form’.40 But she was also conscious that her task went well beyond that of a translator. For so many people started to claim the right to have their say on it that the translation was becoming a quite political business. In March, Layard invited Ffoulkes to contact Elizabeth Eastlake who had agreed to give further supervision on the translation.41 This offer must have flattered Ffoulkes as it was coming from a pioneer of art-historical translations. In fact, a few decades ear
44 | Francesco Ventrella
lier, Eastlake had established her own critical voice by rendering into English some key works of German art history, such as Johann David Passavant’s Tour of a German Artist in England (1836) and Gustav Waagen’s Treasures of Art in Great Britain (1854), and the second edition of Franz Kugler’s Handbook of Painting (1851) – works that had a crucial influence on the formation of British art history.42 ‘I need hardly say that I should think it a great privilege to have her verdict and her help’, Ffoulkes wrote enthusiastically to thank Layard, ‘and should she consider my attempt might eventually be rendered fit for publication, it would indeed be a great thing if she would induce Mr. Murray to publish it’.43 Indeed, Eastlake’s involvement in the business of the translation had a double objective. Firstly, as we read in the letter, it was hoped that she could be instrumental in convincing the publisher John Murray to take up Morelli’s book for publication. 44 Secondly, Morelli himself hoped that Eastlake would write an introduction to the English edition, ‘because there are few people in Europe, like this lady, who have the necessary knowledge and the wanted frame of mind to judge the good and the bad that I’ve said in my book’.45 Morelli was obviously keen on receiving the support of Eastlake’s pen. He held her in high esteem, and respected her as a peer: ‘this lady reasons like a man, her thoughts have a virile inflection and accent’.46 However, upon being informed of Morelli’s hopes, Eastlake initially hesitated to see the usefulness of her intervention: ‘It is difficult to decide, except on one point, namely that I wd not give my name. I have never done so except for very exceptional reasons. Nor do I believe it wd do the work any good. And then I am not satisfied that the work itself is destined to run a straight course. It will require peculiar & careful translation – will be at all events very long, & then has Morelli secured a publisher? These are the questions wh: must be asked before an introduction can be thought of.’47 According to Eastlake, it was the tone of the book which represented the biggest obstacle for the success of the project: ‘As you are well aware an Italian’s banter, however clever, is not easily intelligible to our dull public.’48 Many publishers, too, could not see the book going well with English readers. Ffoulkes thus continued to struggle with the spirit of the text: ‘My greatest wish is to render it, as far as possible, worth of the original and therefore I can only repeat what I have said before, that I trust you or Lady Eastlake will correct me unsparingly, whenever I make use of wrong or inappropriate expressions. What should I do to the ironical parts? Which I feel sure are not satisfactory.’49 Eastlake’s task was therefore an editorial one. She went through the manuscripts, improved those parts which did not flow and returned the manuscripts to Ffoulkes for
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consideration. Eventually, Ffoulkes tidied up a small part ‘on the lines laid down by Lady Eastlake’ to condense a sample for submitting to publishers. 50 Although it became obvious that Morelli’s diatribes needed to be attenuated, Ffoulkes initially resisted Layard and Eastlake’s advice to delete the most controversial passages. Eventually, her worries were assuaged when Morelli authorized her ‘to leave out all his “Polemik mit Bode & dergleichen”’. She further informed Layard that: ‘Lady Eastlake says she will re-model “Princip und Methode” in her introduction & she adds: “a publisher ought to know that the text will be much curtailed & that an introduction will be written – tho’ he need not be told by whom but only by an old hand”.’ 51 The possibility to purge the text made it more realistic for the Morellian camp of London to be mobilised to find a suitable publisher. Ffoulkes’s initial attempts with Virtue soon fell through. 52 Meanwhile, the first volume of the Kunstkritische Studien appeared in Germany, and was immediately reviewed by Claude Phillips for The Academy. After seeing the review, Richter hoped that Phillips could be co-opted to convince another publisher instead. 53 However, the review perhaps helped to stir the matters even further. Phillips described Morelli as both ‘brilliant’ and ‘aggressive’; a book that is cast ‘in an original and piquant form’ which differed dramatically from other books on connoisseurship. For him, the publication of the Kunstkritische Studien was ‘epoch-making’ and it represented an ‘electric shock to art-criticism’. 54 But Phillips also found Morelli’s ‘fiction’ unnecessary, even detrimental to the strength of the claims he was advancing. One of the reasons why he deplored ‘the too controversial and personal character of the new book’ was because its excessive irony made it seem ephemeral. 55 And it is from this standpoint that Phillips made a suggestion that must have sounded like an admonition to everyone involved in the business of the English translation: ‘[…] we cannot help thinking that a considerable excision or modification of the passages coloured with personal feeling would be desirable. The result of Lermolieff ’s serious and indefatigable labours would thus unquestionably be made to stand forth in a more solid and enduring shape’. 56 Phillips’ words made a considerable impact on Murray who echoed them when he issued his definitive response, which was not one that Layard had hoped to hear: ‘Sir Henry Layard, I fear [it] is too controversial, too lengthy and too exclusive to stand a chance of success in my hands.’57 Controversy would not go down well with the English public. When eventually a ‘literary friend’ of Ffoulkes’, the playwright and author Robert St. John Corbet, offered to show the manuscript translation to McMillan, he expressed relief that ‘the polemical matter relating to Herr Bode is to be omitted’, and welcomed the input from Eastlake: ‘It will be exceedingly good of Lady Eastlake to re-model what is too prolix at present & to write an introduction.’58 Unfortunately, however, McMillan too refused to publish the translation ‘for a fear that he could not make it successful commercially’.59 Slowly recovering from a frightening influenza, a still very frail Morelli was particularly disappointed to hear that the publisher thought ‘that the English public is so little interested in works on the fine arts that the publication of a book like the Lermolieff would be a mere loss’.60
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The influenza eventually took its toll on Morelli. His death had a very tangible impact on his female disciples. ‘The influence Morelli exercised on women was extraordinary’, writes Layard to Murray: ‘I knew many who were quite devoted to him. […] And when I spoke to Miss Ffoulkes of his death, she said “the loss to me is irreparable” and burst into tears. He had a very loveable nature.’61 After his death, since no contract had been secured from any publisher yet, Ffoulkes reopened the question of the polemical passages to be censored: ‘The only thing I would like to suggest is that the “Princip” may remain as he wrote it. Lady Eastlake I think thought of embodying the substance in her preface, but I venture to hope that this may not be done as it seems to me it would destroy much of the character of the book. I venture to ask you this privately, I hope you will kindly tell me what you think.’62 The letters following the death of her teacher are written in a new, more confident voice which seems quite far from the over-apologetic tone of her early letters. Ffoulkes was now fully in charge of the production of the translation, which required her to deal with a number of practical matters as well.63 It was only at the beginning of July 1891 that she finally informed the German publisher Brockhaus that she had undertaken the project of an English translation. One final attempt was made with publisher Nimmo, bolstered by a letter of recommendation from Frederick Burton, the third director of the National Gallery.64 By this time, Ffoulkes was starting to feel particularly nervous about the involvement of Henriette Hertz, who had offered to defray the cost of the publication (ill. 3). But she hesitated to make use of this opportunity, fearing especially that Hertz would want to write an introduction: ‘It would be for the better, I think, if Mr. Nimmo would undertake the risk of publication & I sincerely hope he will do so, and will let [us] have an answer soon, for I shall not know what to do if Frl. Hertz writes to me on the subject. One of the conditions she makes is, I believe, that she should write an introduction. I am very much opposed to this & feel sure that Signor Morelli would not have approved of it himself. Whereas it would be of the greatest help to the book if the introduction is written by you. My position, if Frl Hertz writes to me, is all the more difficult, as I know her family well.’65 Ffoulkes was understandably afraid of losing Eastlake’s introduction and the consequential validation of her translation before the English art public. The intervention of a patroness with no particular art-historical standing in the international art world must have made her worried of being pushed back in the place from which she had emancipated herself. Based at Palazzo Zuccari in Rome, where she ran a salon with the collec-
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3 Unknown photographer: Henriette Hertz, c. 1900, Rome, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institute for Art History, Archive
tors Ludwig and Frida Mond, the philanthropist Henriette Hertz was, in the words of Layard, ‘a tuzzy muzzy German lady given to philosophical & aesthetic speculations & has written a novel’. 66 When Giovanni Frizzoni asked if she would ‘take the risk’ of sponsoring the publication, she accepted on the grounds of her conviction ‘of the great importance of Morelli’s book for the future research and development of the science of the history of art’.67 Eventually, Nimmo too turned down the offer to publish the book: ‘It is very strange that all the publishers should be so afraid of it’, Ffoulkes commented defeatedly.68 The same day, Layard did not delay any further and informed the publisher John Murray that Hertz would be in touch soon to discuss the financial matters. 69 Contrary to Ffoulkes’ opinion, Hertz never intended to write an introduction for the book, but instead wished Layard to do so.70 Furthermore, she instructed everyone that her sponsorship would remain anonymous and when Layard approached her to ask whether he could acknowledge her generosity in his introduction, she kindly declined. 71
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Instead, Hertz had some very specific demands with regard to the format of the book, which Layard dutifully imparted to the publisher: ‘She is desirous that the the first volume should be published as soon as possible. She told me that you were of the opinion that the two volumes ought to be brought out together. She thinks, however, that if the first one is published this winter, it might serve useful to English travellers to Rome, as it relates chiefly to the Galleries in that city. I am disposed to agree with her, and as the book is to be published at her own risk, I presume that you would not object. She suggests also that the binding should not be stiff, but flexible as more convenient for the tourist. I have agreed to write a short introduction and to look thro’ the proof sheets.’ 72 This passage is especially useful to document the material conditions in which professional art writing was produced and disseminated at the time. Hertz did not intend the book for an elite of scholars, but wished instead for a portable format which could be taken around the art galleries, in agreement with Morelli’s desire that his method would teach a younger generation of art students how to look at paintings. While Eastlake’s project to write the introduction was, therefore, pushed aside, her obituary of Morelli appeared in the Quarterly Review with the calculated titled ‘The Patriot and the Critic’. 73 The aim of this article was obviously to unmask Lermolieff for the English readers, and strip him bare of his tendentious fictions by showing the politician of a modern country, the serious champion of national patrimony and hero of the Risorgimento. Perhaps in deliberate opposition to the Quarterly and its intellectual network, a few months later The Fortnightly Review invited Wilhelm Bode to summarize the developments of the Berlin Museum under his directorship, which gave the translation business an unexpected twist. 74 In discussing the difference between the English and the German system of museum funding, Bode also took the chance to launch an attack against Lermolieff, whom he called a ‘surgeon’ and a ‘quack doctor’, while he also ridiculed his method of paying attention ‘to the form of the human body, and especially of its extremities’. 75 And he states: ‘An altogether strange epidemic is ranging among us now, such as could only find home in Germany – the Lermolieff mania, I will call it. You have hardly heard in England of Herr Lermolieff, in spite of the claims which are put forward even there on his behalf.’ 76 His invective was not solely directed at the Italian connoisseur, but his English followers as well, most of whom had become involved in Ffoulkes’ translation in different capacities. Reactions from the Morellian network were understandably furious. Sidney Colvin released all his anger in a letter to Layard: ‘My fingers itch to answer the whimpering bully in the way which he deserves: and yet as an official it is my duty to keep a good relationship with my Berlin colleagues.’ 77 Colvin’s point was fair, for even if Morelli’s prose was often sarcastic or even derisive of the Germans, as Bode lamented, he was not
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attacking individual personalities but a class of museum and academic professionals. 78 Bode’s article came out at a crucial moment, and risked undermining the success of the translation. Hence, Layard hurried to reassure Murray that he would duly deal with that ‘most insolent and outrageous attack upon Morelli’ in his introduction. This will in fact read as a balanced clarification and a rehabilitation of Morelli, which was all the more effective as the translation had been purged of the most acerbic passages. 79
‘Englishing’ the Morellian Method When it eventually appeared in April 1892, Ffoulkes’ translation was received very positively by reviewers. For The Westminster Review this was a ‘faultless translation’. 80 The Manchester Guardian praised the translation as ‘one of unusual excellence’, and directly addressed one of the project’s major issues by saying that it displayed ‘in combination with an accurate knowledge of art and the artistic vocabulary, an ease and buoyancy of style very happily reproducing the energetic and stimulating, if sometimes unduly sarcastic and aggressive, manner of the great writer’. 81 In the specialised art press, Walter Armstrong of The Art Journal commended the translator for having ‘done the translation very well’, while the reviewer for The Magazine of Art remarked that ‘Miss Ffoulkes has clearly spared no pains over it’, but also highlighted the ‘Englishing of some of the technical terms’ which is ‘a matter in which perfection seems to be unattainable’. 82 The issue of finding an accurate technical terminology was a general concern for a discipline that was growing too fast, even for the English dictionary. For Ffoulkes, in particular, this point became a painful one, as transpires from her conversations with Murray, Layard and Eastlake. Like them, Ffoulkes too was aware that, in order to advance strong claims about Morelli’s ‘scientific method’, precision of language was essential. This concern was also shared by Eastlake, whose expertise as a translator of art-historical texts from the German gave her a particular insight into Ffoulkes’ work: ‘I hope Miss Ffoulkes’ translation improved as she proceeded. I remark nowadays how bad translations are, evidently undertaken by young ladies who don’t know grammar. Any young & lively hand could concoct an amusing article on the slipslop grammar of the day – my time is over for doing that.’ 83 Eastlake’s qualification of the translator as a ‘young lady’ sounds dismissive of the professional status gained for what was a highly feminized career at the time. This may seem paradoxical from such an experienced translator as herself. Yet, by removing herself from the profession, Eastlake also suggests dramatic change in the landscape of art publishing, now driven by a novel and unprecedented demand which did not compare with the scholarly mission of early translations, intended mostly for an elite. 84 As Morelli’s book, following Hertz’s involvement, now targeted the wider travellers’ market as well, Eastlake must have become susceptible to the possibility that the higher the demand for translations, the lower the quality of translators.
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While working on the two volumes, the art terms in German represented for Ffoulkes ‘often a great puzzle’, and her apprehensiveness became almost a modus operandi of the translator. 85 Eastlake’s publication of the obituary in the Quarterly came as a relief to our translator: ‘it will be very valuable to me in revising the translation as it is a great help to know what are accepted terms in Art, and to see them in print’. 86 Artistic terminology had been a headache for Ffoulkes from the very outset of her job. Writing to Layard from Dresden in March 1890, she had lamented a sort of linguistic isolation which brought her to struggle with some very specific words: ‘I am very grateful for what you tell me about the use of certain words, I did not like the sound of them myself, but I supposed they were the accepted terms as I remember to have seen them in various Art books. Here unfortunately I can get no English books on the subject and I do not have much to guide me what would be English equivalent for pastös, schwammig, Technik, untermalt, etc.?’ 87 These artistic terms presented many problems for the English vocabulary. By translating pastös with ‘claggy’, we lose the connection with ‘impasto’ painting. The passage in the German text reads ‘[…] dass Lionardo damals die Schatten pastös unterlegte’; this was abridged in English as ‘we see that he [Leonardo] first laid in his shadows with opaque colours’, therefore omitting completely the problematic adjective, but also losing the emphasis on a certain quality of the paint which Morelli intended. 88 Similarly, a whole sentence which contained the term untermalt (primed) – ‘Das Kleid scheint bloß untermalt zu sein’ – was completely removed. 89 These are only two instances of the rewriting in translation that Ffoulkes (with further help from Layard, Eastlake, Hertz, St John Corbet and Colvin) had come up to. As Anderson has already pointed out, the English translation that we read today is a much curtailed and reworked text which differs from both the Brockhaus volumes and the later Italian translations. 90 The most dramatic changes occurring in the text obviously deal with direct criticism of Bode. Very little has remained of the sarcastic tone that coloured Lermolieff ’s prose, but the opening section ‘Princip und Methode’ presents some interesting changes worth analysing. 91 In this often quoted methodological parable to the scientific method of connoisseurship, told from the point of view of the young Russian art student, an older Italian connoisseur famously invites him to look closely at fingernails in paintings: ‘“For goodness sake,” I cried, “leave such unsightly things as nails out of question. The German and French critics would inevitably ridicule you if you were to tell them that even nails were characteristic of a great master”.’ Which in the German text reads as: ‘“Um Himmels willen”, rief ich lachend aus, “lassen wir doch die garstigen, unästhetischen Nägel beiseite”.’ 92 Apart from there not being any laugh (lachend), the English translation conflates garstigen and unästhetischen with one single term, ‘unsightly’. A possible reason for
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this choice can be gleaned from the older man’s answer: ‘Everything may be turned into ridicule, especially by people who understand nothing of the subject. And, may I ask, are the nails more unsightly than any other part of the human frame, in the eyes of the anatomist?’ 93 Morelli’s own ideas, ventriloquized here by the Italian older gentleman, proposed that we base our attributions on such unimportant details because they are usually neglected by the copyists and thereby executed almost automatically by each artist and carried out in the most individual manner. At first glance, the Morellian ‘unaesthetic’ seems to stand for a semantic complexity that the ‘unsightly’ does not seem able to contain. Yet, what is perhaps most important is that, whereas the German adjective, by pushing a comparison with the anatomist (Naturforscher), also makes an appeal for a scientific approach to art history, the English translation seems more in tune with an aesthetic discourse based on taste and the polite arts. The translation of the corresponding German term with ‘antiartistico’ in the Italian edition by Frizzoni adds another twist to the text, as it seems to perform an attempt to locate Morelli’s quest within the environment of the fine art academy. 94 The ‘unsightly’, the ‘unaesthetic’ and the ‘anti-artistic’ represent three extremely different but interwoven signifiers within the national discourses about connoisseurship at the turn of the century. Invisible to the artists, as they execute those trifles almost with the carelessness of a reflex, these identifying marks, therefore, remain invisible to the British art historian, whose prudishness is exercised upon acquired taste. The aim of Morelli’s text is obviously to lampoon those who find the scientific study of fingernails unästhetisch. Similarly, Ffoulkes (and her editors) may have opted for the term ‘unsightly’ in order to hit the class of Victorian art critics who despised the new scientific method because they found it simply tasteless. In the old, conservative sense, connoisseurship for the Victorians would still be a polite accomplishment associated with aestheticism and taste. 95 Morelli himself associated this definition with the connoisseur’s Totaleindruck, which he deemed fallible precisely because it was not based on the comparative method, which required the isolation of discrete parts, as anatomists do. 96 By employing the term ‘unsightly’, the English translation therefore enhances Morelli’s criticism and makes it relevant to British culture by slipping in a tongue-in-cheek, but nonetheless effective, critique of the connoisseurs of taste. The distinction between aesthetic and scientific connoisseurship is essential to understanding how the emergence of professional art history during the 19 th century ‘cast new light on the gender politics of both visuality and history’. 97 A considerable amount of prescriptive literature was published concerning the relationship between feminine characteristics and aesthetic behavior at the time. Ruskin most famously declared that a woman’s power was for ‘sweet ordering’ and ‘arrangement’. 98 Women published guides and manuals on art for the home and established themselves as experts on matters of taste, but were considered as lacking ability for discrimination and connoisseurship. By offering women an alternative route to artistic scholarship, the empiri-
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cal method of scientific connoisseurship championed by Morelli gave the objectivity and evidence required for the critical authority which had hitherto been the preserve of men alone. As Caroline Palmer has convincingly argued, ‘the increasingly scientific approach that emerged in the early 19th century offered women an advantage, as it valued individual knowledge acquired through empirical experience above innate taste’. 99 The ‘scientific criticism’ was precisely what, at the beginning of her career, Elizabeth Rigby, later Lady Eastlake, found most congenial in German art history.100 By translating the German art historians into English, she also contributed to a renewal of British art history, steering the discipline towards empiricism.101 Later, Eastlake supported Morellian connoisseurship precisely on the grounds that it was based on importing from the sciences an ‘experimental method’ which proved successful in developing a systematic approach for targeting recurring elements in the works of each painter. Women’s support of the ‘scientific method’, therefore, becomes especially significant when we take into account the gendered politics of art historiography. The endorsement of the ‘scientific method’ was, in fact, at the core of Ffoulkes’ views on the modernization of connoisseurship as well.102 While Ffoulkes was working on the translation of Morelli, she also wrote an article for The Magazine of Art which critiqued some recent misattributions at the Uffizi Gallery. In a language that is reminiscent of the combative tone of her teacher, Ffoulkes took the chance to expound the democratic principles of the scientific method which she had embraced: ‘The visitors to foreign galleries are a large body, taken from every class of society and every grade of thought […]. Signor Morelli, by means of his experimental system, has opened up a royal road to the study of Italian art, whereby even beginners may hope to attain to a certain amount of proficiency in distinguishing one master from another. This road is open to all.’103 Although Ffoulkes does not present a different theory from her teacher’s, her ratification of Morelli’s connoisseurship is marked by difference. In claiming that expertise can be attained through practice, Ffoulkes also challenges the assumption that some people may be ill-equipped in matters of art-historical judgment. If the road was ‘open to all’, it could be travelled by women as well as men. Her advocacy of Morellian empiricism opens up a space in which women, too, could learn through practice and exercise and exchange their own expertise. Morelli addressed the vexed issue of the relationship between education and gender while reflecting on the exceptional circumstances of Sofonisba Anguissola’s training (ill. 4), in which he sardonically asks the reader: ‘Which aristocratic father and especially which noble lady mummy, in our self-professed democratic times, would expect such an “éducation” of their little daughters!’104 Democracy, for Morelli, could not be achieved
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4 Anthony van Dyck: Portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola, 1624, isochromatic reproduction, in: Ivan Lermolieff [Giovanni Morelli]: Della pittura italiana. Studii storico critici. Le Gallerie Borghese e Doria Pamphili in Roma, Milano 1897, p. 199
without equality between the sexes, particularly in matters of art education. At a time in which the South Kensington Schools and the Slade School of Fine Art were starting to train increasing numbers of women artists in Britain, Morelli’s point might have resonated with many female readers.105 However, the passage was completely expunged
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from the English translation. The barely veiled mockery of the aristocracy might not have suited the English readers. Another reason could be found in Elizabeth Eastlake’s lack of support for women’s art education, although, as Julie Sheldon has suggested, she acted as an advocate for the Society of Female Artists.106 Indeed, the question of women’s education always preoccupied Eastlake throughout her career. In 1878, she had published a long analysis of ‘The Englishwoman at School’ for the Quarterly Review in which a passage seemed to anticipate Morelli’s thoughts: ‘Too many fathers have voluntarily placed their daughters in point of education on a par with their sons’, writes Eastlake.107 But unlike Morelli, she was suspicious of the parity between sons and daughters. The starting point of the article is the increasing number of unmarried women in England and their struggle to support themselves. Eastlake highlights the lack of formal education in Britain and of the provision of endowments for girls’ schools. Yet, in comparison with European women, formally educated by trained teachers, English women seem to be superior and to have a stronger sense of independence than their foreign sisters, ‘partly from their greater and easier contact with men, and from the diffusion of the periodical press, which is peculiar to this country’.108 Although she appears critical of women’s social proximity with men, that is not because Eastlake was against gender equality. Rather, she laments that the sort of equality represented in British modern periodicals, for instance, could not guarantee a real independence for women, which she proposed could only be a financial one: ‘Simply because, while taking the lead in all practical progress, we have not associated what we think the most practical thing of all – namely, the earning of money – with high mental culture.’109 Therefore, Eastlake was in favour of women’s education in subjects in which they would not compete with men.110 It is therefore not surprising to find that she endorsed women’s training in foreign languages: ‘there can be no doubt that of the two halves of the population, taken numerically, the ladies travel the most, and, whatever their small French and less German, are generally wanted as interpreters for their male companions’.111 Such moderate arguments are rarely represented in the feminist literature on Victorian education, and show the historiographic necessity of looking at feminism and anti-feminism ‘as a range of connected perspectives across an extended spectrum of ideas’.112 When we turn to the translation of Morelli’s concluding remarks on Sofonisba, another possibility seems to suggest itself for a more nuanced judgement towards the education of women artists. Morelli celebrated the fact that: ‘[…] so viele Jungfrauen sich der Malerkunst widmeten und es darin auch zu einer gewissen Meisterschaft gebracht haben’.113 Which was translated into English as: ‘[…] so many women devoted themselves to painting as a profession, and attained, moreover, a certain degree of proficiency’.114 The translation’s reference to professionalism points at a modern opportunity for women artists, which seems more in tune with the younger generation of New Women to which Ffoulkes – an unmarried woman, art historian and translator, who lived solely by her own means – inevitably belonged. Taken as a whole, the English pages on Sofon-
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isba embody a transgenerational dialectic upon the question of the professionalization of women at the end of the century. There was surely an uncertainty about women who competed in fields traditionally associated with men, but as long as they earned their living from it, that was not an impossibility.
‘... especially when her se x are concerned’: Self -transl ation as Re -vision Ffoulkes’ anxieties were partly assuaged by the overall positive responses from the press to the translation, the success of which had granted her full recognition and appreciation from the Morellian network. And Eastlake, who had mentored her throughout the troubled process, sensed a change in her attitude, to which she referred in a letter to Layard: ‘The poor young lady who was in an agony of suspense and fear as to the reception of her book, is now in good spirits and has set to work to translate the second volume. I hear from persons competent to give an opinion that her translation is “excellent”. I should like to have yours.’115 Layard’s answer took a few months to arrive, but it was the supportive message which Eastlake had wished for her protégé: ‘I am very glad that you were kind to Miss Ffoulkes. She is a hard-working, conscientious, and deserving young lady and merits your encouragement.’116 By the time Eastlake received this letter in the autumn of 1892, Ffoulkes was already very far advanced with the translation of Morelli’s second volume.117 Eastlake’s relocation to Venice meant that she would no longer be able to provide Ffoulkes with her support and expertise as had been the case during the translation of the first volume. Thus, she and Layard entrusted Sidney Colvin, keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum, to assist Ffoulkes with any matter arising from the translation. Soon enough, however, Eastlake understood that this alliance had become quite trying for Ffoulkes, and she, once again, shared her concerns with Layard in another letter: ‘She finds Mr. Sydney Colvin a harder task-master than she found me (I am too susceptible and tender-hearted when dealing with young ladies, especially when tears begin to appear) and is sometimes in the depths of despair. I tell her that after the approval she has received from you – the most unmerciful of critics especially when her sex are concerned – she need not give way to her fits of depression.’118 The transgenerational link between Eastlake and Ffoulkes is particularly important in understanding the gendered politics of 19th century art historiography. Although neither Eastlake nor Ffoulkes were ever ‘women’s writers’ (writing for a female audience), they were both aware of the material conditions of the woman writer. These epistolary testimonies not only seem to shed light on the psychology of a little-known art historian
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who is too often credited only for her translations, but require us to ask how to study the intellectual life of an art historian ‘when her sex are concerned’. Feminist theorists view translation as a literary mode of production, not reproduction. Language is a means of creating meaning, and it can be analysed in order to understand women’s experience of difference.119 By looking at Ffoulkes’ translation of Morelli’s Kunstkritische Studien, I have tried to make the case for the voice of the translator in performing an act of selftranslation in the text, and to make gender legible in the history of connoisseurship. Sherry Simon has devised a tripartite methodology to disrupt the historical role of women as translators, which has informed my examination of the means by which Ffoulkes negotiated a space for her own voice while lending it to the translation of Morelli’s connoisseurship.120 Firstly, Simon argues that translation has been a tool for women to build communication networks in the creative renewal of literary traditions and to substantiate female professional relations. Ffoulkes’ translation of Morelli had constantly to respond to an entire social web of art professionals who, like her, wan ted to use this translation to establish their authoritativeness in the competitive field of connoisseurship. At the same time, that translation also consolidated a chain of support amongst women, most notably Constance Ffoulkes, Elizabeth Layard and Henrietta Hertz. These female relations were instrumental in the popularization of the Morellian method in Britain. Secondly, according to Simon, women translators can use language to interrupt the reproduction and repetition of patriarchal language. At a close reading, Ffoulkes’ linguistic choices can be said to respond to experience of difference as a woman translator and an art historian. Although I have no evidence that certain editorial decisions were made by Layard or Colvin, the stress on Sofonisba’s professionalism and the subtle critique of the aesthetic connoisseurs of taste become distinctly significant when we consider them as signs of feminine inscriptions in the Morellian method. Thirdly, feminist translation theorists are interested in how and what women translate in order to circulate texts which could contribute to progressive political agendas. Although neither Eastlake nor Ffoulkes can be considered progressive feminists, they nonetheless endorsed a scientific method which, as I have demonstrated, opened up a more egalitarian and democratic path for women to embrace art history professionally. When the critic of the Edinburgh Review (published by Murray, and presumably sympathetic to the Morellians) applauded Ffoulkes for her translation, they also used an ambiguous phrasing which seems apt to summarize the relationship between women and translation in art history: ‘[…] the translator has so well acquitted herself of her arduous task that we are never reminded of the fact that the book, in its present form, is not an original work’.121 On the one hand, the critic seems to suggest that Ffoulkes’ translation could be appreciated as an original work, and not as a surrogate reproduction. This reading acknowledges the capacity of the translator to be a rewriter, rather than a copyist. On the other, the ‘acquittal’ of Ffoulkes from the text points to the risk of the translator’s voice remaining forever unrecorded in art historiography. In this essay, I have tried to re-
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read Morelli’s translation again, in order to restore women’s voices to art historiography. While the translation of Morelli’s Kunstkritische Studien saw the involvement of a whole network of men and women who equally contributed to its success, here I have explored how women’s experience was marked by a productive difference which was at work in the work of translation. This is, simultaneously, an act of re-reading and a re-vision of the ways in which we think about a social history of art history.
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Aby Warburg’s Literal and Intermedial Self -Transl ation Maria Teresa Costa
‘There is no better way of finding out what a writer meant than to attempt to state his meaning in different words, preferably in another language.’1 With these words Ernst Gombrich started his lecture in memory of Aby Warburg, delivered in 1999, on the occasion of his 70 th anniversary of death. Gombrich is alluding to the fact that the translation of a text into another language can be useful to think more profoundly about the status of language itself. This is, on many levels, particularly evident in the case of Warburg’s œuvre. Gombrich’s words are referring to a specific circumstance, namely that Warburg’s ‘collected works’ – the two volumes edited in German by Gertrud Bing in 1932 – became available to English readers only in 1999. 2 The process of the reception and interpretation of his works by anglophone art history started nevertheless much earlier with the relocation of his library from Hamburg to London after the Nazi’s seizure of power, and the subsequent shift from German to English as the Institute’s working language. As it is known, this was not a neutral transition but lead to a new phase in the reception of Warburg’s art history: Panofsky, Wind and others transformed Warburg’s kulturwissenschaftlich oriented art history into new methodologies, based, as in the case of Panofsky’s ‘iconology’, on very different foundations. 3 Here, the significance of language and translation for the formation of a tradition comes to the centre of attention, and thereby the question of how a tradition arises through translations and mistranslations.4 But this question would lead us too far from the aims of the present contribution, which deals with analysing the importance of translation and self-translation for Warburg himself.
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Warburg’s language is very particular, full of neologisms, innovations, allusions and stratifications, which is why it is not easy – and sometimes impossible – to translate his work. This has also to do with the specificity of the German language, which, as Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt pointed out, ‘is infinitely inventive, it gives rise to the most admirable poetic finds and it encourages technical terms through the descriptive possibilities which it offers’. 5 And this because ‘one can take it apart for showing the underlying mechanism and bring to light what characterizes it: the easiness in constructing words through the agglutination of very simple parts, for constituting a complex whole […]. All is in keeping with this, its resources are unlimited’. 6 Warburg’s language is a language of translation itself; his vocabulary speaks of spatial and temporal shifts and displacements: Bilderwanderungen (migration of images), Bilderfahrzeuge (image vehicles), Nachleben (survival/afterlife), Pathosformel (pathos formula), to mention only a few terms. Translation affects many different aspects of Warburg’s work: it pertains not only to the vocabulary and the legacy of his texts and ideas, but also to his methodology and therefore to the objects and topics chosen for his research, as well as to the form of exposition. Concerning his method, the attitudes towards translation are caused by Warburg’s curiosity and openness towards other disciplines (like anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, natural sciences, philology, philosophy and psychology), which are brought in to discover new areas of research in the interspaces between traditional disciplines. Through this opening Warburg expands his spectrum of interest from works of art into images, also including objects that were frequently neglected, such as illustrations from newspapers and magazines, photos of old books or stamps. This methodology also has a significant impact on his form of exposition: Warburg’s language is a very visual one, both with regard to the terms used (it is full of metaphors and neologisms) and the way of argumentation. Normally he concentrates on a small detail to deduce from it the sense of an entire epoch, on a cultural-historical basis. Marginal details are highlighted as the trace of a transitional moment from one pictorial style to another, like in the well-known example of the girl with the fruitbasket, styled by Warburg as ‘Ninfa’ in Ghirlandaio’s frescos of the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella. The way in which he confronts images has not much to do with the typical art historical comparison à la Wölfflin. 7 Warburg is dealing with the search for analogies, while not inquiring, in an evolutionary or genealogical sense, for an original model and its reproductions, or the other way around. His aim is to build an intertextual field of correspondences without dissolving differences. These two particular acts have to do with his understanding of translation and are reflected in the practice of self-translation, adopted by Warburg both in a literal sense (as translation of a text into another language), and as intermedial translation. In the following pages I want to discuss two examples for this practice.
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Warburg and the Practice of Literal Self -Transl ation ‘Ebreo di sangue, amburghese di cuore, d’anima fiorentino.’ As Gertrud Bing reports, Warburg loved to describe himself and his polymorphic identity with these words, spoken in Italian. 8 He spent the majority of his life between Hamburg and Florence, and he was so much integrated into the circles of intellectuals working on the Renaissance and revolving around the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and the Biblioteca Hertziana in Rome that he sometimes used Italian as his primary language for writing and lecturing. An interesting case is offered by two essays written originally in German but published first in Italian through the mediation of some Italian native speakers: I costumi teatrali per gli Intermezzi del 1589. I disegni di Bernardo Buontalenti e il ‘Libro dei conti’ di Emilio de’ Cavalieri (1895) and Delle ‘ imprese amorose’ nelle più antiche incisioni fiorentine (1905). 9 This was not only due to the fact that Warburg was an integral part of the debate on the Italian Renaissance conducted amongst Italian scholars. Sometimes, he apparently also had difficulties finding the appropriate word in German because of the specificity of some Italian expressions, which had no equivalent in another linguistic context. This is particularly evident in the case of the second essay, on the ‘imprese amorose’, translated into Italian by Giovanni Poggi, one of the most prominent Italian art historians of his time,10 which can serve as a case study for Warburg’s practice of self-translation. One might think that this is not a case of self-translation in a literal sense, but it was also not a mere translation through another author. As documented in the different versions of the manuscript and in the correspondence between Warburg and Poggi, it was a collaborative exercise.11 Already in the German manuscript of Delle ‘ imprese amorose’ (and unlike in the case of I costumi teatrali), Warburg inserted numerous Italian words to help with the future work of translation, suggesting the specific term or context to which he wanted to allude. The process of translation itself started thus before Poggi turned to the text and shows how Warburg was conceiving his essay in the interspace between two languages (ill. 5). This process is quite typical of multilingual authors, who in the process of writing cannot find a satisfactory equivalent in their mother tongue. But this is also caused by the fact that languages are not ‘equivalent’: this is a question of what is intended (Gemeinte) and the modes of intention (Art des Meinens).12 Even if two words in two different languages indicate the same thing, in the moment in which they signify it in differing manners, they are not interchangeable. This is not merely a problem of context or form, but it has to do with something going beyond this opposition. Every term carries with it significant cultural baggage that can be grasped in depth only by someone who has inhabited a language, or who has been immersed in it for a long time.
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5 Aby Warburg: Delle ‘ imprese amorose’ nelle più antiche incisioni fiorentine, bilingual manuscript, Warburg Institute Archive, III.42.1, fol. 45
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6 Letter from Aby Warburg to Giovanni Poggi, 1904, Florence, Archivio Storico delle Gallerie Fiorentine, Fondo Giovanni Poggi, Serie 1, 23
In this sense, in the German original text the series of 24 round and oval engravings (‘Serie von 24 runden und ovalen Kupferstichen’), attributed to Baccio Baldini are referred to by the Italian words ‘tondini’ or ‘tondi’, or sometimes with a capital letter (‘Tondi’), as if it was a German word. Sometimes Warburg writes both the German term and its Italian translation in brackets, like in the case of ‘das Kupferstichtondo (il tondo stampato)’.13 Giovanni Poggi sometimes accepts Warburg’s suggestions, but sometimes he introduces some small changes, adjusting some expressions to the spirit of the Ita lian language, as he also confirms in a letter to Warburg, dated 11 January 1905: ‘Nella traduzione troverà che io ho tralasciato qualcuna di quelle immagini che non sarebbero conformi al gusto e al carattere della nostra lingua.’ But he immediately cares about Warburg’s reaction, reassuring him that the changes are nothing important and that they can discuss about it: ‘Ma niente di essenziale. Mi scriva presto qualcosa e mi rimandi appena potrà le bozze corrette, con le sue osservazioni.’14 In a letter to Poggi, Warburg draws the engraving conserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris to be sure that his friend has the same image in mind (ill. 6). The use of these round engravings was, as Warburg suggested, to decorate the cover of small boxes, which, during the Quattrocento, lovers gave as a present to their beloved. To introduce the translator to the specific context of these illustrations, Warburg also uses the Italian expression, both in the German original text (‘scatoline’ or ‘bossoli da spezie’) as well as in the marginal notes of the definitive Italian manuscript ready to be printed (‘ornamenti da coperchio per scatoline o bossoli da spezie’).15 This connection with the court life in the Florentine Renaissance is made even more explicit by some other Italian words and expressions, sometimes substituting and sometimes accompanying
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the German ones, offering an interesting mixture between the two languages in dealing with the common space between the two. For instance, one might find a sentence like ‘auf den meisten tondini ist ein Liebespaar nella vita corteggiante dargestellt’.16 The structure and the main part are in German, but he intended to highlight certain aspects and rendered them therefore in Italian. This has consequences for the construction of the sentence: Warburg is sometimes ‘Italianising’ or ‘Germanising’ his text. For instance, in this particular sentence he uses ‘nella vita corteggiante’ as an attribute, which is normally not the case in Italian, and puts for this reason the verb at the end of the sentence. One should also note that ‘vita corteggiante’ is perhaps not the most appropriate translation for ‘höfisches Leben’ (courtly life). ‘Corteggiare’ means in German ‘umwerben’, which can also be expressed as ‘den Hof machen’ because it comes from the context of the court’s life, but in modern Italian has no direct association with the court. One might have translated it better with ‘la vita di corte’ oder ‘la vita cortigiana’. Warburg himself probably became aware of this, putting in the final version of the manuscript the note: ‘all’arte applicata cortegianesca’ to translate ‘zur angewandten höfischen Kunst’.17 However it should be recalled that during the late Middle Ages and during the Renaissance the two spheres were strictly interconnected. This ambiguity is expressed by Warburg also by indicating the patron of the artwork with the Italian ‘Signore innamorato’ (lovelorn giver), an expression that Poggi prefers to render with ‘committente’, because of his attentiveness to the spirit of the modern Italian language.18 In confronting the two versions it becomes evident that one of the technical terms of Warburg’s language, Beiwerk (accessory), is given by Poggi not with the most obvious Italian term, which will also be the one used for translating it in the later translations of Warburg’s Collected Works: ‘accessorio’ – a translation that Warburg himself, too, inserted in his manuscript. Poggi here prefers the more neutral ‘particolari’.19 The term ‘accessori’ recurs twice in the sentence, and this could be a reason for Poggi not accepting Warburg’s suggestion: in Italian, a text full of repetition is not perceived as elegant and savant, and during the 19th century this tendency was probably even more accentuated than now. Similarly, there are some other expressions that Warburg gives in Italian translation in his text, but that are not accepted by Poggi, such as ‘l’attenzione interiore della storia dell’arte’ for ‘die innere Aufmerksamkeit der modernen Kunstgeschichte’. This becomes more concrete in Poggi’s translation where he opted for ‘l’attenzione dei moderni storici dell’arte’, because Italian is a more ‘pragmatic’ language and does not use subjectivisation, as frequently as the German language. 20 There are quite a lot of similar cases: for instance, ‘troppo in fretta sorvola’ does not work for Poggi as translation for ‘allzu eilig hingwegsieht’, which can be better rendered as ‘costringe a sorvolare troppo in fretta’; ‘vallicella fiorita’ becomes ‘valletta fiorita’, or ‘manicone’ becomes ‘manica’. 21 These are instances of a meta-level of self-translation:
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Warburg produces a hybrid text in German with many Italian words that were to be translated in an other Italian. In this process the text becomes more homogeneous (which also means that something of the primal connotations of the multilingual text get lost), and more appropriate to the Italian public. Warburg mastered the Italian language quite well and had detailed knowledge of the context he was speaking about. To give an example: it is quite impressive that he has an idea that ‘zazzera’ (shock of hair) was the right name for the hairstyle of the male figures depicted by Benozzo Gozzoli and others. 22 But even if one masters a language and is immersed in it for a long time, perceiving its tastes and smells, one can never completely feel in that language. And perhaps for this very reason Warburg preferred to ask his Florentine friend for help. Selftranslation, in the full sense of the word, is both a translation of a text and a translation of the self. But Warburg did not want to be translated; he rather believed in the intrinsic power of translation itself, as he was dealing his entire life with patterns repeated with variations in the course of the history of culture. This is apparent in his main ‘Grundbegriffe’, like Pathosformel and Nachleben. By analysing transmissions of images in space and time, he is following an idea of culture as a product of an endless interrelation between fields and epochs. He called this Ikonologie des Zwischenraums (iconology of the interval), emphasising precisely the importance of the liminal space for connecting new constellations and correspondences, because the interval gives an opportunity to pause, to stay at the threshold, bringing together for a significant instant past, present and future. By publishing Delle ‘ imprese amorose’ nelle più antiche incisioni fiorentine in Italy, Warburg wanted to see how the Italian public might perceive his ideas. Poggi’s work helped Warburg to establish himself among the Italian scholars, producing a text that does not sound like a translation. And somehow it is not ‘officially’ a translation, as the German version exists only in manuscript form. As already mentioned, in Warburg’s Gesammelte Schriften the German text is present only in the critical apparatus at the end of the book. 23 But this German version differs from the original German one, as the footnotes are not reproduced; they can only be found in its Italian translation, which also contains an appendix by Poggi. It should be added that Poggi was working on a similar topic in the same period and that Warburg knew his work. 24 The publication of the text through Poggi’s voice was in this sense a way of collaborating, both on a linguistic and on a thematic level. Warburg even suggested that both their names appear as authors on the cover. 25 This did not happen and Poggi appeared only as the translator. Interestingly, there is a short part in the German text in which Warburg changes his linguistic register, switching to a narrative voice. In the first person, he recounts how he was dealing with a sort of enigma, trying to understand to which family a certain Lucrezia, at whom Lorenzo dei Medici’s attention was directed, belonged. And in this particular occasion, Poggi’s autonomous research in the Florentine state archive was vital for Warburg to solve his enigma. Warburg included this historiographic anecdote
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in the text, adding also an annotation in Italian to make sure that Poggi translated this part – but this was not the case. The Italian probably did not want to be mentioned in this way and preferred to homogenize this narrative part with the rest of the text. The phrasing of the German text was as follows: ‘Damit saß ich vor einem anscheinend unlösbaren Rätsel, und meine Bohrarbeiten im dunklen Tunnel des Mediceischen Liebeswesen waren gleichsam in hoffnungsloses Stocken geraten, als ich es zu meinem Troste auch auf der anderen, italienischen Seite klopfen hörte. Freund Poggi meldete sich; auch er, von dem Rätsel der Lucrezia umstrikt, suchte einen Ausweg aus dem dunklen Reich der Mediceischen vita amorosa. An einem Wintertage 1902 ist ihm dann die Erleuchtung im florentinischen Staatsarchiv gekommen; nicht durch eine künstlerische Vision, sondern durch planmäßig angewandten Fleiß war es ihm beschieden, die rätselhafte doppelte Lucrezia auf eine zu reduzieren: die Lucrezia in den lettere der Alessandra war keine geborene Gondi, wie Guasti ohne stichhaltigen Grund behauptet hat, sie war vielmehr eine Donati und, wie urkundlich feststeht, die Ehefrau des Niccolò Ardinghelli, den sie etwa fünfzehnjährig am 26. April 1465 geheiratet hat.’ 26 Warburg attempted a partial self-translation of this passage: ‘I miei lavori di trivellazione nella galleria oscura della passione medicae erano / parevano disperatamente paralizzati / inutili quando io sentivo picchiare dalla parte italiana.’ 27 But the published version by Poggi is much shorter compared to the German text: ‘Nonostante, la persona della Lucrezia rimaneva sconosciuta, quando G. Poggi nel corso di alcune sue ricerche nel R. Archivio di Stato di Firenze trovò che la Lucrezia ricordata nella lettera dell’Alessandra non era una Gondi, come il Guasti supponeva senza ragioni, ma una Donati, andata in sposa nell’età di circa quindici anni a Niccolò Ardinghelli, il 26 aprile 1465.’ 28 There are two expressions recurring several times in the German text, which are always left in Italian, ‘alla franzese’ 29 and ‘all’antica’. Warburg uses them, also in other texts, as technical terms describing two different stylistic modes, which are to be found during the period of transition from the late Middle Ages to the early Renaissance. And it is exactly this transition, which is at the very centre of the text on the ‘imprese amorose’. The aim of the text is to interpret Baldini’s engravings as a case study demonstrating the coexistence of these two styles during a period of transition. 30 ‘Evident though it is, this curious cultural dualism in the matters of love has hitherto gone unobserved. It finds expression on the lids of those love-token boxes in which a stiff, ornamental realism of costume alla franzese seems perfectly compatible with the wearing of swirling antique draperies.’ 31 Warburg concentrates on one particular example, though he concludes the text with the wish that the other 23 engravings will be studied in the near future, in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of this topic. The example in question is a ‘ton-
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7 Baccio Baldini (attributed to): Lorenzo Medici and Lucrezia Donati, c. 1464, etching, illustrated in Aby Warburg’s Delle ‘ imprese amorose’ nelle più antiche incisioni fiorentine, 1905
dino’ (roundel) which is to be found at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (ill. 7). A male and a female figure are represented in profile and put in relation, the one in front of the other, without direct physical contact. Their hands touch one another only indirectly through the mediation of a sphere on the top, held up by the young woman’s right hand and lightly touched by the man’s left hand. The other two hands are also indirectly connected, as they are touching a ribbon blowing in the wind with the inscription: ‘Amor vuol fe e dove fe nonne Amor non puo’ (Love demands faith, and where faith is not, Love cannot be). Close to the sphere and to the motto is the very Impresa amorosa, depicted on the embroidered sleeve of the man’s clothes and shown as a sort of shield. There one sees a ring with three feathers, which was well known as the personal impresa of Lorenzo il Magnifico. But it is above all the female dress which attracts Warburg’s attention: in it he sees a fitting mixture between the two styles. This is expressed again in German, though there are a few Italian words scattered in the text:
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8 Baccio Baldini (attributed to): Venus ( first edition), c. 1464, etching, reproduced in Aby Warburg’s Delle ‘ imprese amorose’ nelle più antiche incisioni fiorentine, 1905
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9 Baccio Baldini (attributed to): Venus (second edition), c. 1464, etching, reproduced in Aby Warburg’s Delle ‘ imprese amorose’ nelle più antiche incisioni fiorentine, 1905
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‘Lucrezia dagegen befindet sich in bezug auf ihre Toilette in einem eigentümlichen Stadium des Übergangs von schwerlastendem Modeprunk “alla franzese” zur idealen schwungvollen Gewandung “all’antica”. Auf dem Kopf trägt sie den schweren fermaglio, mit dem die materielle Besitzesfreude der florentinischen Kaufleute die bürgerliche Braut pralerisch schmückte, das Haar dagegen ist “alla Ninfale” frisiert und wallt in freien Locken lustig nach hinten; zwei Flügel, wie sie der etruskischen Medusa eigen, wachsen über den Schläfen empor, die höhere antikisch ideale Art der Frauengestalt mit diesem direkt aus der Antike übernommen Symbol andeutend. Denselben Kontrast zwischen platter Wirklichkeit und Idealität zeigt das Gewand: die Taille ist à la mode ausgeschnitten […] dagegen war der eigentliche Rock, aus dem die heidnisch nackten Füße hervortreten, in diesem beflügelten Schwunge bei irdischen zeitgenössischen Wesen nie so zu sehen; so traten die fliegenden Victorien des römischen Triumphbogens oder jene tanzende Mänaden auf, die bewußt nachgebildet, zuerst in den Werken Donatellos und Filippo Lippis auftauchten und […] das ewig junge Reis (sic) des heidnischen Altertums dem dürren Stamm der bürgerlichen Bildniskunst aufpfropfend [innestando il ramoscello sempre verde dell’antichità pagana all’albero un poco secco della pittura borghese].’ 32 To reinforce his thesis of a coexistence of the style ‘alla franzese’ and the style ‘all’antica’ during a transition period where Renaissance art had not yet completely shifted to the latter, Warburg refers to an example taken from the planetary series of Baccio Baldini. He confronts two different versions of the illustration of the same planetary image. In the second one ‘the antique butterfly has emerged from the Burgundian chrysalis: the dress flows free, like that of Victory herself; and a Medusa-winged headdress – a welcome aid to flight, for a nymph who dances on air – has banished the empty ostentation of the hennin’ (ill. 8–9). 33 To Warburg, the style of these engravings, and in particular in the depiction of the dress, allowed for an attribution to the young Botticelli, who had not yet found a decided mode of expression, and uses a transitional style mixing idealism and realism. But to confirm his hypothesis and consider the ‘scatoline d’amore […] als organische Durchgangsstation zum freien mythologischen Leinwandbild’, Warburg as usual leaves the question open to future research, in which the other 23 tondini should be examined, but also the banners used during the Giostre (tournaments), and therefore all materials used in Renaissance Florence’s festive pageantry. 34
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Warburg InterMedial Self -Transl ation Intermedial self-translation also played an important role for Warburg: he spent his last years developing a visual epistemology that attempted to translate the concepts and ideas expressed in his texts into a visual language. 35 At the centre of this effort is the well-known Mnemosyne Atlas, a series of photographic arrangements of images in different media, from different spatial and temporal contexts, collected according to their reference to a particular concept, and ‘homogenized’ by the fact that they were put as black and white photographs on a black background and provisionally fixed with thumb tacks. 36 These images were collected under a series of themes – ‘Grundbegriffe’, which should serve as orientation points in Warburg’s work. The Atlas appears as a sort of visual vocabulary of his main concepts and can be read in this perspective as an elaborated technique of intermedial self-translation. In a letter to Jacques Mesnil, written on 3 May 1928 he formulated a principle, which could be read as the epistemic foundation for his collection of images: ‘It is an extensive system of clothes hooks, on which I want to hang all the small and big textiles from the loom of time.’ 37 This sentence condenses in nuce Warburg’s intention to visually translate his previous work, which up to that moment had operated through texts, into a new medial form. Through the Bildertafeln he was able not only to confront and put in dialogue visual materials from different sources, but also on a methodological level to interrupt the linearity of the linguistic argumentation and translate it into the simultaneity of a visual way of thinking. In this perspective each panel can be read as a visual translation of what Warburg expressed in his texts and in his talks. As an art historian he had of course always provided his texts with illustrations and diagrams, to support philologically his argument through visual sources – as we have seen for instance in the case of the text of Delle ‘ imprese amorose’ nelle più antiche incisioni fiorentine – but the experimentations conducted from off 1924 can be interpreted as a proper paradigm shift, the visual arrangements being no more mere illustration of something else, but instead ‘eigenständige Vermittlungsformen’, that is to say, the main work. 38 If one considers this operation as an intermedial self-translation – from text to image –, one can read Warburg’s oeuvre as an immense practice of mise en abyme about the act of self-translation itself. From this perspective one should not forget that the Mnemosyne Atlas remained unfinished and that Warburg had in mind to provide his collection of images with a substantial textual part, which would have complicated his act of self-translation – from text to image to text and so on ad infinitum – and would have brought him to a kind of ‘Rückübersetzung’. 39 In this sense, Warburg was not interested in producing knowledge about images, but to produce knowledge through the correlation of images. 40 As Georges Didi-Huberman sharply pointed out, it is about a ‘visual form of knowledge’ ( forme
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visuelle du savoir) and a ‘knowing form of seeing’ ( forme savante du voir), that is about an aesthetic and epistemological paradigm.41 Each image hanging on one of the panels is not only in dialogue with the other images on the same board, but is in itself an endless referral network to other images and histories. This implies going beyond the dimension of the visible, and therefore of semiotics and communication, alluding to a higher level, where the borders between individual and collective are blurred. Warburg was conscious that the image inhabits exactly this threshold and used a series of media to make this liminal dimension fruitful. For this reason, the interspace (Zwischenraum) between the images hanging on the panels gains importance, because it constitutes the neutral space that gives time to the images to activate their proper power and to enter into a provisional constellation with other images, present or absent, and continue so ad infinitum.42 In this sense the Mnemosyne Atlas is not only a medium to put images in movement, but also to reconfigure memory (Gedächtnis), without fixating memories (Erinnerungen). Warburg opens up art history to another form of legibility, which precedes the opposition between word and image and restores the ‘natural connection’ between the two.43 In the introduction to the Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg refers to a linguistic theory, Hermann Osthoff ’s Vom Suppletivwesen der indogermanischen Sprachen (On Suppletion in Indo-Germanic Languages).44 This theory allowed him to validate his aim of building, on a material visual basis and through a ‘comparative analysis’, an ‘inventory of pre-coined classical forms that impacted upon the stylistic development of the representation of life in motion in the age of the Renaissance’.45 Warburg traces how a number of pathos-laden motifs were represented over the course of art history and how they formed a visual language of gestures (Gebärdensprache). The main instrument for this ‘visual inventory’ was what Warburg defined as pathos formula (Pathosformel), an expression coined in the text Dürer und die italienische Antike (1905).46 The term, one of the cornerstones of his work, indicates a paradoxical dialectic combination of the movement of pathos-laden figures with the fixed nature of a for mula.47 The fact that this word is ‘invented’ by drawing on Osthoff ’s linguistic method shows in itself how the act of translation permeated Warburg’s way of thinking.48 In Warburg’s words: ‘As early as 1905 the author was helped in such efforts by Osthoff ’s writing on the nature of the superlative in the Indo-Germanic language: in brief he demonstrated that a change in the word root can occur in the comparison of adjectives and conjugation of verbs. Not only does the conception of the energetic identity of the intended attribute or action not suffer, even though the formal identity of the basic lexical expression has fallen away; rather, the arrival of an alien root achieves an intensifcation of the original meaning.’49
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In his treatise, Osthoff starts out from the hypothesis that ‘words and patterns which [in the Indo-Germanic languages] are connected to each other through a system of inflexion, like the singular casus of a noun or the different forms of a verb, are generally mutually connected by a roots-affinity’. 50 Of course there are exceptions to the rule. In the history of linguistics they were considered first as ‘irregularities, anomalies in the process of pattern formation’ and then as a ‘defective character of certain word stems’. 51 For Osthoff, the essential question is not about the identification of the singular pattern, but about their substitution (Stellvertretung). This phenomenon, called by Osthoff ‘suppletive nature of our Indo-Germanic languages’ (suppletivwesen unserer indogermanischen sprachen), does not need to be motivated by the fact that a formal deficit occurs in a word stem. 52 Examples are some comparatives and superlatives, like the Latin bonus, melior, optimus (good, better, best); the conjugation of some common verbs indicating action (like the Latin fero, tuli), and the construction of some feminine words, not altering the word’s suffix, but changing the stem (like in father/mother, brother/sister etc.). Accor ding to Osthoff, the reason for this phenomenon is a psychological one: the substitution normally occurs in the case of words designating objects or situations very close and familiar to the speaker. From here, Osthoff builds a fascinating interpretation of the history of the Indo-Germanic languages, and comes to the conclusion that ‘in the development of languages the indication of “individual representations” should have preceded the one of “general concepts”’. 53 The closer objects were to the emotions of the speaker (feelings and thoughts), the more they were individualized through an ‘intensification’ of the stem. From this perspective, abstract logic is criticised as the ‘downfall of our suppletive nature’ (untergang unseres suppletivwesens), with poetry being the only possible medium of salvation, able to protect the ‘drive to individualization or isolation’ and to conserve the richness of languages54 Starting from these premises, Warburg introduces the following hypothesis: ‘A similar process can be ascertained, mutatis mutandis, in the area of the language of gesture in art when, for example, the dancing Salome from the Bible appears as a Greek maenad, or when a female servant carrying a basket of fruit in Ghirlandaio rushes by in quite conscious imitation of the Victory of a Roman triumphal arch.’ 55 Just as the Indo-Germanic languages, crossing continents and times, there are pathos formulae which recur and proliferate, repeating themselves with variations throughout the history of art and images. The element of foreignness, expressed in languages by the suppletives, results in the field of visual art in the intensification of a particular gesture, inserting it into another time, which could be called the temporality of survival. The new form existing in another context is called afterlife (Nachleben). Through this concept, derived from Edward B. Tylor and Anton Springer, Warburg wants to emphasize the power of translation, claiming that each alteration, each metamorphosis, goes
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through the re-search of ‘original’ words (Urworte) and gestures (Urgeste). And this is one of the most important discoveries made by Warburg in analysing the most ‘classical’ thing produced by Western culture: antiquity and the Renaissance. In juxtaposing images representing ‘original’ gestures, the fact that there are no non-hybrid images strikes his eye. For this very reason there is no hierarchy in Warburg’s panels. Each epoch creates new images, but equally quotes and adopts images and forms from the past. Images appear then either as a rebirth, renascence or renaissance (Wiedergeburt) or as a survival (Überleben/Nachleben). From this perspective, the history of art and images appeared to him as the history of a constitutive ‘impurity’, connected to migrations: a history constantly moving, a history of translations. And this is because images are by their very nature mobile, they are Bilderfahrzeuge and they produce a memory which is at the same time imagination. This is the very reason for choosing the name Mnemosyne for his mobile collection of images: images function as mediators of memories and enable the past to reappear and react in the present; memory is what enables the past to prolong itself in the form of images. This entails of course a notion of memory not as conservation, but as construction, as process. It is about a dynamic process of transmission that foresees that the transmitted material is subjected to migrations and transformations and therefore to new interpretations. It is about translations and mistranslations. Self-translation also takes place on a meta-level: the panels used for the Mnemosyne Atlas and for the lectures that Warburg gave in his last years as a visual translation of his previous texts, can be considered as a gesture of self-translation, from the text of the introduction to its visual illustration through the panels. This means that Warburg was not practicing a mere self-translation from texts to images (or image constellations), but constantly experimenting in both directions, since translation was one of the driving forces of his work. In this perspective, the first three panels of the Atlas contain in a condensed form Warburg’s main intent: the huge amount of material collected is unified neither by a desire to synthesise (expressed by a concept that unifies), nor by one of exhaustiveness (like a complete archive), or by a lexicographical criterion (from A to Z). 56 Warburg’s dispositive is a visual one: images deeply differ from words and concepts on an epistemological level. They can show simultaneously different aspects of an object or of an event, something language can only do in succession. Images are then connoted by a paradoxical coexistence of simultaneity and succession, which can be expressed with a formulation borrowed from Ernst Bloch, ‘Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen’. 57 In this sense, the epistemological paradigm used by Warburg in his Atlas was the research of correspondences, without determining an annihilation of the differences. In the panels, images are not connected by adhering to an original, of which they are reproductions. They are adhering to an idea of translation as process, that is neither source- nor target-oriented, or to say it in German, as Über-Setzung, indicating trough the über the ‘double movement of translating from one thing into another’. 58
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In this sense the topic of migrations of images (Bilderwanderung) is exemplified in the panel ‘A’ by the coexistence of three epistemological paradigms of the human desire for orientation and order: cosmic (representation of the sky with constellations), earthly (geographic map), and genealogical (family tree of the Medici Tornabuoni family). 59 It is about a form of knowledge which is at the same time imaginative, geographical and historical.60 Through the oscillations between logos and pathos, between rational and magic-religious pole, the panel ‘A’ offers in a condensed form a representation of culture as a product of syncretism and conflicts, embodying a concept of translation as migration, pilgrimage and hybridization. The three quoted images are dealing with the concept of orientation. They can be read from top to bottom, zooming from macro- into microcosm or the other way around, from mankind to the cosmos, following Warburg’s principle of deciphering the singular case from the whole. In this respect the family Medici Tornabuoni represents an idea of the Florentine Renaissance, just as the round engraving conserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, mentioned in the text about the Delle ‘ imprese amorose’, embodied the transition between the early and later Italian Renaissance. The panel ‘B’ has at its centre the human figure in its corporeality. The ten images collected on the panel show humans simultaneously as a reflection of astral forces, as an anatomical model, and as the centre and measure of the universe. Through his naked body he represents the bridge between macro- and microcosm, nature and culture. Panel ‘C’ introduces the topic of the abandonment of an anthropomorphic conception through the conquest of the universe and its measurement. Astronomy and astrology are the cornerstones which hold together all these images in their irreconcilable dialectic: the scientific and technological progress is shown as problematic. If the panels ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ are expressions of the human need and search for orientation, they show at the same time its ambivalence, oscillating between technology and magic, logos and pathos, astra and monstra. They are offering both a criterium of orientation for the Atlas and showing its complex compositional technique and thus a visual form of thinking, following the motto ‘Zum Bild das Wort’, the word to the image, that is both translating words into images and approaching a transversal methodology to art history.61
The Common Space of Transl ation Self-translation can serve as a point of departure to read Warburg’s work as a stimulating paradigm for thinking about translation in the field of art history. As we have seen, translation affects his œuvre on many levels, but it is through the meta-level offered by self-translating his text and ideas in another language or medium, that the significance of the act of translation becomes even more pertinent.
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Warburg aimed at a paradigm shift for art history, but these ideas can be made fruitful also for other fields. Warburg is speaking about an internationalisation and an ‘interdi sciplinarization’ of the study of images, which anticipates current tendencies, like Bildwissenschaft, visual studies and global art history. And this because he was feeling part of an international community of scholars in related fields, and had sometimes to change his language to feel part of it – in his case the language for the study of the Renaissance was Italian. Thanks to translation one can abandon the limited and isolated dimension of one’s own subjectivity and enter the common space of languages, since each word and each image have a cultural memory and are in themselves a limitless compound of references. That the concepts of original and uniqueness lose their strong contours need not be repeated here. Through translation – and self-translation is the most intriguing example for it – we are able to potentiate what we call the ‘original’. And this is possible because languages are in permanent transition and therefore are constantly self-translating themselves.
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Edgar Wind’s Self -Transl ations Philosophical Genealogies and Political Implications of a Cultural-Theoretical Tradition Giovanna Targia
In 1934, the German publishing house B. G. Teubner printed the first volume of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der Antike, edited by the Bibliothek Warburg (ill. 10).1 In fact it turned out to be the very last episode of an intense collaboration, formally dissolved in the last days of December 1934. 2 For more than ten years, Teubner had been publishing the series of Studien and Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, edited by Fritz Saxl. 3 By that time the publisher already had 23 volumes of the monographic Studien and nine volumes of Vorträge – annual lectures held at the Warburg Library in Hamburg until 1931 – in its catalogue, as well as two volumes of Aby Warburg’s Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Gertrud Bing in dramatic circumstances in the spring of 1933.4 A few months later, the Warburg Library emigrated towards English shores and began to reorganize its activities and publications in London. This transfer (which, for legal reasons, had to look like a temporary relocation, not a permanent exile) seems to have been one of the motives for terminating the contract from Teubner’s side. 5 At the same time, the English edition of the first volume of A Bibliography on the Survival of the Classics was issued by the London publisher Cassell & Co. Ltd. 6 It appeared simultaneously with the German one, printed in Germany, and included, as written on the frontispiece (ill. 11), ‘the text of the German edition with an English introduction’, edited by the Warburg Institute (which had already become the new English name of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg). 7 Even at first glance it does not appear as a mere translation of the German volume in a technical sense. A comparison between the two frontispieces tells us that we are
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10 Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der Antike, vol. 1, Leipzig and Berlin 1934, frontispiece
dealing with a subtle, delicate and sharp operation, which was to mark continuity and a new beginning at the same time. Opposite to the title page of the English Bibliography is reproduced the frontispiece of the German edition, which also specifies the names of the three editors (Hans Meier, Richard Newald, Edgar Wind) as well as the collective character of the enterprise (more than once the Bibliothek Warburg had been called by its members a true Arbeitsgemeinschaft, a working community), but the most evident and telling differences between the two frontispieces lie in the very title of the volume. 8 I will not insist on the rendering of the complex word Nachleben, but rather focus on a macroscopic change: Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie becomes A Bibliography without adjectival specification. 9 This was neither due to negligence nor to an inadequate translation. In fact at the very beginning of the English introduction, written by Edgar Wind, we read: ‘The general theme of this bibliography – the survival of the Greek and Roman tradition – is familiar to English readers. They may feel some misgiving, however, at seeing on the German title page the untranslatable word “kulturwissenschaftlich“, which is meant to indicate the method employed.’10 The sharp dissonance between ‘familiar’ and ‘misgiving’ resounds in a crucial statement, i.e. that of the impossibility of translating precisely the essential part of the
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11 A Bibliography on the Survival of the Classics, vol. 1, London 1934, frontispiece
title: the word kulturwissenschaftlich. At the same time, the dissonance might be seen as a rhetorical means to emphasize the scope and the constant undertone of Wind’s exposition. What seemed to be a radical weakness of Wind’s self-translation was about to reveal itself as the Archimedean point of the whole reasoning, as we will see later on. Edgar Wind was also the author of the German version of the introduction to the Bibliography. In both versions, this short text was meant to constitute a sort of manifesto for the method, the particular profile, and the activities of the Warburg Library, conceived as an organic unity, whose research was inspired by and developed after the work (unconventional on many counts) of its founder. Deliberately, Wind maintained this same nature of a manifesto for his English introduction, which follows the general structure of the German one – although drastically abridged – while at the same time adapting, substituting and calibrating paragraphs for English readers.11 In the following essay, I will analyse Wind’s operation in the light of his broader scope, and I will argue that, far from being a technical translation of the German version, the English text of the introduction to the Bibliography may be called a cultural-political intervention and a (self-)translation in a deeper (and also etymological) sense.
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At the Crossroads between German and English Philosophical Traditions The very figure of Edgar Wind must be situated literally and ideally at the intersection of German and Anglo-American lines. He used to name two authors as his intellectual guides: the German art and cultural historian Aby Warburg and the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce.12 His biographical background was a cosmopolitan one – his father being a Jewish merchant of Russian origin born in Argentina, while his mother was of Romanian origin – and although he completed his studies in a German-speaking environment (attending mostly art history and philosophy lectures in Berlin, Freiburg, Vienna and Hamburg), he began to teach and write also in English from the very first stages of his academic career.13 After obtaining his doctorate, supervised by Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer, in 1922 he was able to publish only an abstract of his dissertation in 1924, and an extended chapter of it in 1925 in the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, due to the financial inflation of the period.14 In those years (from March 1924 until the end of 1927) Wind lived in the United States where he also taught at the university of North Carolina, and published another short extract from his doctoral thesis under the title Theory of Art versus Aesthetics.15 In the same year, he published a general account of the so-called ‘continental tradition’ in two consecutive issues of The Journal of Philosophy under the general title Contemporary German Philosophy.16 Later on, he provided an extensive German account and critique of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of physics.17 Moreover, Wind read extensively in the contemporary British and American tradition of empiricist and pragmatist philosophy, which profoundly affected his theoretical orientation.18 As a consequence, it is worth remarking, his self-translations were not a one-sided equation: the young Wind, who had chosen to be Erwin Panofsky’s pupil and whose work was supervised also by Ernst Cassirer, had not only been conveying Neokantian perspectives to American audiences; in a clearly receptive attitude he had also been able to assimilate and ‘translate’ (in the ancient Latin meaning of traducere, to introduce) empiricist views into a ‘continental’, German philosophical language. Speaking at the 6th International Congress of Philosophy at Harvard in September 1926, Wind presented a paper in which he sketched the fundamental ideas he would later present as a research project for his Habilitation, which he completed, again under the supervision of Cassirer and Panofsky, in Hamburg in 1929 and published as a book in 1934.19 A review of the 1926 paper written by Ernst Nagel, an adherent to Peirce’s and Dewey’s Pragmatism, did not fail to mention the conscious political dimension of Wind’s endeavour: ‘In his readiness to break a lance for a conception of metaphysics that abides by the canons of scientific method, Dr. Wind has made an emphatic protest, so badly needed in his own country, against philosophies which are “zu nebelhaft um auch nur falsch zu sein”.’ 20
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On the one hand, Wind was standing at a crossroads, and aimed to bridge the gap between analytical and continental traditions in order to set the (linguistic and conceptual) conditions for a lucid dialogue between the most recent developments of both. He translated extensive passages of his original paper into German and integrated them in his Habilitation and subsequent book. On the other hand, the German quotation from Wind in Nagel’s review reminds us of an analogous statement Erwin Panofsky inserted in his famous Impressions of a Transplanted European about the obscure terminology of the German history of art, ‘unnecessarily recondite or downright imprecise’ in comparison to the ‘blessing’ represented by the Anglo-Saxon positivism, ‘which is, in principle, distrustful of abstract speculation’. 21 This concern – and Wind’s strivings for a clearer and more strictly logical way of expression – can be applied to Wind’s philosophical as well as art historical works. The language of art history which he was familiar with from the times of his studies covered a wide spectrum of contemporary German schools and methods: he had heard Adolf Goldschmidt as well as Heinrich Wölfflin, Josef Strzygowski and Max Dvorˇák, and of course Panofsky in Hamburg. But the crucial influence on him was to be that of Aby Warburg, whose language and research approach – far from being regarded as ‘unnecessarily recondite’ or ‘imprecise’ – constituted for Wind a decisive and inspiring stimulus for his subsequent research, all the more so because he was able to trace back a precise genealogy of Warburg’s ideas.
Transl ating Warburg and Tracing Genealogies It was only in the summer of 1927 that Wind met Warburg, who during Wind’s first stay in Hamburg (1922–1924) was still in Binswanger’s sanatorium in Kreuzlingen. 22 Wind shared with Warburg not only theoretical positions, but also the belief of a necessary cultural-political dimension of research. 23 In 1929 Wind proposed to translate into English one of the most political essays published by Warburg during his lifetime: Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten (1920). 24 Ruth Wind, Edgar’s first wife, took on and fulfilled the task: the Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg registers several sessions of the ‘Luther-Quartett’, i.e. Warburg, Bing, and the Wind couple discussing aspects of the English translation. 25 The typewritten text, never published, is still preserved among Warburg’s papers in London, although it was not taken into account in the first English translation of a collection of Warburg’s essays, which appeared only in 1999 (ill. 12). 26 The problem of translating Warburg, however, entailed since the very beginning a strong political component, which was to become even harsher in subsequent decades, symbolizing a sort of inheritance conflict. On 10 May 1955, in a letter addressed to Eric
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12 Ruth Wind: Typescript of the English translation of Aby Warburg’s essay »Heidnischantike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten« [1920], c. 1929, London, Warburg Institute Archive III. 90.5, fol. 3
M. Warburg, Erwin Panofsky endorsed the plan for a biography of Warburg, referring to the paradoxical reception of his work: although he was considered a classic author, his writings were mostly unknown: ‘One way of doing justice to Warburg’s memory, and thereby to make the development of art history in the twentieth century understandable, would be to publish an English translation of his own works. This, however, would not serve the purpose
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because so many of his results have by now become absorbed in the stream of tradition and because the tremendous force, compactness and originality of his diction would inevitably be lost in an English translation. If such a translation attempted to duplicate Warburg’s personal style, it would not be English; if it attempted to rewrite his magnificent phrases according to English usage, it would no longer be Warburg.’27 Panofsky’s reasoning against the need of an English translation of Warburg’s wri tings relies upon a twofold argument regarding both their content and their form. As to the content, his point has indirectly been criticized by Ernst Gombrich, who some years later noted that the paradox of Warburg’s reception was rooted precisely in the popularity of iconology in the Anglo-American world. It was iconology, Gombrich argued, that, while presenting itself as Warburg’s direct intellectual legacy and a new paradigm for art history, contributed to veil his actual achievements. 28 Challenging the concept of a ‘Hamburg school’ of art history as a unified group – founded by Warburg and developed by Panofsky into a more or less formalized ‘iconology’ – Gombrich was touching upon a decisive point, which remained mostly unconsidered in contemporary scholarly literature. 29 As to the form of a possible translation, on the other hand, Panofsky evoked the ancient topos of the so-called belle infidèle: the alleged impossibility for any translation to be both elegant in the target language and ‘truthful’ to the source text. 30 By contrast, Wind’s position was a diametrically opposite one. In 1971, in his well known, harsh review of Gombrich’s biography, he stated: ‘There is a danger that, despite its shortcomings, the book will be used and quoted as a surrogate for Warburg’s own publications, which are still unavailable in English. A translation of those incomparable papers, lucid, solid, and concise, which Warburg himself committed to print, would have formed, if not a lighter, most certainly a shorter volume than the book under review. It appears, however, that among Warburg’s followers it has become a tradition to regard his literary formulations as a sort of arcanum, as an exceedingly fine but all too highly concentrated elixir of learning which should not be served to British consumers without an ample admixture of barley water. Though the chances of an English translation may now seem diminished by the sheer bulk of Professor Gombrich’s inadequate treatment, the set-back is not likely to be permanent. Since an authorized Italian translation has been published the justified desire to read Warburg undiluted in English cannot be ignored in perpetuity.’ 31 To read Warburg ‘undiluted’ would have meant, according to Wind, to become aware both of a particular genealogy of his thought, and of the broad perspectives open for being further developed on an international scale.
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13 Proceedings of the »Vierter Kongress für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft«, Hamburg, 7.–9. Oktober 1930, supplement to the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 25/1931, frontispiece
In October 1930, one year after Warburg’s death, Wind spoke on Warburg’s concept of Kulturwissenschaft at the 4th Congress of Aesthetics held at the Bibliothek Warburg, a congress which Warburg himself had contributed to organize in frequent conversations with Ernst Cassirer and Max Dessoir (ill. 13). 32 He provided a systematic account of the ‘framework of thought’ conceived by Warburg for his library, the aim of which was to cater for problems generated, according to Wind’s reconstruction, by recent changes and developments undergone by the ‘relationship between art history and history of culture’. 33 In this lecture, which constituted an immediate precedent for Wind’s introduction to the Bibliography, the author designed this ‘framework of thought’ along three
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dimensions: ‘Warburg’s concept of imagery’, schematically explained by contrast with Riegl’s and Wölfflin’s formalist concepts, ‘his theory of symbols’, and ‘his psychological theory of expression by mimesis and the use of tools’. 34 Wind’s argument is thus constructed by means of oppositions and genealogies. As to the second dimension explored – Warburg’s theory of (the polarity of ) symbols – Wind emphasises the role of the philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer as an antecedent and constant reference for Warburg, who read him ‘again and again, thinking through for himself the principles that Vischer had developed in the essay, testing them on actual material, and building upon them in his own way’. 35 This process of reading again and again, testing and building upon his reference, can be actually retraced as a sort of habitus for Warburg, underlying his explicit as well as implicit references to his sources. Pointing precisely at this habitus of his master, Wind was thus providing a subtle instrument to decipher (and therefore potentially to translate) Warburg’s language and research approach. In connecting Warburg’s theory of symbols to his specific and concrete field of inquiry, ‘his history of the reanimation of past images by the European mind’, or ‘the mnemonic recovery of ancient imagery’, Wind briefly mentioned the main influences on Warburg’s notion of antiquity (again, by means of contrast and genealogy): Winckel mann on the one hand, Burckhardt and Nietzsche on the other, with Lessing as the crucial causa movens of the investigation. 36 Yet Wind did not linger over these wellacknowledged genealogies, already highlighted by Fritz Saxl on more than one occasion, from 1922 onwards. 37 Wind rather intended to elucidate other, mostly ignored (even though at times macroscopic) factors. For instance, he pointed to another theoretical root in the German tradition: Friedrich Schleiermacher, who explained artistic creation as arising from an ‘act of reflection’, which in his view marks a discontinuity within the condition of ‘complete unity of stimulus and expression’. 38 Instead of discontinuity, here Warburg saw continuity: a crucial point that Wind exemplifies by sketching the third part of his ‘framework’, that is, Warburg’s ‘theory of mimetic expression and man’s use of tools’. Here we find one of the earliest accounts of the wider biological and anthropological perspective essential to Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaft. Besides hinting at the private conversations he had with Warburg himself, Wind’s exposition reveals his reading of Warburg’s Fragmente zur Ausdruckskunde (fragments on expression theory). According to an early report on the activities of the relocated Warburg Institute in London in 1934, Wind was ‘going to edit a volume containing the aphorisms in which Warburg put down his notions of philosophy of history and theory of expression to which his historical works have led him’. 39 Among the main references for this work, Wind could therefore insist on the role played by authors like Ewald Hering, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Carlyle in shaping a complex but consistent framework within which to understand the ‘papers […] which Warburg himself committed to print’.
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The question Warburg was dealing with in his Fragments on expression theory, however, was not a ‘recondite’ or esoteric one. Again, Wind points out the tradition in which it was embedded: ‘[…] the problem of the polarity of the psychic reaction has always been conceived of and analysed in the history of aesthetics, from Plato down to Lessing, Schiller, and Nietzsche, as the central problem. It is only by going back to this basic problem as Warburg does that we can also tackle the problem of periodicity in the development of art, a problem with which Riegl and Wölfflin wrestled in vain.’40 Anamnesis represents here the attracting pole of the argument: looking back means looking forward. This might also serve as a motto for Wind’s introduction to the Biblio graphy, as we saw at the beginning. Similar considerations can be found in the German text of a Memorandum dated 1932, which explains the genealogy of Warburg’s concept of Kulturwissenschaft, defi ning it in contrast to the merely descriptive Kulturwissenschaft of the 19th century.41 This text was most probably written by Wind himself, whose linguistic and cultural-political sensibility may have dictated such a thorough explanation of the concept. In view of the critical political conjuncture of the early 1930s – at a time when even the relocation of the Warburg Library was still uncertain – the members of the Institute were tirelessly trying to establish closer contacts with other scientific institutions in different countries (Italy, the Netherlands and the United States being among them).42 The purpose of the Memorandum was, in this context, to build a cooperation between Italian universities and the Warburg Institute: it was not by chance, therefore, that the definition of Kulturwissenschaft was used as a cornerstone to describe a whole research approach.
Political Implications If we now turn back to the Bibliography, we will recognize immediately the same genealogical, systematic and programmatic concern, in the German as well as in the English version of Wind’s introduction. Both versions begin in medias res with a paragraph on ‘Theme and method’, but interestingly, while in the English version Wind defines the ‘general theme’ of the Bibliography as tout court ‘familiar to English readers’, in the German one he states that the very object of that Bibliography, unlike that of any other bibliography, may not be supposed as a ‘given’ or an obvious one. On the contrary, even specialists have often debated on the importance (and on the very existence) of the questions it raises.43 Wind’s point is to broadly re-define the Nachleben der Antike with a clearly programmatic intention, in a militant tone, emphasised by a series of rhetorical questions and by a critical and sharp distinction between Warburg’s concept of Kul-
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turwissenschaft and the method that Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, a few decades earlier, called by the same name (although with slightly different meanings), as a counterpart to Naturwissenschaft.44 Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaft is ‘not an abstract postulate’ for scholarly theories, or a ‘philosophical invention’.45 It rather designates a line of inquiry that has ‘definite historical associations’, related to Jacob Burckhardt’s studies (in particular to his concept of culture as a totality of vital manifestations) and Hermann Usener (who, as a sort of pioneer among philologists, ‘applied the comparative methods of anthropology and folklore to the study of ancient rituals and myths’). 46 As he already did in his lecture of 1930, Wind stresses the relevance accorded to marginal elements (‘details’ in Warburg’s sense) by this cultural scientific method: ‘To proceed only from great works of art, Warburg tells us, is to fail to see that the forgotten artefact is precisely the one most likely to yield the most valuable insights’.47 In other words: prominence is not attributed to the highest (and qualitative) exceptions – as it was for the Romantic theories of artistic genius – but to the invaluable role of anomaly. This might already indicate the broad political implications of these assumptions; the political undertone of Wind’s German introduction to the Bibliography did not escape the attention of the Völkischer Beobachter, Josef Goebbels’ paper. On January 1935 a hostile article appeared, signed by a little-known historian, Martin Rasch, under the title Juden und Emigranten machen Wissenschaft, which attacked in particular Wind’s Kritik der Geistesgeschichte.48 This very paragraph entitled Kritik der Geistesgeschichte is suppressed in the English version of Wind’s introduction, but the militant undertone remained untouched. He only summarized the core of the debate writing that: ‘The word [kulturwissenschaftlich] is full of odd connotations. English readers might feel themselves reminded of war-time slogans which succeeded in rendering the word “Kultur” altogether disreputable. German scholars will think, with some mortification, of the time when their philosophical professors discovered the difference between natural and cultural sciences and became involved in profound discussions as to which science deserved the name of “cultural”. – These times are past, and there is, at least on the part of the editors of this book, no intention to revive them.’49 Beside this sort of pars destruens, however, we immediately find a substantial pars construens in Wind’s political argumentation. Wind’s genealogy for what he defines as Warburg’s ‘comprehensive science of civilization’ (a formulation pointing at Warburg’s attempt to tear down the various disciplinary barriers) is once again connected to the names of Burckhardt and Usener. 50 Two footnotes laconically list the most important works of the two authors, who, at that time, might not yet be familiar to English readers. Moreover, Wind underlines Warburg’s attempt to reconcile the two apparently opposing approaches of Burckhardt and Usener (the former describing the Renaissance ‘in its most
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highly refined and perfect products’, while the latter ‘ransacked the remotest corners of vulgar superstition and practice to find there some classical remnant in a disguised or distorted form’), and adds a significant parallel: ‘It would be as well to proclaim a union between the Renaissance idea of Walter Pater or Symonds and that idea of pagan survival which has directed the work of Sir James Frazer!’ 51 More explicitly, Wind entitles a whole paragraph of his introduction: ‘English Antecedents and Parallels’, highlighting the fact that: ‘the formation of Warburg’s own thought was strongly influenced partly by English sources that in their turn have influenced England. His theory of symbols, dependent though it is upon one of the most striking essays of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, owes a great debt to both Darwin and Carlyle. And his theory of memory is closely related to Hering’s lecture Über das Gedächtnis als Funktion der organisierten Materie, – the very book which Samuel Butler translated into English to use as a weapon against Darwin’. 52 The somewhat cursory character of this overview of sources was probably due to the frantic circumstances in which this text was printed, but its relevance can hardly be underrated. Interestingly, Wind refers precisely to an episode of translation – Samuel Butler’s version of Hering’s lecture – in order to draw attention to the interconnections and the wide perspective of Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaft. 53 In fact the most neglected part of Warburg’s work – the anthropological and scientific roots of his theory of expression, which is at the core of Wind’s exposition in the German lecture of 1930 – is brought to the fore in the English text and re-rooted in its more complex historical and international ‘environment’, providing an ‘English’ genealogy for Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaft.
The Challenge of Wind’s Self -Transl ation From January 1934 to late August 1939 Wind was Deputy Director of the Warburg Institute. Notwithstanding his efforts (pursued through exhibitions and journal issues, teaching and scholarly writings), the English-speaking academic community apparently still considered the approach of the ‘Warburgians’ as foreign for decades. Ten years after the transfer of the Warburg Library, Fritz Saxl remarked – in a retrospective narrative of that complicated phase – that ‘the language in which they wrote – even if the words were English – was foreign because their habits of thought were un-English’. 54 And Gertrud Bing later wrote that Saxl’s activity was constantly oriented at ‘adjusting his scholarship to a different academic tradition’, where the history of art was regarded ‘with more than slight suspicion’. 55
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But if we look at the genealogies Wind sketched in the first volume of the Bibliography, we might deduce how different his own views and expectations were to those of Saxl. Warburg himself used to stress the utility and necessity of bibliographies as cultural-political tools, enhancing the international dimension of research. 56 In his retro spective History of Warburg’s Library, Fritz Saxl defined the project of compiling ‘an annual critical Bibliography of the Survival of the Classics’ as an attempt to build up ‘a wide international organization’, mentioning the (at least initially) successful appeal of such an enterprise. 57 What Wind sketched in his programmatic introduction to the Biblio graphy, however, was a much broader perspective; he did not want the Insitute’s scope to be confined to a mere organizational activity. 58 And it is such a broader perspective which we might see symbolized by the very concept of a ‘self-translation’. Wind pointed at what seemed a ‘foreign’ element (that is, the weakest and at first sight more problematic point of his self-translation, i.e. an allegedly untranslatable, albeit crucial word) in order to show how familiar it was to English readers in a deeper sense. Moreover, thanks to this very move he was able to ‘talk back’ to the German readers too, who might have discovered much wider roots for what seemed to be an institution built within their own tradition.
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American Panofsky Irving Lavin
The literature on Panofsky, his work and his life, is by now enormous, but I wanted to contribute to this volume because I think – maybe – I have something worthwhile to say specifically about his self-translation, as a scholar and as a human being. And I will tell you why. The answer is implicit in my title, American Panofsky, because it is not really proper English, as no doubt you are aware. We do not normally juxtapose an adjective of that kind with a noun of that kind. But the title is very deliberate and it is also metaphorical, and I hope that by the end you will understand what it means and forgive my grammatical transgression. When we talk about Panofsky in this context, we are talking about one of his most famous writings, called Three Decades of Art History in the United States. Impressions of a Transplanted European (ill. 14), which we all know mostly from the republication as an epilogue at the end of his great volume called Meaning in the Visual Arts. 1 In fact, the essay was first published with the title The History of Art in a volume entitled The Cultural Migration. The European Scholar in America, edited by W. Rex Crawford in 1953. It was one of a series of Benjamin Franklin Lectures delivered at the University of Pennsylvania in 1952. The other lectures included, covering a wide range of disciplines, were: Franz L. Neumann, Social Sciences; Henri Peyre, The Study of Literature; Wolfgang Köhler, The Scientists in their New Environment; Paul Tillich The Conquest of Theological Provincialism; Rex Crawford, American thought and Latin-American philosophy. The authors were all famous scholars in their respective fields, and Panofsky’s essay was thus delivered and published in a very distinguished context.
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14 Erwin Panofsky: Three Decades of Art History in the United States, in: College Art Journal XIV-1/1954, p. 7
There is, of course, a great literature about the phenomenon of immigration of intellectuals from Germany both before and especially following the expulsion of Jews from the universities and other state institutions in 1933. Art historians, more specifically, have extensively reflected on the impact of this migration for the discipline. I will mention here only three: Karen Michel’s very perspicacious book Transplantierte Kunstwissenschaft. Deutschsprachige Kunstgeschichte im amerikanischen Exil (1999) approaches the topic of this volume probably most directly. 2 Colin Eisler, himself born in Ham-
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burg (1931) but educated at Yale and Harvard, thus having a personal familiarity with the German language and culture and many of the émigrés, wrote a long and admirable survey of the work of the leading immigrant art historians in the United States, Kunstgeschichte American Style. A Study in Migration. 3 Most recently, Andreas Beyer published a magisterial study of Panofsky, Stranger in Paradise. Erwin Panofsky’s Expulsion to the Academic Parnassus, to which I fear I can add nothing, or little.4
‘Hitler is my best friend […]’ What I have to say about Panofsky can be summarized in one sentence: it has not been noted that Panofsky was, as far as I can see, the only émigré to write about what he learned in America. All the other immigrants wrote, or were written about what they achieved in America, as they properly should: how else could the range and depth of their contribution to American culture be fully grasped? By contrast, there is actually nothing about what Panofsky himself achieved in his essay. The most notable statement about his own person is in the essay’s subtitle: Impressions of a transplanted European. This phrase alone conveys the essence of his meaning, with his usual verbal acumen. He was uprooted from one culture and took root in another. The other migrants in one way or another normally expressed their appreciation that they were accepted and often vigorously sought after, because many of them were very famous. This point is especially true of the art historians who came to the Institute of Fine Arts, the Graduate Department of Art History, New York University, founded at exactly that moment, 1932, by a most amazing man, Walter W. S. Cook, who occupies a seminal place in our history. It was he who said: ‘Hitler is my best friend, he shakes the trees and I collect the apples.’ 5 And so he did. Under Cook’s aegis as Director a remarkable series of stellar German art historians came, some passing through, some remaining – that variety was in the nature of the place, and that is what made it great. Virtually overnight the Institute became, in my mind, the greatest art historical academic institution in the world. Panofsky begins his essay with three brief personal paragraphs describing, as he thought proper, his life in the United States following his dismissal from the University of Hamburg, along with that of all Jewish officials from German universities, in the spring of 1933.6 The purpose of these paragraphs was to confess that his own experience was from the outset not typical since he soon obtained privileged positions at prestigious institutions, the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, Princeton University, and finally at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (the first and third then in statu nascendi). While he was of course deeply grateful for having been treated as a guest rather than a refugee, he regretted not having had much contact with undergraduate students. Only in these autobiographical paragraphs does Panofsky write, as said, in the first person sin-
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gular. Subsequently the text is almost exclusively in the third person representing the immigrant in general. There follows a brief survey of art history in Europe, especially Germany, until the great catastrophe, to reach the following, stunning conclusion: ‘[…] in the 1930s the German speaking countries still held the leading position in the history of art – except in the United States of America’. 7 He then embarks on a long disquisition on the history of art in America, which originated ‘as the private hobby of such men of letters as Henry Adams (1838–1918) and Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908)’, with no relationship to what was happening in Europe. 8 Panofsky also explains, as no one ever had, why the work of the founding fathers of American art history – Allan Marquand, Charles Rufus Morey, Frank J. Mather, Arthur Kingsley Porter, Howard Crosley Butler, Paul Joseph Sachs – was innovative and important. As pioneers of a new discipline they were not followers of an established tradition. They came from different fields: classical philology, theology, philosophy, literature, architecture, collecting. To give just two examples: Allan Marquand, the scion of one of the Captains of the American railroad system, studied philosophy at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University (1876), the first American university to adopt the German academic tradition combining teaching and research. 9 He obtained his Ph.D. there under the great logician Charles Sanders Peirce, with whom he later designed the first mechanical logical calculating machine, the ancestor of the modern electronic computer.10 The machine still exists, housed in the Princeton Art Museum. He began teaching art history at Princeton in 1883, became chairman of the department in 1906 and founded (and funded) the famous Marquand Art library. Allan Marquand was also an important art historian with a vast bibliography of studies on ancient, medieval and Renaissance painting, sculpture and architecture. Particularly innovative and comprehensive were many volumes, including ample archival documentation from the Florentine archives, on the Della Robbia family of sculptors, which recovered the art of terracotta sculpture and especially polychrome glaze technology.11 In 1917 Charles Rufus Morey, then chairman of the Princeton Department of Art and Archaeology, founded what became a vast, indispensable database of medieval art in all media, the Index of Christian Art.12 Many thousands of works are organized and illustrated according to the text of the bible, along with systematic descriptions of the scenes represented. This taxonomy of images made it possible to find and compare many examples of a given subject and so to identify, localize and trace the development of centers of production, or schools. On this basis, a Princeton professor, Earl Baldwin Smith, produced a major, pioneering monograph on a very early group of ivories from the south of France.13 Be it noted that the underlying concept of iconography had nothing to do with meaning. The system distinguishes between the Annunciation from the left and from the right, but gives no indication what the difference might signify. I remember once in Oxford I was taken to see John Davidson Beazley’s index of Greek vase paintings, which is a systematic illustrated listing of all the subjects on Greek vase paintings,
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in this sense just like the Index of Christian Art. The difference is that only the subjects are inventoried, with no description of the scene and no indication of what subject is represented where on the vase. No notion of the vase as a work of art. By contrast, mea ning is exactly what interested Panofsky, as signaled in the title of the book in which his impressions of America were finally published. To connote the difference he needed an appropriate title for another of his epoch-making books, a dazzling panoramic display of a powerful conceptual methodology new in America, Studies in Iconology. Humanistic themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939).14 Morey was a medievalist who wrote extensively about manuscript illumination, and he was a major figure in the history of the Institute for Advanced Study as an advisor on the nascent School of the Humanities (later School of Historical Studies) to Abraham Flexner, the Institute’s founding Director. He helped Flexner to try a new method of research methodology by appointing a group of professors who were essentially in the same field but focused on different aspects of it, so that they could work cooperatively. They chose the quintessential ancient locus, Athens, and the first appointments were in archeology, epigraphy, history, and philosophy.15 Morey also urged Flexner to appoint the immigrant Panofsky to the Institute faculty in 1935, partly so that he might also teach at the university. The College Art Association, founded in 1911 as a professional organization com prising the art departments of American colleges and universities, therefore included both historians and teachers of art. This amalgam was formalized in 1913 with the foundation of the Art Bulletin, devoted not primarily to scholarship but to art practice, education and educational methods. ‘American art history evolved into an autonomous discipline from the beginning of the twentieth century, and after the First World War […] it began to challenge the supremacy, not only of the German-speaking countries, but of Europe as a whole.’16 A watershed came in 1923 when the Bulletin became predominantly scholarly, and in time ‘the leading art historical journal in the world’. With the advent of Fascism in Germany, however, and the Exodus of the Jews, everything changed, dramatically, overnight: ‘The immigrant scholar’, Panofsky says, ‘was amazed that he could order a book at the New York Public Library without being introduced by an embassy or was vouched for by two responsible citizens; that libraries were open in the evening, some as long as until midnight, and that everybody seemed actually eager to make material available’.17 When I studied in New York in the 1950s I frequently worked at the New York Public Library. It is certainly one of the great libraries of the world in every imaginable field, founded with private money in the good old American way, including the proviso that anyone can go there anytime; in my time it was closed one day a year, on Christmas Eve. Panofsky declares that ‘what made the greatest impression on the stranger […] was this: where the European art historians were conditioned to think in terms of national and regional boundaries, no such limitations existed for the Americans’: And, read:
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‘[They] either unconsciously yielded to, or consciously struggled against, deeprooted emotions which were traditionally attached to such questions as whether the cubiform capital was invented in Germany, France, or Italy, whether Roger van der Weyden was a Fleming or a Walloon, or whether the first rib-vaults were built in Milan, Morienval, Caën, or Durham; and the discussion of such questions tended to be confined to areas and periods on which attention had been focused for generations or at least decades. Seen from the other side of the Atlantic, […] the American art historians were able to see the past in a perspective picture undistorted by national and regional bias, so were they able to see the present in a perspective picture undistorted by personal or institutional parti pris’.18 Thus, three quarters of the essay are devoted to this kind of appreciation of the intellectual life and stimulation he found in America. This was the fertile soil, in which he took root. The fourth portion is devoted to a comparative analysis and evaluation of the academic structures in American and German universities, which, not being devoted specifically to art history, I will not discuss except to note that he thought both had advantages and both had disadvantages.
Transformation of Language , Transformation of Academic Persona I will conclude with one of the American Panofsky’s most important considerations, the beneficial effects of having to learn English: ‘It was inevitable that the vocabulary of art historical writing became more complex and elaborate in the German-speaking countries than anywhere else and finally developed into a technical language which – even before the Nazis made German literature unintelligible to uncontaminated Germans – was hard to penetrate. […] The German language unfortunately permits a fairly trivial thought to declaim from behind a woolen curtain of apparent profundity and, conversely, a multitude of meanings to lurk behind one term. […] Every German-educated art historian endeavoring to make himself understood in English […] had to make up his own dictionary.’19 In doing so Panofsky realized that English would require a simpler and more direct syntax and more precise vocabulary. Within months after his arrival he was already writing an absolutely amazing English – American English – so precise and sensitive to words and structure it is hard to believe. He was helped in this endeavor by Mrs. Alfred Barr (Barr was director of the Museum of Modern Art), who was known as Daisy (he often called her ‘Lady Margaret’). They became fast friends and conversed in dozens of
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letters that are sometimes as long as ten pages at a time. He always spoke with an accent, never ridding himself of his Hamburg past, but he was an elegant lecturer in English, with a magnificent command of the nuances of the language. He also was soon writing with, I would say, emphatically delightful prose. This characteristic is evident particularly and no doubt deliberately, in an essay on the most profound and serious subjects – film and characters like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Panofsky’s article on film was published in three versions: initially in 1936 with the title On Movies; again the following year, slightly enlarged and with a new title, Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures; and in the definitive version, extensively revised and expanded and with the word ‘Moving’ in the title changed to ‘Motion’, a decade later, when it was described as ‘one of the most significant introductions to the aesthetics of the motion picture yet to be written’. 20 Reprinted at least 22 times heretofore, it is by far Panofsky’s most popular work, perhaps the most popular essay in modern art history. This unexampled success is the more astonishing given the author’s traditional training and otherwise almost exclusive preoccupation with traditional ‘high’ art. 21 In fact, the essay offers a rare, if not unique, instance in which a sensitive and informed ‘eye- (and later ‘ear-) witness’ comments extensively on the evolution of a revolutionary new technical invention into a high art. The lapidary style and especially the potent dose of humor in a normally solemn academic and scholarly context, became vintage Panofsky. 22 He himself described the transformation toward economy of thought and expression that the adjustment to the English language of his adopted country entailed. What he did not mention is an equally profound transformation of his academic persona. Panofsky was famous for his delicious and sometimes outlandish witticisms. In America, his wit was always irrepressible and legendary, from cradle to grave, as it were, for example: ‘Children should neither be seen nor heard until they can quote Virgil in Latin.’23 And witness the immortal epitaph which he said appeared to him in a dream after spending an afternoon with his granddaughter: ‘He hated babies, gardening, and birds; / But loved a few adults, all dogs, and words.’24 I speak here, however, of the infusion of this personal quality into the koine of scho larly discourse. 25 That is the critical point; he had no limit in-between. The charm and humor that abound in almost everything he wrote in English were a product of his Americanization. They were his own invention, however, for they were no more characteristic of previous American scholarship in art history than they were of European. And they brought a breath of fresh air to academe, both here and abroad. Of course, we all know that the matter of language also had a political, indeed ideo logical root deep in Panofsky’s psyche. He neither wrote nor spoke German publicly after he moved to America – with the notable exception of his trip to Munich in 1967 to receive the Pour le Mérite award, Germany’s highest honor. For the requisite acceptance address there, he spoke in German.
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Frederick Antal or a Connoisseur Turned Social Historian of Art Jennifer Cooke
In memoriam Gianni C. Sciolla
In his tribute to Frederick Antal (1887–1954), John Berger stigmatised the prejudiced opinion of many art critics who saw in the Hungarian-born scholar ‘the connoisseur despite the Marxist’.1 In fact, a connoisseur’s eye coupled with positivist philology were actually the qualities even his opponents, such as Ernst Gombrich, recognised, thus sparing him from the stronger resistance that others, like Arnold Hauser or Francis Klingender, encountered. 2 Following Antal’s migrations, from Budapest to Berlin, Vienna, Florence and London, one may appreciate the significant critical experiences that shaped his method, from his formalist beginnings to Geistesgeschichte (‘spiritual’ (cultural and intellectual) history) to a markedly sociological approach. By following these ‘translations of the self ’, one may also attempt to reconstruct the theoretical tenets that got lost in translation. The ill fate of his publications – mostly delayed, incomplete or posthumous – indeed favoured a teleological interpretation which often failed to consider the context of Antal’s methodological development. This was particularly the case with his studies on Mannerism, which may offer an interesting and more nuanced perspective on the man who, in Berger’s words, ‘worked to release a vision’. Though born in Hungary in the 1880s, Antal’s art historical formation was essentially German. Antal received his first rudiments in art history in Berlin, where he attended Heinrich Wölfflin’s very popular lectures, but he soon grew dissatisfied with the latter’s strict formalist views, which ‘conceded, relatively, the smallest place to history’ and reflected the ‘prevailing doctrine of art for art’s sake’. 3 As customary for Central European scholars, Antal’s itinerant training then continued in Vienna under Josef Strzygowski and, more importantly, Max Dvoř ák, with whom he earned his doctorate
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in 1914.4 Dvoř ák’s dualistic conception of art as a result of competing mentalities (as opposed to Riegl’s monolithic Kunstwollen) exerted a great influence on the Hungarian, as he would later attempt a synthesis of Geistesgeschichte and the Marxist theory of art developed within the intellectual group led by Györgi Lukács that Antal frequented back in Budapest. 5 However, as pointed out by Hans Aurenhammer, Dvoř ák always remained a forma list at heart, concerned with the artwork’s Wesensform and patterns of stylistic Entwicklung. 6 This methodological line would have been pursued more directly by students like Richard Offner, Johannes Wilde or Charles de Tolnay, although it also played a part in honing Antal’s sensitivity for formal values. Perhaps in response to Wölfflin’s rejection of the phenomenon, and certainly owing to Dvoř ák’s pioneering works, Antal formed an interest in Mannerism, which became his chosen field of enquiry. When he returned to Budapest, he actively took part in Lukács’s Sonntagskreis, a forum of young intellectuals discussing the relationship between ideas and their social context, as a matter of fact mainly focusing on Mannerism. 7 The group of historians and philosophers – amongst whom were Arnold Hauser, Johannes Wilde, Charles de Tolnay, Lajos Fülep, Karl Mannheim – gathered informally at the poet Béla Balázs’s flat to discuss philosophical and artistic problems, mainly positing an anti-positivist and anti-materialist return to idealism. 8 Lukács’s early essays and his theories on the artistic form shaped by conflicting worldviews had already influenced Antal’s investigation of classicism and romanticism in his doctoral thesis. 9 In contact with the Sunday Circle, Antal did not only pursue his penchant for Mannerism, but he further consolidated his geistesgeschichtlich approach that would lead him to explore the Weltanschauung underlying artistic vision. The essentially idealist philosophical orientation of the Sunday Circle is evident even in the name of the journal they published, A Szellem, ‘The Spirit’ in Hungarian.10 He also joined the Free School of Humanities Lukács had founded in 1917 to ‘spread the world view of new spiritualism and idealism’.11 While Hauser lectured on Kant’s aesthetics, Fülep on the national character of Hungarian art and Mannheim on Idealism, Antal dealt with Cézanne – a painter highly praised in the Kreis – and, significantly, with the interaction of form and content in modern art.12 Although the Sunday Circle did not initially embrace an overt political position, a Marxist radicalisation became evident when Lukács and his group backed the short-lived Soviet Republic of Béla Kun in 1919–1920.13 As Antal was appointed Director of Museums in Budapest, he oversaw the confiscation of private collections, orga nised exhibitions in the Museum of Fine Arts and promoted public art projects.14 This experience of political engagement may have played an influence in Antal’s outlook, as Paul Stirton noted, which would take an even more political connotation in his German years.15 At the same time, the museum work also provided him with the opportunity to practice his connoisseurial skills as he studied and catalogued collections, especially in the prints and drawings department, with the help of Otto Benesch. Once the White
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Terror regime took over, the better part of Hungarian intellectuals left the country; being a Jew implicated with Kun’s republic, Antal, too, was forced to move to Vienna where many other Sunday Circle members had regrouped.
Mannerism in Florence and Hamburg Set out to prepare a large work on Florentine Mannerism specifically dealing with the persistence of Gothic style in High Renaissance art, Antal spent time in Florence and Northern Italy between 1920 and 1923, and again in 1928. These years give probably the best proof for his connoisseurial credentials. His expertise on the Italian Cinquecento brought him into contact with Roberto Longhi, as evidenced in the correspondence unearthed and published by Laura Gallo in 2010, corroborating the observations Enrico Castelnuovo had already made about this ‘unlikely partnership’.16 Antal first encountered the Italian connoisseur in Florence in 1921, then the two would meet again in Rome, Milan and Berlin in the following years, visiting museums and private collec- tions where they studied works of 16th century masters together, often challenging previous attributions. By his own admission, Antal was growing dissatisfied with his colleagues in Vienna – with the sole exception of Dvoř ák – and found a kindred spirit in Longhi, claiming their articles on late Renaissance art to be ‘scientifically alike’ and hoping they could profitably work together.17 One of the fruits of this sought-after collaboration was an article Antal published in Longhi’s newly-founded journal Pinacotheca where he attributed the Saint Roch in San Petronio to Parmigianino on stylistic grounds, while the analysis of its subject-matter in the context of contemporary religious movements was reminiscent of Dvoř ák’s and Pevsner’s recent theories (ill. 15).18 As can be inferred from the frequent discussions on dating and attribution of works in their letters, the dialogue on Mannerism between Longhi and Antal continued at length in those years.19 Albeit appreciating the scientific rigour in his method, Longhi was however rather sceptical towards the abstract theories of stylistic development, which the Hungarian had inherited from the Entwicklung myth proposed by Dvoř ák or, as he would later name him, ‘il mago della scuola viennese’. 20 Namely, the Italian connoisseur strongly objected to the so-called ‘pan-Gothic’ theory, dominant amongst German-speaking scholars, which Antal furthered in his research. 21 Indeed, in their correspondence the latter made no secret of his opinions on the stylistic analogies between Gothic and Mannerism based on their spiritual kinship, anticipating a general outline of the different currents at play in 16th century art that he would have later examined with the Italian in Vienna. 22 In the lectures he gave at the Courtauld Institute in the 1930s, Antal would not hesitate to call Longhi ‘the foremost Italian art historian of our time’. 23 And in his turn, twenty years on, the Italian scholar commended Antal the connoisseur who had not yet ‘converted to the more austere his-
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15 Frederick Antal: Un capolavoro inedito del Parmigianino, in: Pinacotheca I/1928, pp. 50–51
torical materialism’, a due specification to distance himself from the sociological ‘conversion’ of Florentine Painting and its Social Background. 24 Antal probably reckoned his theories on the Weiterleben der Gotik would find a more sympathetic ear in Hamburg than in Vienna, let alone Italy. In 1927 he contacted Erwin Panofsky to submit his Habilitationsschrift on the anticlassical movements and the question of Quattrocentogotik and Mannerism. 25 To further this end, in December 1927 Antal delivered in Hamburg a ‘Warburgian’ lecture on the survival of Gothic elements in Pontormo’s style as indication of the revival of medieval religiosity. 26 In a previous article on 15th century paintings in the Kaiser-Friedrich museum, Antal had introduced the distinction between ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Pseudo-Renaissance’. The latter term – reminiscent of that ‘Pseudo-Classicism’ he had referred to in his thesis – denoted the linear tendencies in late Quattrocento design, which he described as a unique combination of Giotto’s art, Sienese narrative expressive style and Julius von Schlosser’s höfische Kunst, a trend that had spread in Central and Northern Italy coalescing in the courtesan environment of the Ferrarese School. 27 The intensified movement and expression, the linear design and serpentine line characterising the anti-classicist 15th century art closely recalled what Aby Warburg had termed ‘idealising classical style’, conversely attributed to a surge of Dionysian antiquity rather than to Gothic revival. 28 The emphasis Antal
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placed on Quattrocento survivals in the late 16th century must, however, also be considered in the light of his attempts to befriend the Warburg Kreis and make a career in the Hamburg School, the so-called ‘Dreamland of Humanists’. 29 But his hopes fell short when Warburg – in spite of Panofsky’s mediation – interceded so that his Habilitation was rejected on the grounds of what seemed personal rather than methodological disagreement. 30
‘... im Dienste einer kommenden Geistesgeschichte’ Despite the remonstrance about his Viennese colleagues confessed to Longhi, or perhaps because of it, Antal joined a Berlin-based group led by Wilhelm Pinder and Georg Swarzenski, whose aim was to continue the tradition of the Wiener Schule on German soil. From 1926 to 1931, Antal also became co-editor with Bruno Fürst of Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur. A continuation of Kunstgeschichtliche Anzeigen, the yearbook placed itself under the aegis of Dvoř ák in pursuing a history of art ‘at the service of a future Geistesgeschichte’, as evidenced in Pinder’s introductory note. 31 Reviewing the latest results of Kunstwissenschaft, the journal dealt with Mannerism, Romanesque and Gothic architecture, and the discussion of new methodologies. Another emphasis lay on the geography of art. Actually, Kunsttopographie was the focus of Antal’s contribution, which was clearly indebted to the theory on the migration of forms developed by Strzygowski, and to Dvoř ák’s genetic Stilkritik based on the association of stylistic patterns to a national spirit. 32 However, the art topography Antal intended to draw would encompass the whole spectrum of influences in European art in terms of a cosmopolitan exchange, and hence indifferent to the hotly debated Blut und Boden issues. 33 The biased Kunstgeographie fuelled by nationalism was stigmatised as ‘Unwissenschaftlichkeit’ in Antal’s first comment on Berthold Haendcke’s book about French, German and Netherlandish influences on Italian art. 34 In a second review, Antal positively commented on Longhi’s article tracing the influence of early Tuscan Mannerism and Italian and Northern Caravaggisti on Spanish art, and attributing the St. Thomas panel in the Museum of Orléans to Velázquez (ill. 16). 35 Antal, on the other hand, anticipated his own theories on the impact of Florence, Rome and Venice on Netherlandish Mannerism to address the question of its origins, which Hans Kaufmann claimed were to be found in Fontainebleau rather than Italy, a view validated by Wolfgang Stechow’s review in the same journal. 36 The Hungarian art historian made the influence of the Italian Cinquecento the key point in his last article for Kritische Berichte on Mannerism in the Netherlands. Therein Antal argued that Netherlandish art had ‘consciously assimilated’ rather than ‘passively imitated’ Italian – and especially Florentine – models, as northern artists driven by the
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16 Velázquez: San Tomaso, reproduced in Roberto Longhi: Un san Tomaso di Velázquez e le congiunture italo-spagnole tra il ‘500 e il ‘600, in: Vita artistica II/1927, unpag.
same ‘stylistic force’ explored the Baroque element present in Italian art to the detriment of the classicist line. 37 The target of his rebuttal was Otto Benesch’s introductory essay to the catalogue of 15th and 16th century Netherlandish drawings in the Albertina, for which his former colleague denied any foreign influences. Other advocates of broad stylistic interconnections who published in Kritische Berichte were, for example Meyer Schapiro who wrote a note on Jurgis Baltrušaitis’s book on the origin of ornament in Romanesque sculpture, or Fritz Saxl who penned a virulent critique of August L. Mayer’s monograph on El Greco, contesting amongst other things the failed contextualisation within European Mannerism. 38
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Nonetheless, the leading group of Kritische Berichte was already steering in a different direction, as evidenced in Hans Jantzen’s article discussing the principle of Raumkunst in architecture, Otto Pächt’s analysis of national constants in Austrian panel painting, or Pinder’s and Swoboda’s examinations of völkische art. 39 Significantly, Antal no longer contributed to the yearbook’s third and fourth issues and left the board for good in 1931.40 The reasons for this drift may have been mainly methodological, as Sedlmayr, Pächt and Kaschnitz were laying the foundations of the ‘New Viennese School’, marked by the creation of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, a journal which ran from 1931 to 1933. The distance from Antal’s perspective becomes clear in the principles Sedlmayr explained in the famous article Toward a Rigorous Study of Art, stating a return to the ‘investigation of individual works’ supported by Riegl’s formalism, and refuting the legacy of Dvoř ák’s Geistesgeschichte.41 Antal could not have agreed with this structura list isolation of art objects imbued with Gestalt psychology; he probably shared Meyer Schapiro’s qualms, who had dismissed these theories as a mere revival of attributionism deprived of scientific scholarship.42 This formalistic approach was used to justify racially-biased and nationalistic views, and when events escalated Sedlmayr’s sympathy for Hitler would have caused frictions not only with Schapiro himself but also with Otto Pächt, eventually bringing Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen to an end.43
London and a Book Impossible to Publish in Germany Antal left Germany in the wake of the rise of the Nazi regime and settled between 1933 and 1934 in England, a country that would soon welcome other members of the Sunday Circle, such as Karl Mannheim, Arnold Hauser and Jenö Lányi. 44 Peter Burke, indeed, defined this as the ‘Hungaro-British moment’, when the provincialism of English humanities was shaken by the influx of Central European émigré intellectuals.45 At the time Antal arrived, art history was in its infancy and had no academic recognition, as the discipline was still conceived in terms of connoisseurship at the service of art appreciation and mainly taught in art galleries, schools and museums.46 Another hindrance refugees had to tackle was what many perceived as an English abhorrence for theoretical speculation and, as Saxl pointed out, an alienness to methodological discourse, especially when applied to the art historical field.47 For this reason the Courtauld Institute, founded in 1932 with the intent to foster British art scholarship, turned to the positivist and anti-speculative philological approach of the early School of Vienna for a methodological bedrock.48 This bond with continental art history was further strengthened when the Warburg Institute opened its doors, attracting such scholars as Ernst Gombrich, Otto Pächt, Edgar Wind and many others. Fritz Saxl, the Director of the new Institute and a student of Dvoř ák himself, had maintained the connections with the Wiener Schule since his Ham-
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burg days.49 The now transplanted institute finally opened its doors to the Hungarian scholar. Saxl particularly appreciated Antal’s research on Florentine art from a sociological standpoint while remaining a ‘serious connoisseur’ nonetheless, and invited him to publish in the Institute’s Journal, which featured in the opening issue an article on the reuse of classical models in Mannerist art – a question revisited years later with an essay on Hogarth. 50 Whilst a wind of Marxism swept over Oxford and Cambridge in 1933 – as Anthony Blunt would recall – leaving most of British intelligentsia in the early Thirties fascinated by leftist doctrine, Antal in particular could find support in two politically-minded key players in the art historical field, Kenneth Clark and Herbert Read. 51 As a matter of fact, Antal’s political ideas had become more radical during his Berlin years, when he frequented Marxist political groups and travelled to the Soviet Union in 1932. 52 Read especially, whose overt communist proclivities were patent in studies like Art and Industry and Art and Society, proved a very valuable ally. 53 As editor of The Burlington Magazine, he saw to the publication of those articles with which Antal made a name for himself between 1935 and 1941, and as adviser for the publisher Routlege & Kegan Paul, Read endorsed Florentine Painting and Its Social Background – a book that in Antal’s own words would have been impossible to publish in Germany. 54 The Hungarian’s political views also attracted the attention of Anthony Blunt, who invited him to Cambridge’s socialist and Marxist circles. Blunt had been captivated by what he called the ‘gospel of Antal’, i.e. that association of revolutionary art and rea lism ascribed to artists like Giotto, Masaccio, Michelangelo, Raphael, Poussin and Rembrandt. 55 Antal also befriended other art historians from a more orthodox Marxist coterie, like John Berger and Francis Klingender, who in 1943 wrote a book on Marxism and modern art, followed by Hogarth and English Caricature, and Art and the Industrial Revolution in 1947, whose incoherence in handling the ‘contextual’ reference material Antal had mildly criticised. 56 Therefore, it may seem 1930s England would have made a receptive cultural and art historical milieu providing the right stimuli for his so-called ‘Marxist turn’ to take place. Yet only a decade later that leftist wind had subsided and Antal felt more and more isolated and regarded suspiciously for his political ideas, as he confessed to Lukács in 1946. 57 The lectures Antal gave at the Courtauld Institute between 1934 and 1935, and again in 1937–1938, are a case in point of this transition towards the sociological outlook of Florentine Painting. 58 Upon reconsidering his theories on Cinquecento art, he conceded to having overemphasised the irrational current of Mannerism under the influence of Expressionism, whereas its coexistence with classicism had to be readdressed in close relation with religious tendencies and the economical and political frameworks. 59 Antal argued that the concurrence of the balanced, harmonious compositions of a classicist trend epitomised by the works of Raphael, and the whimsical irrational style marked by the revival of late-Gothic elements typical of Rosso or Pontormo, could only
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17 Massaccio: Madonna and Child / Gentile da Fabriano: Madonna and Child, reproduced in Frederick Antal, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background, London 1948, unpag.
be explained in the light of the socio-political changes and their link to religious and philosophical ideas.60 And in spite of materialistic-sounding assertions like ‘the rising class determines the style in art’, the Hungarian mainly weaved a cultural and political pattern, avoiding the Marxist strait-jacket and placing the stylistic description of the individual work of art at the heart of his discourse. 61 However, that socio-stylistic polarisation of irrational/aristocratic and popular vs. rational/middle-class, clearly formulated in Florentine Painting, was beginning to take shape. This is all the more evident in Reflections on Classicism and Romanticism, where the nuanced stylistic perspective of his Viennese thesis had changed into a more stringent dichotomy, as the Manichaean English title indicates.62 The importance of the social background came to the fore in his 1948 Observations on Girolamo da Carpi, where the impact of the Counter Reformation is primarily explained as a consequence of Italy’s economically decaying bourgeoisie and resurging feudalism, mirrored by the revival of Gothic art.63 These were basically the premises of his Florentine Painting and Its Social Background, which in Antal’s original plan should have been completed by a second part on Mannerism.64 Like Raphael and Pontormo had been the two sides of the Cinquecento, Florentine Painting began with the famous juxtaposition of Masaccio’s and Gentile da Fabriano’s Madonnas (ill. 17), which posed
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the fundamental question underlying the scholar’s whole research: ‘What is the meaning of the conception of style in its totality?’ The origins of this matter – and of Antal’s penchant for methodological discussion – harked back to the 1920s Methodenstreit, when the relation between form and content and the possibility to reconstruct the context of artworks were at the heart of the art historical debate in the quest for a reine Wissenschaft.65 While Panofsky, for instance, had resolved the issue of the dichotomy between form and content by introducing the notion of ‘Typus’ followed by that of ‘meaning’, Antal, on the other hand, had found a solution in Lukács’s studies on modern drama and the theory of the novel, wherein style was defined as a socially determined a priori of the artist’s vision, a concept, however, that the former came to fully embrace only in Florentine Painting. 66 Although Lukács himself had admitted to Antal being the only Sunday Circle member with true Marxist inclinations, Anna Wessely remarked that initially the Hungarian art historian had been incapable of reconciling his political ideas and aesthetic credo with his scientific activity, because of the dominating influence of Dvoř ák’s Geistesgeschichte. All the same, Antal saw in the middle-class the progressive force furthering artistic development while the lower classes actually represented the conservative tendencies, clearly differing from Lukács’s ideas on the proletariat’s class-consciousness as a driving aesthetic force. Also, Dvoř ák’s dualistic conception was rather the result of antagonistic Weltanschauungen than of those socio-economic patterns, which he considered to be positively fruitless. 67 Therefore, in the attempt to conciliate social and ‘spiritual’ history, Antal forced the hand of interpretation when in the preface to Florentine Painting he turned to Dvoř ák for a precedent of art as expression of a social class, whilst he carefully tiptoed around a sociological approach by safely introducing it as a consequence of Geistesgeschichte. In fact, art was seen as the result of ‘the outlook, the ideas of the public, expressed through the medium of the artist’, and the existence of different ‘publics’, belonging to diffe rent social strata with different worldviews could be explained through the analysis of the socio-economical factors that shaped those mentalities. Incidentally, Antal’s words appear to echo Panofsky’s famous definition of ‘intrinsic meaning’, a comparison which may not seem too far-fetched if one considers the notion of Dokumentsinn posited by Mannheim as their common denominator. And indeed, Antal presented his ‘method of sociological interpretation’ as being in continuity with the study of style ‘as the specific combination’ of subject and form that had been pursued by both Dvořá k and Riegl, as well as by the Warburg Institute and American, British and Russian art historians. 68
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The Disillusioned Remark s of an Émigré The socialist enthusiasm of the 1930s had waned in the early Cold War years and Antal, like many other Marxist art historians, intended to build a larger consensus around his theories, afraid of being condemned as ‘materialist’.69 This intention is clear in the long list of ‘post-Wölfflinian knights’ Antal called in his defence in his 1949 Remarks on the Method of Art History: Fritz Saxl, Herbert Read, Richard Krautheimer, Rudolf Wittkower, Meyer Schapiro, Ernst Gombrich, Anthony Blunt, Edgar Wind, Siegfried Giedion and Millard Meiss. 70 After evoking the art historical tradition represented by Aby Warburg and Max Dvoř ák, Antal drew attention to the growing tendency of combining the history of ideas with social history in England, by referring to such examples as George Thomson’s Aeschylus and Athens and George M. Trevelyan’s English Social History, rather than to the more Marxist-laden works by Francis Klingender, Jack Chen and Sidney Finkelstein. 71 Nor was there any mention of Lukács’s essays, even if, only two years before, Antal had actually acknowledged his indebtedness to him and stated that his critical goal was to redefine ‘the developments in art on a Marxist basis’.72 The diverse roster of art historians Antal likened to his method (featuring even Gombrich!) bespeaks a final attempt at gaining recognition in the field. And in the closing lines, the Hungarian also openly took issue with his adversaries, the hero-worshipping connoisseurs. Art historians ‘living in their ivory tower’ of ‘attributions almost for attributions’ sake’, whose articles on the occasional ‘Master of the Goodenough Deposition’ merely discussed the subject-matter in terms of iconography ‘as aloof as possible from living history’. 73 Embittered words that give a sense of Antal’s grievance and frustration (and of his cantanke rous character too) as he had not succeeded in finding a permanent position in British academia, unlike other fellow expatriates such as Wilde or Hauser. 74 There was a flurry of critiques attacking Florentine Painting for its ‘Marxist verbiage’ and ‘narrow channels of class-conscious dialectics’. 75 The oversimplifications appeared to be striking: Giotto’s style was described as expressive of the interests and outlook of the wealthy upper middle class, and deterministically juxtaposed to Duccio’s ‘lyrical, emotional and ecstatic’ manner, closely connected to the weaker ‘middle and petty bourgeoisie’ of Siena. 76 Criticism even came from some of the scholars Antal had summoned in defence of his approach, as was the case with Meiss’s detailed review for the Art Bulletin, targeting the weaknesses of his ‘monist conception’ and ‘rigid social determinism’. 77 Antal was actually hoping the review would be a clement one, anticipating more adversaries amongst English formalists rather than on the American front. 78 But to Meiss, the ‘rarefied atmosphere of those endless debates about neo-Gothic or late-Gothic-baroque’ that he identified with Antal’s work were exemplary for his continental-positivist kunstwissenschaftlich background thus marking that great divide between Anglo-Saxon pragmatism and such speculations on patterns of stylistic evolution. 79 Along these lines, John Pope-Hennessy believed that it was in fact this continental ‘pattern-making pro-
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pensity that caused Antal to force works of art into a mold’ and not his Marxist leanings which had made Florentine Painting a ‘disappointing work’. Namely, he was alluding to Antal’s ‘pan-Gothic’ labelling of works that made him see ‘what he wished to see’ and ultimately led him to a ‘generalized style history’. 80 Scepticism towards theoretical generalisations was a problem other German and Central European scholars, like Mannheim, had faced when ‘translating one culture in terms of another’. 81 Nevertheless, this translatio studii also meant that Antal could merge the sense of German ‘Kultur’ with that of English ‘civilisation’. Norbert Elias, another refugee scholar, emphasised how German ‘Kultur’ referred to the intellectual, artistic and religious facts expressing a national identity as opposed to the more cosmopolitan (and imperialistic) Franco-English notion of ‘civilisation’, which also included political, economical and sociological factors. 82 And while Florentine Painting had been written during his German years, Hogarth and his Place in European Art and Fuseli Studies more clearly reflect this transition83 Furthermore, the choice to address quintessentially English artists or topics was a common assimilation strategy other émigré art historians had adopted: Dagobert Frey and Nikolaus Pevsner, for instance, both wrote on the Englishness in English art, and Edgar Wind studied Reynolds and 18th century England. 84 At the same time, the fact that Antal was now dealing with a monographic study allowed him to move away from the broad stylistic formulations of his Germanspeaking (or thinking) art education and set the development of a single painter against the background of 18th century English middle-class, weaving a pattern of cultural and stylistic borrowings and influences of an artist whose language was firmly embedded in past and contemporary European art, literature and history. 85 Though both his Hogarth and Fuseli books appeared posthumously, Antal was probably hoping they would fare better in the British milieu than Florentine Painting. In his Remarks, he actually hin ted at the fact that establishing a connection between art and the socio-political context was more accepted for artists of more recent centuries practicing secular art, specifically mentioning Hogarth, David and Géricault. 86 Twenty years on, he would be proven right as Francis Haskell did indeed praise the Hungarian’s combination of a keen connoisseur eye and historical imagination, almost fulfilling Antal’s ominous words: ‘But the time will naturally come when the exclusive formalists will generally be recognised as in the rear of art-history.’ 87
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Strangers in a Foreign Language Writings on Art and Architecture in Turkish Exile Burcu Dogramaci
‘Sir Nikolaus Pevsner starb 1983. Er konnte die Übertragung dieses 1940 im englischen Exil erschienenen Werkes in seine Muttersprache, in der er es zwischen 1930 und 1933 verfasst hatte, nicht mehr autorisieren.’ German edition of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Academies of Art, Past and Present1
Being a stranger in a language is described by the exiled writer Jean Améry as an essential characteristic of emigration in the period of National Socialism: ‘In the years of exile our relationship to our homeland was akin to that toward our mother tongue. In a very specific sense we have lost it too and cannot initiate proceedings for restitution. […] Not to the same degree, however, that our mother tongue proved to be hostile, did the foreign one become a real friend. It behaved and still behaves in a reserved manner and receives us only for brief formal visits. One calls on it, comme on visite des amis, which is not the same as dropping in on friends. La table will never be the table; at best one can eat one’s fill at it. Even individual vowels, and though they had the same physical qualities as our native ones, were alien and have remained so.’ 2 Just as the native language threatens to become foreign with the passage of time, so the communication in the target countries of exile often presents an insurmountable challenge. For the theatre critic Alfred Kerr or actor Fritz Kortner the emigration to Bri tain and the US and into a new language environment was even a threat to the very basis of their livelihood. But what was the fate of those emigrants who would go on to contribute to the creation of academic subjects, were to give lectures and write seminal works in their countries of exile? Numerous German-speaking scholars and architects responded to the invitation of the Turkish government before and during the period of National Socia
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lism to work and teach at the newly established and reformed universities and academies of the Turkish Republic. After 1933, the ‘racial’, political and cultural persecution and alienation that immediately followed Adolf Hitler’s assumption of power led to a continuous stream of emigration out of Germany. Among these emigrants were also public figures, such as politicians, university professors, artists, writers and actors. 3 Emigration meant leaving behind the home in which one was no longer welcome and in which one no longer saw any opportunities, and travelling to foreign countries, often with uncertain prospects for the future. Turkey, quantitatively speaking, was not one of the preferred countries of destination for German-speaking emigrants under National Socialism, considering that ‘only’ one thousand refugees were granted asylum there. What is astonishing, however, is the number of highly qualified people among them; 300 academics came to Turkey, making it a country of destination for elite emigrants. One could only enter the country by official invitation. The founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 had heralded the beginning of a period of radical changes in society, politics and religion and the targeted invitation of these foreign experts was meant to boost its progress. The successor state to the Ottoman Empire wanted to catch up with Western Europe in the areas of the economy, legal systems, education, and culture. 4 The Turkish government had already been inviting foreign specialists since 1927 and, after 1933, their number included many emigrants from Germany. 5 Prerequisite for obtaining a post was the assurance of the immigrants and emigrants to make a visible contribution to teaching and research, publication and committee work within a few years of their arrival. Using scholars and architects who migrated to Turkey as an example, this essay will examine various strategies of lecturing and publishing in a country of exile: as one noteworthy example one might mention Ernst Reuter who, as a professor of Municipal Science in Ankara, quickly learned the Turkish language, held his lectures in Turkish and was able to closely supervise the translations of his books and essays. As the architect Ernst Egli before him, Reuter also translated scientific terms used in his field from English and German into Turkish. In this way he contributed significantly to the establishment of a Turkish technical terminology for his discipline. By contrast, the work of the art historian Ernst Diez in Turkey shows that processes of writing, translation and reception could also be prone to misapprehension and dissonance. While Josef Strzygowski – one of Diez’s teachers – was widely recognised across Turkey, Ernst Diez provoked controversy with similar theoretical concepts which would, ultimately, cost him his position.
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Oral Transl ations Foreign professors who were invited to Turkey were expected to learn the Turkish language within the contract period. In the first years of their stay, lessons and exams were given and set in German with Turkish translators. Translators were often students or assistants with a knowledge of German, usually because they had grown up or studied in Germany. For the sculptor Rudolf Belling, for example, lessons and lectures were translated by Nijat Sirel and Kenan Yontuç who had been trained in Germany. 6 A few – such as Ernst Reuter and before him the architect Ernst Egli – learned the Turkish language and were able, by mastering a number of idioms, to connect much more closely with their students. Barriers between foreign professors, their Turkish colleagues and students were undoubtedly frequently caused by language problems or inadequate translation services of an interpreter. 7 What had been said and written was mediated through a third party who frequently changed or shortened parts of the original material during translation. This was reported, for example, by Wolfgang Gleissberg, the assistant to Erwin Finlay-Freundlich, the Chair of Astronomy at Istanbul University. In his memories, he reflected on the problems of the translation of lectures and claimed that this not only wasted precious time, but also that the desirable immediate contact to the audience could not be made: ‘Remarkable was also that as soon as the students noticed that a German professor started to learn the Turkish language, they asked him to give lectures in Turkish; they kept explaining that it was easier for them to listen to a lecture which was given in bad Turkish than to a translated one.’ 8 The work of German and Austrian experts in Turkey is an ideal case to think about the range of possibilities of transfer and translation and the shifts in meaning they entail. Cases like the lectures by Clemens Holzmeister on the history of European architecture can serve as prime examples to demonstrate the number of protagonists involved. Holzmeister had been giving them at the University of Istanbul in German since 1946; they were subsequently translated by his female assistant Necribe Çakıroğ lu. How ever, these lectures have not survived in the original manuscript but only in the written records of one of his students, Behruz Çinici, who published them forty years later in the form of a book. 9 Holzmeister focused on certain architectural periods selected according to his personal preferences. Thus, the detailed appraisal of Romanesque and Gothic art can be deduced from Holzmeister’s own field of interest as a trained church architect. Either intentionally or because of a lack of interest on his part he disregarded important developments in the transition from the 19 th to the 20 th century as the turning point of architecture.10 Holzmeister’s statements and remarks in the form of Çinicis records in Turkish therefore contain numerous omissions which on the one hand were due to the subjective view of the architect on architectural history, but on the other may indicate losses during the translation process: from Holzmeister through his assistant Çakıroğ lu to his student Çinici.
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18 Ernst Reuter: Kasabalarımız, translated by Adnan Kolatan, in: Arkitekt 5–6/1943, pp. 121–126
Writings in Foreign Languages: Te x tbook s, Essays and Terms The Turkish government required foreign professors to write and submit textbooks for their courses. These textbooks often constituted course material for several generations. The architect Bruno Taut had already begun writing his textbook on architectural education when he was in Japan; in Istanbul he revised and completed the manuscript. Erica Taut reported that her husband dictated the handwritten notes to her for transcription and that he was able to inspect the proofs before his death.11 The book was translated by Adnan Kolatan and published in 1938. In Germany it was published only in 1977, almost forty years after its first edition.12 In Turkey, the book was published under the short title Mimarî Bilgisi (Architectural Education), while Taut’s original German manuscript had the subtitle Grundlagen, Theorie und Kritik aus der Sicht eines sozialistischen Architekten (Basic principles, theory and criticism from the perspective of a socialist architect) – this political positioning of the author was omitted in the Turkish edition. As was the case with Bruno Taut’s work, the texts written in German were often translated into Turkish by others. Adnan Kolatan not only translated Taut’s ‘Architectural Education’, but was also responsible for the translation of numerous articles of
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19 Ernst Reuter: Komün Bilgisi, translated by Niyazi Çıtakoğ lu and Bekir Sıtkı Baykal, manuscript with handwritten additions by the author, c. 1940, Berlin, Landesarchiv.
the scholar of urban studies and city planner Ernst Reuter (ill. 18). Kolatan translated, among others, Ernst Reuter’s Belediyelerin yapı i şletmeleri (‘Communal Construction Projects’), Belediye reisliğ i (‘Communal Management’) and Kasabalarımız (‘Our Country Towns’).13 Only very few authors who had learned Turkish soon after their arrival, Ernst Reuter and Ernst Egli among them, were able to check the translations for their accuracy. In the Turkish manuscript of his textbook Komün Bilgisi (‘Municipal Education’) from 1940, which was translated by Niyazi Çıtakoğ lu and Bekir Sıtkı Baykal, Reuter made numerous handwritten corrections regarding spelling, the terms used and the facts given (ill. 19). His handwritten changes make very clear that he worked critically with the translation, not only rectifying misspellings and adding words, but also revising basic information like numbers or percentages. This was not possible for others who did not know Turkish.
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20 Gustav Oelsner: Şehirlerde sürekli bahçeler, translated by Adnan Kolatan, in: Arkitekt, 9–10/1946, pp. 226–227
Coining Technical Terminologies Translators often faced the challenge that there was no equivalent in Turkish for some German terms. In the texts of the urban planner Gustav Oelsner terms like ‘Heimstätte’ or ‘Siedlung’ (‘homestead’; ‘settlement’) were simply adopted into Turkish as loanwords.14 Sometimes, however, neologisms were produced, such as the transformation of the ‘Schrebergarten’ (‘allotment gardens’) into the term ‘Sürekli Bahçeler’ (permanent gardens) (ill. 20). Thus, in dealing with the published articles and books one always has to take into account a substantive loss of meaning between original manuscript and translation; unless, as in the case of Ernst Reuter, the original manuscripts are available for comparison. Furthermore, German-speaking experts in Turkey were also members of language commissions and were supposed to contribute to the establishment of technical terms. The astronomer Wolfgang Gleissberg, jointly with Turkish colleagues, formulated a number of terms for the subject of astronomy such as height, orbit, revolution, or sidereal time. On the one hand, use was made of the Turkish vocabulary, on the other, the scientists had to form new words from existing Turkish word stems:
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21 Ernst Reuter: Komün Bilgisi, Ankara 1940, Appendix
‘When I read the astronomy literature that has appeared in Turkey since then, I can state with satisfaction that the terms I introduced have naturalized and have become an integral part of the Turkish technical language. They were used for the first time in a textbook on astronomy published in 1937 in Istanbul, written by Prof. Freundlich and me […]’.15 Ernst Reuter translated technical terms for municipal science from English and German into Turkish. For example, the term ‘Mali Tevzin’ (‘financial compensation’) was first introduced into the Turkish literature by him, and was later on even used in the Turkish Constitution. The Article 116 of the Turkish Constitution in 1961 included a provision on financial compensation between the state and city government – ‘the municipalities are assigned revenue in accordance with their duties’ – which goes back directly to Reuter’s considerations. He had dealt with financial compensation in several essays and in his book Belediye Maliyesi. Ru ş en Kele ş recalls that Reuter’s students and assistants had contributed to the introduction of Article 116, which was
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also included as Article 127 in the Constitution of 1982.16 In the appendix to his textbook Komün Bilgisi, there is a collection of 200 English, German and French terms with their Turkish counterparts (ill. 21): there are basic terms like ‘kütüphane’ (‘library’) or ‘belediye reisi’ (‘mayor’) but also technical terminology like ‘i ş sizlik sigortası’ (‘unemployment insurance’) or ‘murakabe’ (‘audit’). And there are some notions which could obviously not be translated very easily: for a single word like ‘Bodenreform’ (‘land reform’) Reuter suggests a more complex translation, ‘arazi ispekûlasyonuna kar ş ı mücadele’, in order to explain the meaning as clearly as possible.17 The architect Ernst Egli was appointed chairman of a commission whose goal was to address the Europeanization and reform of architectural terminology. The purpose was to establish a universal terminology that would transfer old terms into present context and also coin new ones. Egli reported: ‘We were busy, among other things, inventing an official technical term for the rope to which workers repairing the minaret roof were attached. […] This kind of rope is now referred to among the people as “can-ipi”, which means “thread of life”. “Can” means life and soul at the same time, “ipi” means rope, string or yarn. One can see just in this term, which is now included in the official terminology, how skillfully and descriptively the people take their expressions and terms from their own environment.‘18 Egli’s terms have long since entered the Turkish vocabulary.
Understanding and Misunderstanding Art History The work of this commission coining a new technical language is an expression of the overall cultural, social and linguistic change that took place in Turkey within a few years.19 This included a new historiography, which relativized the importance of Ottoman history in favour of a genuinely Turkish history. Previously, religion had served as the main determination of identity. However, under the slogan of ‘Turkism’, a return to genuine Turkish traditions was demanded. All the people that had ever settled on the Anatolian territory were considered ancestors of the Turks, and Turkish elements were sought in their languages and cultural products. Institutional foundations like the Society for the Study of Turkish History and the Faculty of Language, History and Geography at Ankara University were tasked with the exploration of Turkish traces in history. After 1923, Turkish academics such as Mehmet Fuat Köprülü committed themselves to the exploration of Turkish cultural history with the goal of constructing a national identity. In 1924 Köprülü founded the Türkiyat Institute, which examined Turkish history, literature and culture across time and space: from Antiquity to the present day,
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from Mongolia to Hungary. 20 It was also the historian Köprülü who popularized Josef Strzygowski’s writings in Turkey. The Austrian art historian, the subject of controversy in his native country, maintained close relationships with colleagues in Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1932, Strzygowski was invited to speak at the First Turkish History Congress under the aegis of Atatürk. 21 Strzygowski’s writings were read in Republican Turkey with great interest, chiefly because they emphasized the dominance of the nation and ‘race’ over the cultural-historical influence of religion. This ethnic argument was in harmony with the national feelings of the Kemalists and their desire to overcome an Islamic cultural history. 22 In particular, the inclusion of pre-Islamic cultures corresponded to the search for the identity of the young republic under Atatürk, who propagated the view that Greek art was influenced by Turkish art. It was precisely this weakening of the influence of Hellenistic and Romano-Christian art that could be found in Strzygowski’s works: in a Turkish essay published in the 1930s, Strzygowski tried to demonstrate Islamic influences in Athens and to prove the adaptation of Ottoman motifs in the works of the Italian Baroque artist Bernini. 23 The arguments of the art historian were embraced as ‘making propaganda for Turkishness and the majesty of our culture’ as it was described in a 1975 publication. 24 At the first congress of Turkish history in 1932, Strzygowski denounced the defamation of Turkish art by ‘humanists’ as ‘the work of barbarians’ and called for a reassessment of this artistic tradition reaching into the depths of history. 25 With this he met with broad approval in Turkey and with just as much enthusiasm in Croatia or Hungary, where his writings also contributed to the construction of national histories of art. 26 In Turkey, Strzygowski is appreciated by Turkish historians to the present day for having extended the European view of the history of Turkish art and its geography. The art historian Oktay Aslanapa emphasizes in particular Strzygowski’s groundbreaking research on Turkish art in the publications Amida (Heidelberg: Winter, 1910) and Altai-Iran und Völkerwanderung (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1917) as pioneering works. 27 The reputation that Josef Strzygowski enjoyed in Turkey paved the way for other researchers from the Viennese Institute of Art History and its former students. In addition to Heinrich Glück one must mention here one of Strzygowski’s students, Katharina Otto-Dorn and, above all, Ernst Diez. In 1943 Strzygowski’s former assistant Diez, after working at the American Bryn Mawr College and in Vienna, arrived in Turkey to build an art history institute at the University of Istanbul. In his book Die Kunst der islamischen Völker (‘The art of the Islamic Peoples’) which first appeared in 1915 and of which three subsequent editions were published before 1925, Diez extensively discussed preIslamic and Ottoman Turkish art, architecture and ornaments. With only limited financial and technical resources, Ernst Diez tried to set up an institute in Istanbul. He wrote his manuscripts in German (ill. 22), unlike his lectures in the U.S. that were written in English. The translation in the classroom was then done by his assistant. Diez’s contract also required him to write a textbook for his subject. Excursions into rural Turkey, the
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22 Ernst Diez: Lectures at the University of Istanbul, 1946/1947, manuscript, Istanbul, Papers of Oktay Aslanapa
search for unknown historical buildings and their photographic records served as preparation for the required textbook. Turkey’s entering the war in 1944 led to the internment of nearly all the Germans in three Anatolian localities: Kır ş ehir, Yozgat and Nev ş ehir. Far from interrupting his work, Diez used his internment of over one year to write the textbook. At the beginning of 1946, back in Istanbul, Ernst Diez resumed teaching and, within a few months, completed the work on his textbook Türk Sanatı. Ba şlangıcından Günümüze Kadar (‘Turkish art. From the beginnings to the present’). It was published in 1946 in the translation of his assistant Oktay Aslanapa. Diez wanted his book to be a pioneering text about the history and genesis of Turkish art. This hitherto little explored territory was now to be examined and evaluated extensively as a national phenomenon: ‘The book we have now published is intended to show the roots of the national monumental artistic creation, on the basis of selected works of architecture and art. It has been written with the inten-
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tion of extracting the Turkish element within the art complex commonly referred to as Islamic art.’ 28 In his book, Diez expressed views favouring a comparative art history (‘Vergleichende Kunstwissenschaft’). 29 This method, developed by Josef Strzygowski, pursued the emergence of national styles and influences that resulted from the examination of the individual edifices. Following Strzygowski’s views, Diez understood the individual work of art as part of the great history of mankind. 30 Diez tried to prove the existence of an exchange between religiously and philosophically-culturally delineated geographic zones. In doing so, he not only resorted to the idea formulated by Strzygowski of valuing the object above the written source – Diez called this an ‘empirical basis’. 31 Closely following Strzygowski’s investigative parameters of knowledge, nature and development, he ultimately saw Turkish art to be part of the global art history. In his textbook Türk Sanatı the art historian attempted to trace back the origins of architectural motifs and decorative elements of Seljuk and Ottoman art over countries, nations and centuries. Thus Diez saw the windows of the Green Mosque in Bursa framed with Muquarnas designs as being derived from Armenian architecture. The dome as the main element of Ottoman roof architecture was traced back to Iranian architecture. 32 He argued that migrations of peoples contributed to the migration of forms and styles. 33 Diez attached particular importance to Armenian culture: religious constructions like the mausoleum towers in the vicinity of Lake Van in Anatolia were attributed by Diez to formative Armenian influences. 34 With these comparisons, Diez followed the tradition of Strzygowski who had contributed to the re-evaluation of Armenian architecture. 35 The Austrian expressed a particularly far-reaching view on Ottoman mosques. Diez was of the opinion that the mosques built on the orders of the Sultan resulted from a competition with the Hagia Sophia. Only after Sinan had reached the spatial effect of the Hagia Sophia in the Ş ehzade Mosque, could he set a standard for Islamic religious buildings. 36 This argument demonstrates the problems of comparative art science which always performs an assessment of things old and new, and of what is innovation or imitation through comparisons. It was particularly the attributing of the origins of Turkish art to Christian and non-Turkish cultures that caused lively protests on an unprecedented scale. Numerous important daily newspapers of the Republic, such as Ulus, Cumhuriyet and Vatan, as well as the architecture magazine Mimarlık published articles by Turkish architects and historians who expressed scathing criticism of the author and his work. The most outspoken critics in the campaign against Ernst Diez, the architect Sedat Çetinta ş and the rector of the Topkapi Museum, Tahsin Öz, described the textbook as a slanderous ‘attack on Tur kishness’. 37 They denounced the comparison between the Hagia Sophia and an Ottoman mosque, and criticized the relationship between Turkish and Armenian art articulated in the book. Öz writes: ‘If the architectural masterpieces actually originate from Armenian models, if Armenian masters worked on them, if the outlines of the most important
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mosques and mausoleums are taken from churches, where is actually the Turkish architecture? Why does he call his book “Turkish Art” then? And, with all due respect, where is there a need for a Chair in Turkish Art History?’ 38 Diez tried to defend himself in the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet and in the specialist magazine Felsefe Arkivi. His arguments were based on the ‘law of endosmosis’, or the ‘cultural penetration’ from which no ‘province of art’ was excluded: ‘There is no art historian who would deny the high degree of originality of the architectural ornaments of the Seldjuks but primarily it is the task of the art historian to explore the origins of construction and ornamental forms.’ 39 In order to substantiate the links between the Turkish and non-Turkish architecture over the centuries, Diez provided some images he was requested to supply for comparison. At the same time he did not move away from his views on the connections between Turkish and Christian architecture, conspicuously avoiding the term ‘Armenian’ and instead speaking of Transcaucasian references.40 In defense of his reputation as a scholar, Diez referred to the fact that he was Strzygowski’s student, indicating the many years of his teaching experience in Europe, the USA and Turkey. However, Ernst Diez’s reputation as an art historian was ruined by the public attacks.41 They ultimately led to his dismissal. In 1950, he left Turkey and his still young institute with 110 students. Although Diez had only spent seven years in Turkey and polarized his contemporaries, his impact on the development of the subject was still great. His assistant Oktay Aslanapa became an influential personality in the research into Turkish art history in the second half of the 20 th century. Aslanapa expanded the institute founded by Diez and was head of its Turkish-Islamic branch for many years. The Turkish art historian developed the institutional founding of the subject at the University of Istanbul, which was to become the model for many other Turkish institutes. He also initiated the expansion of the Institute and in 1963 he contributed to the establishment of three chairs – European art history, Byzantine studies and IslamicTurkish art history. This corresponded to the objectives pursued by Ernst Diez, whose ideal was a globally oriented discipline. Oktay Aslanapa established archaeological excavations as an instrument of research and made them a required course for the students of the Istanbul Art History Institute. In this way Aslanapa passed on the professional expertise that had once been called for by Josef Strzygowski in the late 19th century in his teaching in Graz: the unity of classical archeology and modern history of art.42 In his writings, Aslanapa repeatedly referred to the tradition within which he saw his own work. He wrote in 1993: ‘With Ernst Diez, who worked with such success at the world famous Strzygowski-Institute in Vienna, a scientific and systematic research into the history of art started in Istanbul and in the whole country. At the same time I started my career as his assistant and in this way the art historical research in this country is connected to the Strzygowski-School in Vienna.’43
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Yet the debate surrounding Ernst Diez shows quite clearly that the application of supposedly established theoretical models does not always succeed. What may have led to the rejection of Diez’s book was the selection of examples and comparisons perceived as inappropriate, on the one hand, and arguments, terminology as well as translation problems on the other. An accurate translation of a text does not always necessarily result in a successful transmission of ideas. Thus the book Türk Sanatı may have been indeed translated true to the meaning of the original text, but nevertheless, the translation probably bypassed the cultural prerequisites and idiomatic practices, especially when the formulations were perceived as brusque, comparisons as insensitive, or even political, and arguments as arrogant. Translation theory assumes that texts in a culturally sensitive translation can be context-oriented or not.44 However, for Turkey, the case of Diez’s and other translated, written and spoken texts, it is difficult to measure the quality and equivalence of the translations, since the German original manuscripts are in many cases missing, or the Turkish translation was made orally. In this context one can speak of self-translation rather in a figurative sense when terms and concepts were transferred into the language body of the country of exile – and, as is evidenced by the example of such terms as ‘Heimstätte’ or ‘Siedlung’ (‘homestead’ or ‘settlement’), the use of the German revealed their apparent untranslatability. The author Gustav Oelsner left those words in his native language. The untranslated and untranslatable terms stayed on one hand foreign while on the other hand could not be misunderstood. It seemed that even migrants that stayed in Turkey for many years (like Oelsner did) were not confident about their abilities to find the right words for all the things they had to say.
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‘Always living in a foreign tongue ...’ Carl Einstein and the Language of Exile Uwe Fleckner
All things considered, Carl Einstein lived his whole life in exile. Of Jewish descent, switching in his youth between neo-Kantian philosophy and reception of Nietzsche, between renouveau catholique and the artistic avant-garde in search of an intellectual home, the writer and art historian spent his formative years between Berlin and Paris before deciding to quit Germany for good: ‘This is no longer a country for concentrated work’, Einstein wrote to his friend Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler as early as the summer of 1924; and four years later he moved to the French capital.1 As a communist activist and radical author, as a bold art theorist and relentless critic of contemporary art who expressed himself in often hermetic terms, he had made many – too many – enemies in Germany. Yet his move abroad cannot, of course, at first be seen as exile in the political sense, even though it was certainly due to persistent political and anti-Semitic attacks. 2 On the contrary, in founding his journal Documents Einstein had quite deliberately given himself a firm economic footing in Paris (ill. 23); for years he was associated with the leading artists in the French metropolis, and from 1928 onwards he was publishing essay after essay, alternating treatises on art theory and art history with art criticism out of Parisian galleries and studios. Yet the first cracks soon appeared in the dubious happiness of voluntary exile. By the start of the 1930s, Einstein had few illusions about France’s economic and intellectual situation. As he wrote on 28 November 1931 to the publisher Ewald Wasmuth in Berlin, a close friend of his, crisis was becoming a permanent state of affairs; books were hardly being sold, literary texts were hardly being published, and Einstein spoke unenthusiastically of his own plans in the field of art history and art theory, such as his study on the work of Georges Braque, which would not see the light of day
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23 Carl Einstein (ed.): Documents. Doctrines – Archéologie – Beaux-Arts – Ethnographie 1/1929, cover
until 1934. 3 It was not just the failure of Documents after just two years that left Einstein so deeply disillusioned. Political slogans would ‘eventually kill us’, his letter continued, nothing would be left of Europe but a few ‘depraved députés and war memorials’, and the last poets would soon ‘end up writing thrillers’, and become ‘barbarous cretins with incongruous memories’. The letter to Wasmuth makes clear that it was particularly the unbearable political situation in Germany that triggered his decision to move to Paris. In his view, France was still a country of profound intellectual traditions, however brittle these links had become. Not without desperate irony, and still full of wit, Einstein wrote: ‘We still speak Voltaire and Racine. Kültüre. We have a bidet and no Hitler; esprit, on vit avec le sourire; latinité et mesure. On mange l’oignon, Méditerranée; l’ail; Virgil still stinks. Homer’s sun is heavily rained upon, and clarté seems desperately commonplace. But, to be fair, there are no Nazi louts here. That at least is agreeable.’4 Einstein did still refer to ‘we’, the community of intellectuals living and working in France – a personal pronoun not used in this way in his Berlin letters and writings. Indeed, in the early 1930s the writer frequented Paris’s leading literary and artistic circles, he got to know such writers as Eugène Jolas, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and such artists as Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder, and was in close communication with such personalities as Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille, Georges Braque and
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Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and André Masson. But Einstein saw his activity and intellectual existence as threatened, and soon began to sense that his freely chosen move to France might truly turn into exile: ‘I would not like to end up as an emigrant’, he wrote in February 1932, ‘and I am not skinny enough to be a whiner like Heine’. 5 Yet Einstein did end up as an emigrant. In January 1933, a new chancellor came to power in Germany – and Einstein, the Jew, the political agitator and fighter on the barricades, the defender of revolutionary artistic positions, knew only too well that he would eventually be unable to return home. And thus in January 1934, Einstein lamented his loneliness, and above all the loss of his linguistic community, in the following words: ‘How dead is a breath to which no known word surges forth, how dead my eyes that no longer see familiar people […]. The life of the individual is meaningless and unalive, sounding into the mute, airless space. There is a pain at work within me, a perpetuum mobile of pain.’6
Realit y Adap ted to Vision It was during this period of crisis, in 1934, that one of Einstein’s main works of art theory was published: his book on Georges Braque (ill. 24). Planned since the early 1920s and finally written in 1931–1932 (as an editorial note informs us), the book, the firstever monograph on Braque, was published by a consortium of Editions des Chroniques du Jour in Paris and the publishers and gallery owners Anton Zwemmer in London and Erhard Weyhe in New York. 7 Despite the monographic title Georges Braque, the publication is an unusual kind of book, as the text does not (as one might expect) deal with the artist’s personality, his career or a chronology of his work. Instead, it is a solely theoretical treatise that sums up the author’s decades of thinking on a broad range of philosophical and aesthetic topics – of course with references to Braque’s works, but more often in free association with phenomena in contemporary art that are linked in a very general way to Cubist and Surrealist trends. Yet, in his book on Braque, Einstein – who, a year earlier, had also curated the firstever retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work at the Kunsthalle in Basel – was not only breaking with traditional notions of art writing, but also uncompromisingly dismis sing what he saw as the reactionary aestheticism of modern art criticism and art history. Despite the misleading title, the book was a summary of – as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler put it – the author’s ‘world view’ (Weltanschauung), of his aesthetic, anthropological, religious-historical, scientific-historical and sociopolitical standpoints, with the muchesteemed artist and Einstein’s close personal friend as the most reliable witness and authority. 8 The methodological basis for this ‘anti-monographic’ monograph, written in such apodictic and hermetic terms, with its fair share of redundancies and contradictions, could thus only be a ‘sociology, or ethnology, of art’. 9
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24 Carl Einstein: Georges Braque, Paris, London and New York 1934 (XXe siècle, vol. 7), frontispiece and title page
In 1934, Einstein’s idea (developed during the 1920s) that, in order to be relevant, an artwork should be able to intervene in reality, and hence fundamentally alter people’s image of themselves and the world, was radicalized and became the central theme in his work on art and art theory. He disclosed this interest (which was also political) to his readers in the following unambiguous terms: ‘Artworks only concern us to the extent that they contain means of altering reality, the structure of man and the concepts of the world. So the main issue is this: how can artworks be integrated into a concept of the world, or how do they destroy it and move beyond it?’10 Hence it was no longer interpretation but transformation of the world that was the goal of the visual arts: ‘When confronted with Braque’s Cubism and, even more so, his romantic [i.e. Surrealist] period, the aesthetic formula of style proved completely inadequate, for now reinterpretation was not enough – instead (and at first we are only talking about Cubism) the very function of seeing was altered. This would be followed by irrational vision and metamorphic art, and new objects, i.e. visual myths, would be created.’11 Vision and metamorphosis, reality-generating ways of seeing, and the break with a rationalist world of stable object-subject relationships – these were the terms in which Einstein had described the work of a new generation of artists influenced by Surrealism
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25 Georges Braque: Nu allongé, 1933–1934, etching, 18 × 25 cm, supplement to the limited edition of Carl Einstein’s Georges Braque, 1934
in Documents and the third edition of Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (‘Art of the 20 th century’), which appeared in 1931. He had also pointed out that late-1920s Cubism had benefited from such a vitalistic-dynamic expansion of its artistic potential, equipping its spatial visions with hallucinatory objects and populating them with corresponding figures. In the artist’s current works, in which Einstein believed the visionary element had been elevated to a ‘mental archaism’, in his still lifes as well as his figure compositions (ill. 25–26), Einstein saw a fundamental protest against rationalist-positivist conventions and their implicit notions of reality: ‘These works were an attempt to break free from history and civilization; and what made this possible was hallucination, in other words destruction of the conscious ego and the conventional environment. These canvases were thus dominated by a marked tendency towards death. Conscious personality had vanished.’12 In a meandering and occasionally sluggish flow of ideas, Einstein described the artist’s commitment to the visions he had experienced; the totality of the things around him was no longer the goal of his representations, but traumatic experiences now brought repressed particles of reality to light, penetrated the artworks as figurative objectifications and, having become images, produced their highly apotropaic effect in
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26 Georges Braque: La danse, 1933–1934, etching, 25 × 18 cm, supplement to the limited edition of Carl Einstein’s Georges Braque, 1934
opposition to a world of invisible menacing forces. The externalization of the artist in his work, the abolition of a sharp boundary between the seeing subject and the seen object, indeed the total surrender of the artist’s personality to surging hallucinations – which Einstein repeatedly clad in the metaphor of the subject’s ‘suicide’ – would have a particularly strong influence on the still-life painter.13 Even in the case of early Cubism, Einstein did not describe the objective motif as a precondition for Braque’s still lifes but, on the contrary, characterized his painted worlds of things as emanations of mental processes, as conceptual images. His friend Einstein’s summa aesthetica presented Braque’s art as a pictorial criticism of existing reality, a manifesto of human freedom and morality.14 The middle-class ego was overcome by the artist’s hallucinations; humanity escaped from its rationalistic alienation, and cast off tradition and civilization: ‘This was where Braque’s later pictures displayed their extraordinary human significance; in them, mental forces could operate more freely and in a non-committal way, and the visionary was liberated from conventional identifications, from ordinary observation.’15 Whereas the positivist middle-class mainstream treated vision and hallucination as subjective fictions, Einstein – occasionally with (mostly tacit) reference to Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud – discovered the psychological truth of the pictures produced by Braque and some of his contemporaries, their relationship to reality beyond the
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illusory realia of logic and science. And so Einstein came to realize the truly universal significance of Braque’s later works in particular, which in the author’s hands became the symptoms of a fundamental revolution in the way the world should be seen. They restored the original power of art, and their potential for change reinstated magical qualities that had long been considered lost.16 At the well-nigh apotheotic end of his treatise, Einstein referred to what he saw as the ability of art to invert the once mimetic relationship between image and reality, and adjust the latter to the former: ‘To situate Braque’s later work psychologically, it is important to know that it grew out of an incongruity between vision and rational reality, between the premonitions of the soul and the mechanized ego, and that Braque ultimately refused to submit to conventional reality, demanding instead that reality be adapted to vision. But this totally altered the importance and significance of the artist’s position and that of the artwork; instead of the picture being an interpretation of the given world, it now called for reality to be transformed in accordance with the rules of vision.’17 Einstein’s book on the work of Georges Braque was a philosophical blueprint for the world, a statement of basic anthropological principles extending far beyond the narrow boundaries of art and aesthetics. But it was still a book about art, for in the early 1930s Einstein continued to see the still lifes, landscapes and figure paintings produced by Braque and his Cubist-Surrealist peers as crucial instruments in the aesthetic and political revolution that he demanded and – polemics notwithstanding – propagated in pugnacious, emphatically assertive terms. Yet this treatise, written during the years of global crisis and published in exile, was the last thing Carl Einstein would write on the visual arts. With Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, the escalating economic and social conflict in France and the ever-bloodier civil war in Spain (which he would eventually become personally involved in as a combatant), Einstein felt a growing sense of disillusionment. His despairing attack on the European intelligentsia (another kind of suicide), Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen (‘The fabrication of fictions’), which was not published until after his death, would demand a very different and deeply pessimistic approach to the reality of his life.18
A Hermetic Te x t and its Obscure Transl ator As far back as the early 1920s, Einstein had insisted that a work of art should shatter existing realities, and create new worlds and new people. At the time this could still be interpreted as a metaphor – although even then Einstein probably meant this more literally than many of his readers suspected. Yet it was to become, in the living reality of the Paris diaspora, a political and social necessity that eventually consumed his
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entire personal existence. Seen from this perspective, the book on Georges Braque can perfectly well be read as an existential litany against an estranged life, crying out for change, for a revolt against reality as man suffers it, a metamorphosis of even his own world. In Einstein’s doubt, indeed his desperation, he tortures himself with an often redundant mass of text, starting over and over again in an effort to wring out a suitable expression for the all-important relationship between art and the reality that is to be overcome. The book was initially written in German; the manuscript has survived in the author’s estate.19 Yet Einstein evidently did not attempt to find a German publisher for the work, even though this would still have been possible in the early 1930s – instead, he was primarily aiming at readers in his new linguistic environment. And so the book, which in the manuscript is entitled Über Georges Braque und den Kubismus (‘On Georges Braque and Cubism’), appeared in a French version with quite a few linguistic peculiarities of its own. To begin with, the first edition has a different arrangement of chapters from the manuscript – a decision that was surely not made by the translator, but undoubtedly by the author. A striking stylistic feature is that the convoluted sentence structure of the German version is retained throughout; Einstein’s predilection for ellipses is respected, his bold metaphors are often rendered literally, his neologisms and ‘dizzying conceptual equilibrations’ (Wilhelm Hausenstein) are just as often imitated by French equivalents. 20 In addition, the text displays a markedly nominal style, as well as the unusually frequent repetition of the personal pronoun on (‘one’), which typifies Einstein’s idiosyncratic style of writing, especially at the beginning of sentences; there are also occasional grammatical errors in the published version, starting with the very first sentence (‘L’effondrement de la culture et des conventions eurent [should read: eut] pour effet ...’). 21 None of this suggests a French translator working separately from a German author. At all events, no attempt was made to achieve the ideal of a translation that would read like a text originally written in French – on the contrary, every line of the book suggests a work originating in a foreign linguistic environment. The book was rendered into French by an obscure translator called ‘M. E. Zipruth’ (the ‘M.’ may be an abbreviation of Monsieur) – of whom, remarkably, there is no further trace in the publications, documents or archives of the time. However, this may be the same person as Edouard Ciprut, who translated a text by Josef Strzygowski into French in 1932. 22 Nevertheless, and despite considerable efforts, nobody has so far managed to identify anyone with the name of ‘Zipruth’, or even discover a pun in it, or an anagram that would shed light on its meaning. One therefore cannot help wondering whether the translator’s name is fictitious, a mask for Carl Einstein himself – at least as the main contributor. What is also suspicious is that the author’s letters at the time make no mention of the lengthy work that such a translation would have entailed, whereas he often refers to the laborious process of finally getting his book written. Furthermore, the language in which the printed version of the Braque text is couched strikes today’s readers as so
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peculiar that the publishers of a new French edition dated 2003 decided to have the text retranslated from the German manuscript – an absurd decision, for the reader can then no longer hear the voice of the original, the voice of Einstein, who at least authorized the French text, even if he may not have been mainly responsible for it. 23 Indeed, the strangeness and awkwardness of the text, with its hermetic thickets of often tortuous phrasing, cannot be blamed on poor translation; these were already there in the German manuscript, and are entirely due to the author’s complex reasoning. In all likelihood Einstein had resolved either to tackle the migration of his work into the language of exile in person (probably with the help of a friend – perhaps even one called ‘Zipruth’ / ‘Ciprut’) or at least to fight shoulder to shoulder with the struggling translator. In his letters, Einstein wrote an idiosyncratic, highly idiomatic, expressive French which – just like his German – was full of wordplay and neologisms, and by no means free of errors. The French version of the book, which must have been produced around 1933 and was originally to be presented at the Basel exhibition, is thus also a linguistic reflection of the author’s exiled status: a hybrid of German syntax (full of meandering subordinate clauses) and French semantics, with none of the elegance and clarté that an experienced translator would doubtless have brought to it. But the price to be paid for this might well have been a reduction in complexity – a price Einstein was evidently unwilling to pay. 24
A Linguistic Battlefield Einstein’s stay in Paris, which in 1933 turned into political exile, is marked by a growing fear of losing touch with his mother tongue. The author’s letters from Paris and his increasingly resigned self-questionings in the late 1920s and the 1930s reveal a lucid view of his situation. For every poet, the day-to-day use of spoken language is not just a succession of communicative acts, but an existential cornerstone: ‘always living in a foreign tongue’, Einstein lamented in February 1932, despite his great fluency in French, ‘is sooner or later fatal’. 25 A much-quoted note dated 18 February 1933 soberly records the moment when the loss of his language coincided with loss of his homeland, the moment that marked the watershed in the drama of his exile: ‘A Jew, German-speaking, in France. A Jew without a god or a knowledge of our past, German-speaking, yet determined not to let the German language slip away, as my compatriots and co-linguals are so lazily and tiredly doing. In France, i.e. without readers. / From now on I will briefly converse with myself each day; for I have long been entirely cut off from books in my own language and the people that speak it. I will never feel at home in French poetry; for my dreams and musings are in German. So now, because of Hitler, I am condemned to utter homelessness and foreignness.’26
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Loss of language has been a recurring lament in the literature of exile ever since anti quity. Its main victims are writers, whose whole existence depends on their contact with language. 27 Indeed, it sometimes seems as if the elegy for lost language is one of the last genres in which exiles can let their voices be heard one more time. Since 1928 the poet Carl Einstein had lived in exile, torn away from a second self who, at the same time and in the same place, wrote his texts on both past and present art and drew up aesthetic theories, at first seemingly without concern. In Einstein’s book on Georges Braque this inner conflict that raged within him and threatened to be his undoing was fought out on a linguistic battlefield: German, in which he felt at home as a poet, and French, which never became second nature to him even though he published his works on art history and theory in that language, battled within him to create a haunting image of his exis tence in exile. In the letter to Ewald Wasmuth written on 28 November 1931, Einstein even mentioned the possibility of giving up writing altogether: ‘And now I finally want to finish off this aesthetic [i.e. the Braque book]; I’ve had enough of it, and the arty-smarty book that I still have to write will be my last. I’ve had enough of it, I’m sick of it, and of theories too. We’ve been pasted over with this wallpaper quite long enough. Unless things seriously change, Mr Einstein is going to stop writing.’28 And indeed, after 1933, once it became clear to him that his freely chosen departure from Germany had turned into permanent exile, Mr Einstein did stop writing; or rather, he only wrote for a very small, isolated audience – himself. His prolix manuscripts from the 1930s, which remained unpublished during his lifetime, above all Fabrikation der Fiktionen, and his constantly reformulated notes on a world art history, as well as his futile attempts to finally complete his second, autobiographical novel, bore witness to a literary monologue that refused to end. 29 It was, of course, in language that he, as a writer, recorded his experience of life in foreign parts: the increasingly resigned tone was ever more clearly marked by isolation and ineffectiveness, loss of mother tongue and premonitions of death. As an art historian, he at first placed his hopes in the power of works of art, whose ability to change the world he conjured up for the last time in his book on Braque. But in the end even his friend’s art could not save him. In 1936, in an existential act of self-liberation, Carl Einstein went to Spain to fight on the anarchist side in the Civil War; and in 1940, fleeing from German troops after the fall of the Spanish Republic, he took his own life.
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Transl ating Art History, Transmitting Humanitas Mingyuan Hu
Let us think, in juxtaposition, about a liberal dimension in the histories of critically engaging with art history by what we call humanists in Europe, and by what we call lite rati in China. Let us do so through contemplating one specific act of translation by a man of letters living between Paris and Shanghai in the 20 th century. When Fou Lei (1908–1966) set out to translate Hippolyte Taine’s Philosophie de l’art (1865–1882) in 1958 Shanghai, he was returning to a book of which he had, whilst a student in 1929 Paris, translated a chapter.1 It was thus a translator’s self-translation; the fifth of six times, to be precise, that he re-translated one of his own translations. 2 This, as he told his publisher in 1959, was to present to his readers ‘a comprehensive history of Western art hitherto unknown in our country’. 3 True in Fou Lei’s opinion, it was also an apologia for the censors. The renowned critic, translator, and public intellectual had been persecuted in early 1958 during the Anti-Rightist Movement (ill. 27). Not allowed to publish (except under a pseudonym, which publishers suggested but he rejected) and bereft of income, Fou Lei carried on with his work. The act of translating Philosophie de l’art as planned, amidst bottomless incertitude, was one of defiance. That by then anything ‘Western’ was deemed suspect did not deter Fou Lei’s choice. Nor did the Great Famine, which began in late 1958 and which left an already diminished man a physical wreck, stop him in his tracks. Fou Lei’s first draft of the translation was finished in early 1959 and, without delay, corresponding with the editor he negotiated each detail of its publication, the use of illustrations in particular. Not until 1963, sixteen months after the translator’s ‘rightist’ label was lifted, could this rendition of Philosophie de l’art, lectures delivered by Taine a century earlier in Paris, be released.4
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27 Fou Min: Fou Lei in Shanghai, 1961, photography, The Fou Family Trust
Taine’s distinctive voice was heard in a distinctive tone. Fou Lei was, since the late 1930s, the most accomplished stylist in translating French literature in China. The translator defined the volume of his choice as ‘a work of art history’ as opposed to ‘a book on art theory’, a categorisation intended by the publisher on the strength of its title. In his letter, Fou Lei wrote: ‘The so-called “philosophy of art” [...] was the opinion and method of the author when he explained the history of art; indeed, he used the history of art to attest his theories on art. Eighty percent of the work discusses painting and sculpture, fifteen percent literature, and five percent architecture and music. Part I is but a prologue to Parts II, III and IX; only in Part X does theorisation dominate. […] Therefore, when People’s Literature publishes this book, even under the heading art and literary theory, you are in effect publishing, concomitantly, a history of Western art’. 5
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Fou Lei’s professional self-identity, as his visiting card in the 1940s implied, was ‘critique d’art’. His preferred discipline, had he accepted the invitation to teach at Tsinghua University in December 1949, would have been art history, the subject he had taught at Shanghai Art Academy (1931–1933) but not on offer at Tsinghua. Establishing serious art historical research in China was a Republican project which Cai Yuanpei, chancellor of Peking University (1916–1927) and former student of Karl Lamprecht at Leipzig (1908–1911), initiated and with which Fou Lei was associated. In a different China, now Communist, towards the end of his 1959 translator’s preface to Philosophie de l’art, Fou Lei, ideologically censored, employed Marxist critique, at once a political imperative and indicative of late-19th and 20 th century attempts at toppling Hegelianism: ‘Today we see Taine’s shortcoming as quite something else: though he tried hard to unveil the constituent elements of spiritual culture, the epochs and milieux that he revealed are limited to thoughts, sentiments, morals, religions, politics, laws, and customs – in short, everything in the superstructure. He did not touch upon the basis of the society. Observing every facet of human life, he yet neglected, or did not stress enough, its most fundamental aspect – economy. Be the material of Philosophie de l’art so rich and be its argumentation so thorough, one is left with the impression that it is incomplete – and here is the reason. From ancient Greece to medieval Europe, from 15th century Italy to 16th century Flanders and 17th century Netherlands, this book has not illustrated the relation between base and superstructure. The prosperity and decline mentioned by the author only describe social phenomena on the surface. The author thought these phenomena a mixed result of politics, law, religion, and national characteristics; he did not recognise forces of production and relations of production to be the society’s principal motor.’6 Dry and constrained, this was the flip side of an impassioned preface by the same translator, published in 1929 to accompany a translated chapter of the same book. 7 Fou Lei’s interwar criticism of Taine, namely his determinism and his disregard for the creative process of the individual artist – of both of which the ‘correct’ Marxist model is no less guilty – now quieted. The translator ended by justifying why he nevertheless introduced this ‘limited’ work: ‘But other than its one-sidedness and incompleteness, Taine’s research in the small realm of the superstructure provides reference for further discussion. Historically and scientifically grounded aesthetics may still be in need of major amendments and supplements, yet Taine at least made the first step.’8 In 1929 Fou Lei had asserted that Taine’s positivist méthode was a shortcoming, but one which paradoxically provided remedy for a China devoid of scientific scholarship – the flawed ‘first step’. As China was presumed to be behind on a linear, progressive march to modernity, scientism which accompanied modernisation was presumed to be a necessity. Interlinked premises, coloured by Darwinism and Hegelianism combined,
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28 Unknown photographer: Fou Lei in Paris, 1931 (photograph sent by Fou Lei in July 1931 to Elisabeth and Raymand Berguerand), The Berguerand Family Archive
and internalised by Chinese intellectuals since the turn of the century, stayed with Fou Lei. As far as art history was concerned, he saw millennia-old literati art criticism as failing to explain why art in China was the way it was. This need for explanation was gratified when he read Taine, who not only explained readily in causal terms but who did so with a belle-lettrism that Fou Lei, versed in a comparable tradition in classical Chinese, relished.
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In effect, I see Taine’s apparent shortcomings as having never really bothered Fou Lei; not in 1929, still less in 1959. The introduction – or indeed, experimentation – carried out by the translator was of a separate order. Not a single sentence stayed the same from his 1929 to his 1959 translation of Taine’s first chapter. The 1929 execution, though clear, exact, stylish, reads ‘translated’; not all syntactical arrangements were comfortably worked out. Fou Lei was twenty-one. This confident undertaking – the book would have been translated and published in full had the young man not been distracted by life in Paris – was simultaneously a project of self-education, where he taught himself French, art history, and writing (in vernacular Chinese) at the same time (ill. 28). After three decades of sustained self-education whilst translating for a living, Fou Lei delivered an infinitely more limpid, judicious, refined rendition. Not a word redundant. Not a beat out of place. Rhythm, colour, form, cadence, all present, immaculate. A merciless selfredemption. Now it sounded like Fou Lei speaking with concision and with precision, as would have done Taine, lecturing at the École des beaux-arts. As we read Fou Lei’s interpretation against Taine’s French original, fine prose writing in two languages unfolds in parallel. To ‘explain’, one needed an explanatory language. Under the guise of ‘science’, Taine explained largely by way of metaphor and analogy. An art was for him testimony to a civilisation, and vice versa. Visual evidence complemented his interpretation of a culture, and vice versa. Within the framework of presupposed Zeitgeist and Volksgeist, Taine’s approach to art and history recalls Winckelmann and Hegel, of whose purely metaphysical analysis he was critical. And yet, looking at Greek temples Taine saw ‘not the work of overexcited imagination, but that of lucid reason’, after judging medieval churches precisely such a work of ‘overexcited imagination’ in a previous chapter. 9 We have here a self-fulfilling argument. We have many self-fulfilling arguments from Taine – and internal unresolvedness. That things are similar does not mean that they are representative of a singular, whole truth; that they are related does not lead to one thing being the cause of another. Nonetheless, with erudition and eloquence, Taine could persuade and seduce, constructing his système of a cultural history based on extensive learning, in a manner one would today call interdisciplinary and of a nature humanistic. Nearly all the ‘empirical’ evidence with which Taine built his ‘positivist’ analysis came from close, personal reading. Multilingual, he devoured English authors in the original, and read Hegel in German before some of the latter’s work was translated into French. Versed in Greek and Latin, he was in accord with such preceeding humanists as Boileau about the interrelation between speaking, writing, and thinking. Unpacking the ‘conditions’ of painting in Renaissance Italy, he regarded its writers’ language which ‘became noble as it became clear [...] Style became all of a sudden exquisite, and spirit all of a sudden mature’, suggesting all were part and parcel of a meteoric feat.10 Language, like painting itself, was for Taine an entry into a milieu and a moment, through the understanding of which he sought in turn to understand art and literature’s histories.
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‘ THEY are Purists...’ Regularly reduced to his own rigid formula, Taine was in fact far more astute than is assumed. On Greek religion he reflected: ‘[…] in poetic language as in transparent water, the indissoluble sequence of facts and the indestructible demarcations of things reveal themselves. Today our sciences concede them, and the Greek notion of destiny is no more than our modern concept of law. All is determined – what our formulae pronounce, their divinations foresaw’.11 Not a million miles away was Wittgenstein when he later said that really one should write philosophy only as one would a poem.12 Taine, who whilst discussing painting in the Netherlands was happy to digress (‘I stood often on the banks of the Scheldt, gazing at the pale water, languidly wrinkled, where black hulls floated. The river glistens. Here and there on its flat belly, murky daylight ignites hazy reflections’13), was wary of language as a tool and as a subject. ‘Almost all our phi losophical and scientific vocabulary is foreign’, he wrote, ‘[f ]or us to use it well, we need to know Greek and Latin. More often than not, we use it poorly. This technical vocabulary has inserted many words into everyday conversation and literary style, and so we speak and think today with terms cumbersome and unwieldly’.14 Primordial to huma nist scholarship was philological learning, itself an historical enquiry. Again not unlike Wittgenstein, Taine thought about language in spatial terms, and did so with a sense of historical distance marking the humanists’ relation to antiquity: ‘Compare the first and most vigorous of education, the one given by language, in Greece with ours. Our modern languages – Italian, Spanish, French, English – are patios, deformed remnants of a beautiful idiom which a long decadence has ruined and which importations and combinations have come to distort and disturb still more. They resemble edifices constructed with the fragments of an ancient temple and with other materials gathered at random. Indeed, it is with mutilated Latin stones joined in another order, with pebbles on the way and rubbles of plaster, that we have built the structure in which we live, first a Gothic castle, now a modern house. Our intellect lives there, for it is used to it. But with how much more ease the intellect of the Greeks moved in its dwelling!’15 Where Taine wrote ‘Notre esprit y vit’ (‘Our intellect lives there’), namely in the modern house built with fragments of stones, pebbles and plaster, Fou Lei translated ‘我 們的思想在我們的語言中能夠存活’ (‘Our intellect can survive in our language’). A slight difference there may be between living and surviving. In reality, the question of linguistic deracination was sombre for the translator. Taine’s contemplation struck home: Chinese had been transfigured as a written language since Fou Lei’s birth, and deteriorated in the years leading to his death. The transfiguration came with a literary revolution (1917) – following a political one (1911) – which propagated replacing classical with vernacular
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Chinese. That Dante wrote Divina Commedia in Italian and not in Latin sufficed for certain Chinese élites to regard the vernacular as regeneration and heritage as decay; that classical learning was embraced with critical fervour in trecento and quattrocento Italy was facilely missed. Reasoning in a rush, post-revolutionary descendants of a newly deceased scholar-official class legitimised an iconoclastic condemnation of their supposed cultural baggage. At once cosmopolites and patriots, they wanted a Renaissance for their country, deeming the latter dead, or dying. If things did not quite add up here perspicaciously, they did psychologically, given several generations’ acute anxiety vis-àvis sustained foreign threats and domestic chaos. Being a literatus, politically impotent though he may be, meant taking responsibility for his nation’s direction. Fou Lei was of the last generation to have still received a classical education; he was self-consciously spearheading the making of a new language. Written words, for two millennia in China, were the élite’s means of ameliorating a world order which they had made humanistic. This order collapsed. Self-imposed duty remained. Translating one’s chosen literature was one way of surviving a suicidal rebirth – that of rebuilding a self-destructed house. Not that this house was doomed; it was precarious. Hypotheses may hold no place here, but this proposed project of a cultural renaissance, by all means earnest, would not have died as horrendous a death if not for the Maoist reign which drove it to an early grave. In a Tainean vein, we consider how language behaved in this process. Analogy does work wonders – think about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). What happened in China linguistically after 1949 resembled precisely the fictional Newspeak. With speed, printed words turned almost exclusively propagandist, sloganeering. Through its language policy, the government succeeded in eliminating critical concepts and freethinking, like in a fiction. Remnants of classical Chinese, which had animated and enriched vernacular experiments in earlier decades, were forbidden: Oldspeak, so to speak. Chinese became ugly; impoverished and staggeringly ugly. In 1963 Fou Lei wrote to René Étiemble (1909–2002), sinologist and chair of comparative literature at the Sorbonne, whom he had met in 1957 Shanghai: ‘At last, my works of the past five years begin to be published one by one: Balzac’s Rabouilleuse and Taine’s Philosophie de l’art having been released, I intend to send you a copy, as these translations might help your students in learning spoken Chinese and the modern (written) style, of which I am considered one of the rare purists today.’16 Fully aware was he of where he stood, from the position of his language, in relation to everything. Taine thus described men and women of letters in Italy and later France: ‘[They] are acquainted with Greek and Latin literature, […] they know history and are versed in philosophy, […]. Moreover, be the matter strenuous and be the dispute fierce, they retain always gallantry of expression. They are purists, as are the fine speakers of Hôtel de Rambouillet, contemporaries of Vaugelas and founders of our classical literature’.17
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History, literature, and philosophy weighed equally for the educated. For cultivated men and women in China from around 500 BCE on, literature, properly done, was history, and vice versa; their own arts were to become poetry, calligraphy, and painting. When Taine said, ‘for a man to appreciate and produce great painting, he must first of all be cultivated’18 he could have sat in a room with Song writer-politician friends of Su Shi and with Petrarch’s immediate followers in Italy, who all argued for painting to be an intellectual activity – its appreciation and its production – and for whom art and literary criticism were twin practices, where entwined notions of ingenium and virtue found articulation in disparate times and places, through named or unnamed programmes of liberal arts. Separately, humanists and literati addressed incessantly the dignity of man. A savant of classical and modern learning, dubbed a ‘son of Voltaire’ and admired for his honnêteté, Taine operated in a public sphere in France after the revolution. Fou Lei, a self-proclaimed child of the New Culture Movement (dubbed the ‘Chinese Enlightenment’), an old-school literatus at heart, intervened in a post-revolutionary society, taking seriously the public rôle of translator as cultural transformer even after a public realm ceased to exist. In matters political, Taine came close to classical liberals such as Tocqueville. The young Fou Lei studying in interwar France was profoundly taken by Taine’s scepticism of the revolution and by his liberal conservatism. Both defended the fundamental freedom of the individual. Re-translating Taine, after another few wars and under another regime, Fou Lei, half a lifetime older, effected his linguistic maturing and affirmed his intellectual standing.
‘ We Chinese are like this!’ With a sense of lineage Taine painted in Philosophie de l’art his vision of Greek civilisation; with a sense of kinship Fou Lei handwrote, in 1961, his unpublished translation of Taine’s chapter on Greek sculpture for his son Fou Ts’ong. The pianist, newly exiled to London, had conversed with his father about Hellenism. Their correspondence having halted in the thick of their political plights, a resumed dialogue flew in the sky of ancient Greece. Annotating his own translation – à la literati who annotated their readings as a way of extending an historical conversation, their annotations becoming part of the literature – Fou Lei announced with childlike excitement, after Taine’s comment on the richness of ‘fallacious arguments and paradoxes’ from antiquity: ‘Our Spring and Autumn, Warring States and Pre-Qin were like this’.19 When Taine wrote ‘It is an order, Kosmos, a harmony, a refined and orderly arrangement of things which subsist and transform themselves’, Fou Lei wrote ‘This outlook on the universe and on nature is completely in line with that of the ancient Chinese’. 20 When Taine said ‘Later, the Stoics compared the universe to a great city governed by the best laws. There is no place here for gods incommensurable and vague, nor for gods despotic and devouring. Religious giddiness does
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not enter healthy and balanced minds which conceived a world such as this’, Fou Lei said ‘We Chinese are like this!’ 21 The Chinese were not like this. Not in Fou Lei’s China of 1961. Taine’s account of the following would have resonated more with the actual state of affairs: ‘Masses of people wiped out, monuments ravaged, fields devastated, cities gutted, industry, fine arts and sciences mutilated, degraded and forgotten; everywhere fear, ignorance and brutality scattered and entrenched. […] In the eleventh century, forty out of seventy years were those of famine. […] Cannibalism had come to pass […] memory of the past aggravated the present misery; the few thinking beings, who still read the ancient language, drearily sensed the immensity of the fall and the depths of the abyss into which the human race had sunk for a thousand years.’ 22 ‘The Chinese’ were what Fou Lei believed they used to be, and what he thought they ought to be. For why learn, if not to become better human beings. And yet precisely the human was now missing. In his manuscript for Fou Ts’ong, copied out in elegant callig raphy (ill. 29), Fou Lei, whose eyesight was failing, underlined the following: ‘In Greece, institutions are subordinated to man and not man to institutions. Man makes institutions a means and not an end. (ill. 30)’ 23 Taine did not doubt his philosophy to be history, whilst his history mingled with political commentary. History here was the humanist’s alibi, with whom he thought critically about the present. To read a fellow humanist’s writing was to enter a shared space of historical memory and critical reflection, as was to translate it. Through Taine’s romantically tinted ancient Greece, Fou Lei’s views on contemporary politics – specifically, on the relation between political confusion and poor education – were communicated. Note, again, his emphatic underlining: ‘It takes fifteen years for a writer to learn to write, not with genius, for this cannot be learned, but with clarity, coherence, rectitude and precision. […] If he has not done so and wishes to debate questions of right, duty, beauty, the State and all the great concerns of man, he gropes around and flounders about; he gets mixed up with big vague clichés, commonplace tones, abstract and tedious catchphrases. About this you can look at newspapers and the speeches of popular orators. This is especially the case with intelligent workers who have not gone through a classical education; they are not masters of words and, thus, of ideas. They speak an expert language which is not natural to them and which disconcerts them; this is why it clouds their minds.’ 24 Two months later, writing that ‘nothing influences the way of thinking more strongly than our language’, Fou Lei resounded the author he had translated. 25 Like-
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29 Fou Lei: ‘Sculpture in Greece’, Part IX of Hippolyte Taine’s Philosophie de l’art, title page of manuscript translation copied out for Fou Ts’ong, 1961, The Fou Family Trust
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30 Fou Lei: ‘Sculpture in Greece’, manuscript translation with annotation and parts underlined for Fou Ts’ong, 1961, The Fou Family Trust
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wise heard are echoes of Confucius: ‘He who does not study poetry knows not how to speak.’26 On poetry Taine wrote: ‘When we wish to imagine lyric poetry, we think of the odes of Victor Hugo or the stanzas of Lamartine. It is for the eyes to read, or recited softly at most to a friend, in the silence of one’s study. Our civilisation has made poetry the secret of one soul speaking to another. The poetry of the Greeks was not only delivered audibly but declaimed, sung to the sound of instruments and, much more, mimed and danced.’ 27 The poetry of the Chinese, too, was once declaimed. Fifty years after Fou Lei’s death, I asked Fou Ts’ong about his father’s musicality. Slowly the aged musician said: ‘I remember the summer days when it was very hot. He would take a rest from work and ... rest ing on a bamboo bed, he would chant ... ancient poetry. ... It was immensely moving.’ 28 ‘The remaining verses are only fragments; accent, gesture, chant, sounds of instruments, the stage, the dance, the cortege, sundry accessories – everything that equals poetry in importance has perished.’ 29 For the perishment of Greek civilisation thus sketched by Taine (‘péri’), Fou Lei used ‘一去不復返’ (‘once gone, it returns not’), words from a Han chronicle and a Tang poem. 30 In 1931, leaving Paris for Shanghai, Fou Lei confided in Jean Daniélou (1905–1974) that he feared, above all, the loss of ‘notre civilisation spirituelle’ (of China’s ‘spiritual civilisation’). 31 Where Taine ended his chapter on ‘Sculpture in Greece’ with ‘we arrive at the empty space which is yet recognisable, where its pedestal was raised, and from where its majestic form has gone’, Fou Lei annotated in 1961: ‘The author refers not only to Phidias’ Pallas – the statue of Athena has long been broken, and the entire tradition of Greek sculpture long lost.’ 32 Writing to Fou Ts’ong who delighted in the manuscript, Fou Lei again likened Periclean Athens to Pre-Qin, Jin, and Six Dynasties: ‘Such an era, once gone, will never come back, like the lovely phase of a child growing to be an adolescent.’ 33 The phrase ‘一去不復返’ returned, as he matched the myth of Greece as a childhood lost with his own of a China bygone. Fou Lei’s love of his country and his disconsolation had to somehow reconcile. They reconciled in a contrapuntal cerebration considered and forlorn. Proposing art history as a humanistic discipline amidst a humanitarian calamity, in 1940 Erwin Panofsky observed: ‘From the point of view of determinism, the humanist is either a lost soul or an ideologist. From the point of view of authoritarianism, he is either a heretic or a revolutionary (or a counterrevolutionary). From the point of view of “insectolatry”, he is a useless individualist. And from the point of view of libertinism he is a timid bourgeois.’ 34
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31 Fou Min: Fou Lei and Zhu Meifu in their study, Shanghai, 1965, photograph, The Fou Family Trust
Under this grim light, we look again at Taine, ‘a brave pessimist’ in the eyes of Nietzsche but accused as ‘bourgeois’, ‘reactionary’, and ‘counterrevolutionary’ by his contemporaries and their derivatives alike; and at Fou Lei, ‘un grand lettré libéral’ in the eyes of a left-leaning Étiemble but denounced as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘rightist’ by a totalitarian system. Resolvedly sceptical, neither Taine nor Fou Lei was affiliated with a political party. In 1963 Fou Lei wrote to his son: ‘Countless have been those charged on unaccountable grounds throughout history; not even Galileo, Voltaire, and Balzac were spared, let alone an insignificancy like me.’ 35 And the translator’s reaction was none other than continued self-cultivation and proud resignation (ill. 31). Evoking the ‘darkness of total domination’ in preceding decades, ‘in which whatever goodness there may still remain becomes absolutely invisible and therefore ineffective’,
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Hannah Arendt said of Karl Jaspers in 1958, ‘even then reason can be annihilated only if all reasonable men are actually, literally slaughtered’. 36 In the summer of 1966, at the outset of the Cultural Revolution which saw millions of good and reasonable men and women actually, literally slaughtered, Fou Lei and his wife Zhu Meifu hanged themselves. Before doing so, they left a calm, factual will, so that all accounts were settled; and placed a thick blanket under the stools on which they stood, so that neighbours would not be disturbed in the quietness of night: ‘Read, in Racine […]. Violent may be their passion, Hermione, Andromaque, Roxane and Bérénice maintain the tone of gentility. Dying, Mithridate, Phèdre and Athalie speak seemly phrases. A prince must keep his presence till the end, and die in solemnity.’ 37 During his last years, a mortally ill outcast, Fou Lei did not stop working. I see him at his desk in 1958, eight years before his eventual death, when misfortune befell, and when the translation of Philosophie de l’art began. Was it not Burckhardt who quoted an exiled humanist as saying, ‘Wherever a learned man fixes his seat, there is home’? 38 Banished and confined in his country which had become barbaric and foreign, to which he had returned from Europe thirty years previously, re-translating his beloved youthful reading of art history, Fou Lei looked for the light that once illuminated his being. Like many before him, he was a receiver and giver of light – a spark went on to illumine, through his translation, in another language space; a transmitted space making bearable living and dying.
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Seductive Foreignness Gottfried Kinkel at University College London Hans Christian Hönes
In 1853, the German émigré Gottfried Kinkel gave the first ever lecture in art history at an English university (ill. 32–33). The reactions to his lecture series at University College London were by no means unanimously positive. No other than Karl Marx wrote a scathing letter, dated 17 April, to his friend, the German-American architect Adolf Cluss where he reported: ‘Sweet Gottfried sucked up so successfully to the administration of the university that they allowed him to repeat his old lectures on medieval Christian art for a London audience in a hall of the London University. […] He lectures in an abominable English, reading out a manuscript. While greeted with applause first, he fell flat completely over the course of his lecture. […] Edgar Bauer, who was present – Kinkel gave his first lecture last Tuesday – has reported extensively to me. It must have been truly piss-poor miserable.’1 Most commentators spoke, however, much more favourably about Kinkel. An article in the German émigré-newspaper Deutsches Athenäum even stated that the lecture ‘exceeded all expectations’. 2 British commentators like Henry Crabb Robinson echoed this verdict and wrote that the lecturer ‘succeeded better then I could expect’; the audience was ‘delighted’ and the lecturer ‘admired’. 3 It is safe to say that Kinkel’s performance actually was not half as bad as Marx (who apparently did not even attend in person, but relies on hearsay) suggests. The deeply hostile tone of the letter might already indicate that the relationship of Kinkel and Marx was strained for other than Academic reasons. 4
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32 Advertisement and Syllabus of Gottfried Kinkel’s University College London Lectures, in: The Literary Gazette, 9 April 1853, p. 1
In one respect, however, all observers did agree: the lecturer was not in full command of the English language. Marx’s verdict that he spoke an ‘abominable English’ seems, for once, not completely unfounded. Even Kinkel himself conceded publicly, at the end of his last lecture, that he ‘has still to struggle against [the] language’. 5 The set-up of the lecture theatre did not help either; in a letter to Charles Caleb Atkinson, the university’s secretary, Kinkel complained: ‘I had a little difficulty in reading the lecture the former day, as the gas light comes from a certain height upon the papers.’6 The article in the Deutsches Athenäum confirms this impression: ‘Of course one recognises that Kinkel is still very much fighting with the English language and that he cannot express the wealth of his thoughts fully in this idiom.’ Slightly relieved, the reviewer concludes that over the course of the lecture the fascinating content more and more eclipsed the weak deli very. 7 Yet, his linguistic shortcomings may not have been entirely to Kinkel’s disadvantage. According to the Deutsches Athenäum ‘they made more of a “juicy” than unfavourable impression on the English audience’. 8 This remark suggests that the delivery had an almost exotic appeal for the locals who attended the refugee’s lecture. At the same time, however, the reviewer emphasises the accessibility of Kinkel’s teachings and the great efforts he made to adjust the content to the expectations of his London audience. While the German author of this article was very pleased by the ‘original and completely German manner’ of Kinkel’s lecture, he admits that, in order to succeed in front of an English audience ‘the German philosophical form has to be shoved aside completely and be replaced by a clear, intelligible form of expression’. 9
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33 Unknown artist: The London University, 1827–1830, etching, 12 × 20 cm
The lecture certainly was not, as suggested by Marx, a mere translation of Kinkel’s old lectures that he had delivered before his exile, as professor at Bonn University. Though parts of the content remained the same, he translated his (German) teachings not only into English, but also to a new register of style in order to tailor them for his new audience. However, while adjusting the skopos of his lecture to the expectations of his English audience, Kinkel took at the same time great care to make allusions to his own continued ‘Germanness’, fashioning himself with a specific ‘migrant identity’. By doing so, Kinkel probably made a virtue out of necessity: his accent and linguistic shortcomings identified him as an immigrant anyway. His self-translation and acculturation was, as I am going to argue in the following, intentionally fragmentary. Kinkel deliberately used his ‘foreignness’ to gain the attendance of his audience. His hints to his German origin – linguistically as with regard to content – were also meant to transport implications about his personal biography and the public role that Kinkel, a major celebrity of his time, had in his country of origin.
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Reconstructing Voices Kinkel’s extremely well-documented case provides one of the rare occasions where we can reconstruct the role of the spoken word in the process of self-translation, normally inaccessible before the invention of recording devices. The available sources encompass not only comments by contemporaries, such as the ones just quoted, but also Kinkel’s manuscripts; annotated by our lecturer with numerous pronunciation notes, they give insight to the quality of his spoken English.10 This allows to analyse and to evaluate the ephemeral audial aspect of his self-translations, and to take the performative qualities of his lectures into account. Although comparatively unknown and (at least outside of his hometown Bonn) largely forgotten today, Gottfried Kinkel was one of the more colourful and prominent art historians ever.11 His status as a 19th century celebrity had, however, not much to do with his academic achievements, though he was widely regarded as one of the pioneering exponents of a cultural historical approach to art history.12 In fact, even his art historical career was sort of a by-product of other far-reaching shifts of his biography. Originally trained as a Protestant theologian, he pursued an academic career in this subject – until he fell in love and married with a divorced Catholic poet and musician, Johanna Mathieux. The scandal was enormous – and Kinkel was not able to pursue his theological career any further. But as he had already lectured several times on Christian archaeo logy, and the chair for art history at Bonn University (one of the earliest of its kind) happened to be vacant, the university agreed that he transferred to the School of Philosophy where he took up a post as ‘Professor of Modern Literature, History of Art, and Culture’ (‘Professor der Neueren Kunst- Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte’) in 1846.13 This career, however, was meant to last only about three years. In the wake of the German revolution of 1848/1849, Kinkel began another career as a Socialist politician and journalist.14 When the revolutionary movement took up arms to fight the Prussian authorities actively, Kinkel joined a regiment in Baden. During the Battle of Durlach in 1849, he was wounded, captured, and sentenced to life in Spandau prison. In the wake of these events, Kinkel became nothing short of one of the most prominent exponents of the Democratic cause.15 This was also due to the fact that, apart from being an academic, he was also a very popular poet and playwright whose late-Romantic, slightly pathetic dramas and poems, mostly on legendary German heroes such as ‘Otto der Schütz’, were veritable bestsellers of his time.16 The culmination point of these dramatic occurrences was finally reached in 1850 when he managed to break out of prison and flee to England, where he subsequently started a successful career as a teacher and lecturer for, among other subjects, German, history, geography, and – art history.17 Having thus only lived in English-speaking countries for little more than two years (his stay in Britain was interrupted by a lengthy journey to the United States in 1851/1852, in order to lobby and fundraise money for the German democratic cause),
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Kinkel’s struggle with a foreign tongue is probably understandable, especially given the fact that he apparently did not speak a single word of English before his exile.18 During his first year in the United Kingdom, he still lectured mainly in German, for a largely German audience. At this point, the customers that booked his courses on topics like modern German literature and history were to be found predominantly among the wealthy German communities in cities like Manchester. His lectures took place at German clubs and societies (such as ‘the German Verein of the Athenaeum’), and only ‘a few English ladies and gentlemen, were present’ on these occasions.19 Where he had to speak publicly in English (e.g. during his journey to America), he always read out from a manuscript, while he spoke freely in German. 20 Most of the time, however, he was speaking ‘in front of a German audience in a foreign land, and […] speaking to them in the German language’. 21 In order to overcome this deficit, Kinkel invested tremendous amounts of work in language acquisition, as documented by the correspondence with his wife. 22 This extended to the whole family: his children were naturally sent to an English school in order to facilitate their learning of the new language. 23 Letters to their father had to be written in English, too, in order to practice constantly. 24 The latter might be the most striking example for the Kinkels’ relentless attempts to acculturate themselves in Eng land. 25 These efforts paid off quickly; after a comparatively short period of time, Kinkel had acquired a level of (written) English that allowed him to write compelling academic lectures in the foreign tongue. Judging from his 1853 lecture manuscripts, Kinkel’s mastery of the written word was impressive. He was in full command of the English language – at least on a purely grammatical level and with regard to the vocabulary. Apparently without difficulties, he drafted sentences, altered their grammatical structure, and replaced formulations with more fitting words (ill. 34). This includes also relatively unusual vocabulary: ‘gutters’ is replaced by ‘waterspouts’, and ‘torrents’ by ‘rivulets’. 26 His language is admirably nuanced and rich. The shape of the manuscripts clearly reveals that Kinkel was able to form sentences freely, to alternate his vocabulary and to bring fragments and discarded formulations in the right grammatical order. It is difficult to say how much help Kinkel had in conceiving these texts. Only once in his diary, he mentions that he ‘revised the lecture’ with a certain Miss Hering – apparently an established German family in London that helped the Kinkels in many practical respects. 27 But the share of such helpers was probably not too large. The lecture notes show clear traces of an immediate notation and numerous instances of an instant reworking of the formulations: obvious errors like ‘Parthenon’ when he wanted to write ‘Pantheon’, for example, were corrected immediately; many passages show traces of a hesitant gestation of the sentences and of several successive alterations of the word order. All this clearly suggests that this was the one and only draft of the manuscript, written off the cuff, probably only with a few headwords noted down beforehand.
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34 Gottfried Kinkel: Fourth Lecture (The Arts in Italy), Bonn, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, S2705, p. 3
This fluency with the pen did not, however, extend to his spoken word. Even though the great Victorian diarist Henry Crabb Robinson noted that Kinkel’s ‘English & the delivery were both remarkable’, the testimonies of most other ear witnesses suggest that this was only partially the case. 28 As already indicated, the lecture notes themselves provide the most compelling evidence for this fact. On the margins of his manuscript, Kinkel repeatedly noted the phonetic spelling of numerous words (ill. 35–36). To give just a few examples: beneath the word ‘mediaeval’, he wrote – in German script – ‘medi-
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35 Gottfried Kinkel: The Arts during the Middle Ages, manuscript, pronounciation note (‘medihwal’), Bonn, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, S2705, p. 34
36 Gottfried Kinkel: The present State of the Arts, manuscript, pronounciation note (‘ßatteir’), Bonn, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, S2707, p. 7v
hwal’; beneath ‘crooked’ he noted ‘kruckid’; ‘gala’ is transcribed as ‘Gähla’, and ‘choir’ as ‘queir’. ‘Aeschylus’, ‘admirable’, ‘favourite’, ‘anger’, ‘rescued’, among many more, are all equipped with a superscripted ‘ä’. It was thus not only in the case of difficult words like ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘mediaeval’ where the pronunciation is indeed not completely intelligible to a foreigner that Kinkel needed hints and aids to pronounce his lecture at least approximately correct and understandable. Even very common words like ‘cannon’ or ‘anger’ troubled him. Such a discrepancy between written and spoken English is an experience shared by many other exiles, also from later generations – Ernst Gombrich probably being the best-known example. Although known for his brilliant and often very idiomatic English, Gombrich’s spoken language, clumsy, labored, and defective, with a thick Viennese accent, was often ridiculed and impersonated. 29 It seems as if these exiles, well versed in the classical languages, acquired their English more as a sort of Latin – as a language that they mastered perfectly in written form, but struggled to handle orally.
Identit y Politics Kinkel’s foreign descent was thus unmistakably clear to his audience, and he made no attempt to hide it. Repeatedly, he addressed his status as an émigré directly. More than once Kinkel praises the ‘kindness of [England’s] disposition towards science in foreign countries’, noting it as quite extraordinary that ‘an English audience should confer so
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much favour on a foreigner’. 30 Right at the end of his last lecture at University College London (UCL), he emphasises that ‘I was independent in my own country, and I hope to remain it during the time also, that I shall be compelled to be an exile on this hospitable island’. 31 He explicitly reminds his audience of his political status – although the hope for a continued independence is probably only partially true. In reality, Kinkel very much hoped for a less independent, permanent position at UCL or another British institution. 32 Over the course of his lecture, he stressed repeatedly that no English university had a permanent lecturer for Fine Art – and that this would be quite a poor record for such a culturally rich nation as the United Kingdom: ‘You have a National Galery [sic], a British Museum, a Flaxman collection, and no public lecturer is appointed to instruct your lower classes how to see and how to understand what art is!’ Only a few pages later, Kinkel bemoans again: ‘None of the celebrated universities in England has a professorship on the History of Art.’ 33 Although such passages have at times the begging quality of a desperate job pitch, they also serve another purpose: Mentioning his ‘independence’ as well as his status as an exile allows Kinkel to recall his heroic past as a rebellious spirit who stood up against the feudal Prussian authorities. When he says that he is speaking in ‘a language of which two years since I did not understand a single word’, he also reminds his audience of what he actually did two years ago, and where he was – namely, in Spandau prison. Nobody in the audience was not informed about this fact: Kinkel’s prison break had been, as already mentioned, a gigantic media event that was also well covered by English newspapers. 34 Some of them, as the radical newspaper The Leader, even published poems of dubious quality celebrating the occasion: ‘Kinkel is free! / A beaker full of wine, / Fresh from the rocky Rhine! / Brave Kinkel, health to thee! / With beating hearts, and eyes / Moist with glad tears, do we / Shout back the welcome cries, / “Kinkel is free!”’ 35 Kinkel was a household name in England as well, ‘with whose reputation as a professional scholar, and his adventures in the recent political struggle, most of our readers are acquainted’ (as a newspaper wrote in 1852). 36 Earlier condemnations by the press who wrote of the ‘democratical scoundrel called Kinkel’ who was denounced as ‘a disreputable atheistical professor’ surely only increased the attention that his arrival in England attracted. 37 Given this reputation, one might readily argue that Kinkel had no choice than to keep referring to his German descent – and not only because his origin was so unmistak ably audible in his delivery. After all, his Germanhood shaped his personal and political identity prior to his exile decisively. He was one of the best-known advocates of the nationalist cause for a united Germany. During the first years of his British exile, his political ideals remained the leading incentive for Kinkel’s actions; his public role was so prominent that Jenny Marx even called him, again with a hostile undertone, the ‘future President of the German republic’, insinuating that this was Kinkel’s purely egoistically motivated, vain aim. 38 Such claims were not too far fetched; Kinkel was undoubtedly one of the leaders of the German democratic opposition in England – a fact that was also one of the
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main reasons for Marx’s envy: here the successful public orator, there the bitter man, sitting isolated and neglected in the British Library, writing Das Kapital. 39 Kinkel’s academic agenda was also closely connected with his nationalist aims. To write ‘a cultural history of my people’ was the self-declared ‘academic goal of my life’. 40 And even in his early years of exile he defined himself first and foremost as citizen of a ‘Greater Germany’ whose current exile is just a waiting state until the political tide turns.41 This somewhat backward looking attitude changed quickly – and so changed his mission to write the ‘cultural history of my people’. In front of a British audience, his allegiances shifted remarkably, and already the possessive pronouns indicate that it became quite unclear which country he was belonging to. Especially at the beginning of his second lecture, Kinkel takes great pains to emphasise that Germans and Britons are both offsprings from ‘the same Teutonic race’.42 In other instances, he writes nevertheless of ‘our Velleda’ and ‘your Boacidea’, thus ascribing the respective Celtic heroines to either the British or the German nation.43 Most of the time, however, his formulations are much more inclusive; in a passage where he first considered to speak of ‘our races’, in the plural, he subsequently changed it to ‘our race’, leading it back to ‘our common forefathers, the Teutonic tribes’.44 In other cases, he was apparently ambivalent on how far he can go. First he wrote about ‘our Witenagemot’ (the Anglo-Saxon gathering of noblemen that was often seen as a precursor of British parliamentary democracy). In this case, he backed off, crossed out ‘our’ and changed it to the more neutral indefinite article: ‘the Witenagemot’.45 A similar uncertainty about national attributions can also be observed in artistic matters. Again, he speaks of ‘your Milton’, ‘your Wilckie’, and, as opposed to that, of ‘a countryman of mine, Mr. Ramboux’, or of ‘my own country’, the Rhineland.46 He is especially outspoken in taking an outsider’s perspective in the passages already quoted, where he bemoans the insufficient funding of the Arts by the Bri tish state, and the lack of an art historical education in British higher education. In many other instances, he is nevertheless confident to talk of a shared art historical heritage that belongs to him, the German, and his British audience alike: ‘our sculptors’, ‘our painting’, ‘our parks’. This is especially prominent when speaking about institutions: ‘our British Museum’, ‘our National Gallery’, ‘our Flaxman Gallery’.47 Where appropriate, he clearly stylized himself very much as part of the culture of his country of exile.
Self -Transl ations What I wanted to demonstrate so far is that Kinkel constantly shifts between assimilation and identification with his host country on the one hand side, and frequent allusions to him being a refugee who hopes to return to his own country one day, on the other hand side. It seems that Kinkel consciously and deliberately played with such a Janus-faced identity politics, shaping his migrant identity. Even where this self-trans-
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lation borders the translation of the self, and thus the ‘becoming of an other’, blurring his former, German self, he does so with a certain irony and tongue in cheek.48 In this vein, he started his first lecture with a quote by an ‘ingenious German poet’, who wrote about the ‘poetry of the Grave’ being first discovered by the Germans.49 The said person, not named in the lecture itself, is apparently no one else than Kinkel himself; the sentence, translated to English in his lecture, can be found in his own book Geschichte der bildenden Künste. 50 This camouflaging of his own quote might readily be understood as a quite humorous self-praise through the back door, maybe still intelligible as an insider joke for those members of the audience who knew his German writings. In the printed book, as in the lecture, this quote marks the beginning of a chapter on the Roman catacombs and Early Christian Painting. Though the general outline of the respective passages is rather similar (and can thus be identified as a direct self-translation), the gist of his interpretation differs remarkably. This holds weight for some of the facts, but especially for the tone of the lecture. What is a sober, scholarly discourse in the printed form becomes a high-pitched, dramatic narrative in his lecture at UCL. The alterations are subtle but far-reaching. When discussing who was buried in the catacombs, Kinkel writes in his lecture: ‘They had been used already to throw the dead bodies of slaves and proletarians, and the first Christians in the Metro polis of the ancient world, who most of them belonged to the lower order of society, selected those for their hidden burial places.’ The German book just stated: ‘Auch pflegte man in sie die Leichen der Proletarier, Sklaven und Verbrecher hinabzuwerfen um sich ihrer rasch zu erledigen.’ 51 The English lecture counts the Christians among the criminals and poor outsiders of ancient Rome, and thus suggests that the catacombs were an otherworldly place for the lawless and persecuted lower classes. The introduction of such a latent class struggle in ancient time sets the tone for his description of the Christian use of the catacombs. While Kinkel mentions in his book quite soberly that ‘these rooms were, during phases of persecution, also a temporary abode for the living’, he exaggerates this fact significantly in the lecture: the ‘subterranean kingdom of death’ becomes a ‘dwelling place for the living’, implying a more permanent, not just temporary abode underneath the surface. 52 The catacombs are described as a ‘Labyrinth’; the ‘Christians took refuge in these intricate passages, most of which were quite unknown to their heathen enemies’, underscor ing the division between here and there, above and beneath ground level. 53 In his lecture, the ‘Stadt der Todten’ becomes an inhabited parallel world ; dramatically, Kinkel evokes how ‘in the dead of night they sung their psalms, unheard by the persecutor who trod the ground above them’. 54 One has to admire the dramatic quality of Kinkel’s account, providing an exciting and quite entertaining narrative. Whether this was also an accurate and academically sincere account is a very different question. Whilst Kinkel acknowledged in his book (correctly) that many of the catacombs were official burial sites, often used by subsequent generations of the same
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family, he gives the narrative a more illicit and cruel gist in his lecture. In his book, he even writes that most of the decorations were made in ‘peaceful times’, for example under the 3rd century emperor Severus Alexander who tolerated Christianity and its public practice. 55 These hints to a coexistence of Christians and heathens, both using the catacombs at the same time, are all but omitted in his lecture. Such discrepancies suggest clearly that Kinkel bended the facts knowingly, in order to emphasise the violent, subversive struggle of Christianity and to turn the historical events into a more compelling and dramatic story. His lecture also shows a clear tendency to personalise his research: in the Geschichte, he acknowledged that our knowledge of the catacomb paintings is decisively shaped by Early Modern illustrations; although many of them are old and very inaccurate, they are the only available documentation of the often-ruinous originals. This means that ‘we have to content ourselves with a, all in all, very insufficient idea’ of their original condition. 56 In his English lecture, however, Kinkel boasts that ‘during my stay in Italy’ (which he undertook in 1837/1838, aged twenty-two) he ‘visited several times these first abodes of a persecuted creed’, and thus has first-hand knowledge about them. Speaking from a subjective ego-perspective, Kinkel recalls his own ‘deep emotion at the sight of these silent graves […] this […] battlefield, where ancient Rome was conquered by the cross’. 57 Christian history and personal biography are blended in the subsequent musing about the fact that ‘every faith is sure to overwhelm its enemies’ and that ‘ideas conquer the world by martyrdom’. 58 By claiming this fact to be the ‘great truth of modern times’, Kinkel probably alludes, once again, to his personal ‘martyrdom’ and political struggle for an idea, aligning his personal fate with the historical cause of Christianity. 59 One might readily find this slightly pathetic – but it was certainly rhetorically effective. The different genres of the two texts (book publication vs. lecture notes) cannot explain this difference in style. A comparison of both texts with the academic lectures Kinkel gave at Bonn University is very instructive. While some of these lectures (e.g. Geschichte der christlichen Kunst, 1843; Kunstgeschichte der modernen Völker, 1846– 1847) discussed the same topics as the Geschichte der bildenden Künste, their style was, again, very different (ill. 37). Even more than the book, these lectures are characte rised by a very clear structure, divided into chapters and subchapters, which are in turn structured by paragraphs (e.g. ‘§1 Einleitung, 5. Perioden, 1. Altchristl. Kunst […]’, or ‘I. Altchristliche Kunst, §1 Anfänge, 1. Anfänge der Baukunst […]’). 60 One should keep in mind that Kinkel’s book, conceived as a textbook for students, was marketed as being written for a rather broad readership, ‘in allgemein verständlicher Fassung und Sprache’.61 The lectures at Bonn University, on the contrary, targeted unmistakably an exclusively Academic audience. Their level of erudition clearly shows Kinkel’s academic roots as a theologian. His manuscripts are saturated with quotes in Latin, Hebrew and Greek, and many references to the relevant literature – whole chapters are devoted to the review of the current state of research. The opening pages of his 1846 lecture on
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37 Gottfried Kinkel: Lectures on the History of Christian Art, manuscript, 1843, Bonn, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, p. 8
early Christian art, for example, contain quotes from authors such as Apuleius, Origen and Clement of Alexandria – all, of course, in their original language. The same can be observed in the case of other lectures, such as one on the history of Netherlandish Pain ting (1846–1847). Kinkel quotes not only lengthily from primary sources, documenting
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the commission of artworks such as Rogier van der Weyden’s Miraflores triptych. He also makes extensive references to current research literature by authors such as Domenico Fiorillo, Gustav Waagen, or Johann David Passavant.62 In sum, the manuscripts for his German university lectures show a degree of erudition that is completely absent from his English lectures. In its popular appeal, the UCL lectures thus were in many respects closer to the printed, popular textbook than his German academic teaching.
Seductive Foreignness This might indicate how academic this first university lecture in art history in England was – namely, not very much so. As far as we can reconstruct it, his audience at UCL was not very academic either. The lectures were an extracurricular event; when Kinkel applied for them, the Senate of the University objected that the students would be too busy to attend such a series. Art history, it seems, was just not deemed a proper academic subject; the Senate referred to the Royal Institution as the place where the subject was already taught, which should suffice to satisfy the educational needs of the public. 63 The prediction of the Senate was only partially correct. Kinkel’s lecture drew ‘a crowded attendance’ – but attracted indeed hardly any members of the university. 64 According to Henry Crabb Robinson, Kinkel’s audience consisted of ‘many Germans, and many ultra liberals’ – ‘but few professors, few of the Counsel’. 65 The majority of the audience seems to have consisted of a group that was, from a Victorian perspective, even more un-Academic. Women made up the lion’s share of Kinkel’s audience. As his friend, the German writer Malwida von Meysenbug wrote in a letter to Kinkel: ‘You’re absolutely right to rely on the women.’66 His reputation among the ‘fair sex’ was indeed hard to surpass – and not exactly built on his excellence as an academic. There are uncountable reports marvelling at Kinkel’s physical features and appearance: the tall, slender figure of the ‘exceedingly attractive’ professor, his piercing blue eyes and the well-groomed beard, at the age of thirty-eight still in a dark black hue, were much admired (ill. 38). 67 This attractiveness combined with the reputation of a rebellious spirit who fought for his ideals with gun in hand apparently sufficed to draw large crowds to attend his lectures. Quite characteristic for these high expectations young women had about Kinkel is the exclamation by an American student to her piano teacher. Excited to attend the first of Kinkel’s lectures at UCL, she sighed ‘I think I shall fall in love with Dr. Kinkel!’68 Although lecturing in a new social setting, Kinkel was thus able to draw on a well-established, tried and tested behavioural stereotype: by staging himself as the virile male professor, teaching a seemingly impressible female audience, he was reasser ting the sovereignty that he might have lost due to his linguistic shortcomings. Kinkel clearly capitalized on his infamous reputation – slightly dangerous, and heroic at the same time – even more so, I would argue, when speaking in front of an exclusively
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38 Gottfried Kinkel in Chains, in: The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, vol. 1. New York 1907, p. 246
female audience. In fact, lectures at the numerous newly founded female colleges were one of his main sources of income. In one of his most popular lectures, On the origin of Art, read for the first time in 1854, he did not fail, again, to allude to his past, equally heroic and tragic and in any case a good romantic subject. 69 Speaking about the merits of art, being an ornament that improves our life, he contrasts this with a scenario as the following:
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‘The worst suffering of a prisoner is that he finds himself deprived of all elements of art, that no sound of music penetrates in to his ear, that the colourless walls stare at him in a monotonous whiteness, that his thirsty eye nowhere discovers a graceful outline to soften the melancholy corrosive action of his thoughts.’70 Again, it is not hard, given the dramatic emphasis of the description, to imagine that his listeners readily took these sentences as informed by the personal experiences of the famous professor. In the following years, Kinkel made a very good living by targeting precisely this type of popular audience: Women’s colleges, institutions for public learning, and private salons were his main turf. The impression he made concurs with the dramatic, populist tone that became apparent in the style of his lecture. To quote just one, quite representative review of one of his performances, published in 1854 in the Reading Mercury: ‘This lecture proved that Professor Kinkel is quite master of the art in which so few thoroughly succeed, that of popular lecturing. In listening to him you become irresistibly interested in the subject, and perhaps even still more so in the vigorous and manly personality of the lecturer, which both voice and gesture reveal. His voice, for example, is strong, of considerable range, very flexible, and thoroughly under his control: he manages it indeed remarkably well, bringing fully out by natural change of tone the finest touches of humour, pathos, and beauty, with which his lecture abounded; his action too is easy and graceful; indeed he has a good deal of the orator about him, and is an impassioned and effective speaker.’ 71 Kinkel had mastered the English language more than enough to give a rhetorically impressive and suggestive performance, particularly attractive for a broad, popular audience, although his accent must have been prominent still. By now he clearly lived up to the level of oratory that he was famous for in Germany, praised even by many of his political and personal enemies. 72 Reviews of his speeches and lectures were full of superlatives, praising his exquisite rhetorical brilliance and unsurpassed power of persuasion. Kinkel’s voice was called a ‘force of nature’; his lectures were judged nothing less than ‘captivating’. The abovementioned attractiveness of the lecturer, again, had its share in creating this impression. 73 Kinkel was certainly aware of the impressions he made on his audience; he knew that his ‘reputation rested more on practice than theory’, more on his heroic and rebellious past than on academic brilliance. 74 That he was willing to cater for these lurid expectations was not the least one of the reasons that drew scorn from less successful and popular exiles like Karl Marx. As seen in the case of the UCL lectures, Kinkel adjusted the content of his art historical lectures in his self-translation into English and dropped the academically accurate German style of lecturing in favour of a livelier, dramatic rhetoric.
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The rhetoric chosen matched Kinkel’s romantic and adventurous life story, to which he alluded repeatedly. In many respects, he seems to have made a virtue out of necessity: the lecturer’s accent was identifiable anyway as a migrant’s voice, a sonic palimpsest that carries the reminders and melodies of one’s mother tongue. It is hard to judge whether this was unavoidable, or whether Kinkel, as so many migrants, consciously cultivated a linguistic distinctiveness that resisted complete convergence. 75 Even in his native German, he seems to have retained a strong local Rhineland accent throughout his life. Intentional or not, Kinkel embraced his Germanic migrant identity and allowed his biographical experiences to shine through his historical account. While this is, on the one hand, an example for a successful and nuanced self-translation of academic content, it also opened, on the other hand, the door for a more porous acculturation on a biographical level. Kinkel was playing with his status as an émigré. This strategy was ultimately facilitated by the fact that exploiting his life story also allowed him to reassert a hierarchical power balance by drawing on a pronouncedly masculine self-fashioning that peppered his performance on the platform.
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Identit y, Voice and Transl ation in the Life and Work of Leon Vil aincour Linda Sandino
In the autumn of 2003, I began what was to become a twelve-hour life history recording, conducted over several months, with the painter Leon Vilaincour (1923– 2016) at his home and studio in West London, for the National Life Stories collection at The British Library (ill. 39).1 Initially, he refused the invitation. Having read through the list of previously recorded British artists who had taken part, he replied by letter to say that he did not fit into what seemed to him the national character of the collection. Not unsurprisingly given his background, as I will show, an acknowledged commitment to alterity was to become a prominent aspect of Leon Vilaincour’s narrative both in relation to its content, and the mellifluous pitch of his non-British accent, a sonic palimpsest of continental European linguistic frequencies. As the sociologist Anne Karpf has noted of the voice: ‘Even before I open my mouth to speak, the culture into which I’ve been born has entered and suffused it.’ 2 Significantly therefore, at the start of his oral history, Vilaincour stated the name of the city where he was born, but provided its two alternative pronunciations for an English listener: Kraków in Polish, Cracow in English, setting us off on the journey through his complex past and present circumstances. Inspired by Vilaincour’s strategy of combining figures in his paintings who never met in real life, in this essay I bring the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s (1913–2005) concept of narrative identity and his work on translation to meet Leon Vilaincour, both of them explorers of the conditions and ethos of plural identities, which for the latter began in Galicia, southwest Poland. Vilaincour was born into a city that was the centre of Polish cultural and artistic life. From 1846 to 1918, it had been part of Austrian Galicia, a territory of the Austro-Hun-
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39 George Newson: Leon Vilaincour, 1992, photograph, London, Lebrecht Photo Library.
garian Empire, in whose army Vilaincour’s father had served as an officer. In 1923, Galicia was officially ceded to Poland, but its geographic location in the south-west meant that it retained its position close to Austria and, fatally, to Germany. Vilaincour’s parents came from families of assimilated Jews, and as a boy he attended both Catholic and Jewish schools. 3 His father, Zygmund Pauker met his future wife, Gustawa Löffelholz, in Vienna where she was training as a Court dressmaker, subsequently setting up a family fashion house with her sisters in Cracow, with links to Parisian couture, such as the house of Lanvin.4 One of Vilaincour’s paintings, Jean Pierre Latz / Jeanne Lanvin pays tribute to his fascination with the furniture craftsmanship of the 18th century and haute couture of the twentieth (ill. 40). As familiar with Paris as Cracow, Vilaincour was fluent in Polish and French and equally attuned to their specific but intermingled cultures. This
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40 Leon Vilaincour: Jean-Pierre Latz / Jeanne Lanvin, 1993, oil on canvas, 121.9 × 111.8 cm, London, Southbank Centre, Arts Council Collection
binary was shattered in 1939 when aged sixteen he found himself stranded and exiled in England to which his mother had sent him for safety, attending a Jewish boarding school in the English seaside town of Hove, before going on to the Central School of Arts and Crafts where he continued his studies after the War, and met his future wife, the artist Roberta Cameron Smith. For the next sixty-seven years, London became his home, with Chelsea College of Art where he taught from 1950–1987, providing him with a ‘very special community’ of fellow artists. 5
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Narrative and Linguistic Identit y The principal aim of these biographical details is to emphasize Vilaincour’s national and ethnic plurality: Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, England, Catholicism, Jewishness, German all contributed to the distinctive narrative voice and identity of Leon Vilaincour, articulated in the specific context of a British Library interview (but to an equally ‘plural’ interviewer). While telling about ourselves is clearly an identity narrative, what is the distinctive capacity of ‘narrative identity’? The work of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur provides the guide to thinking through the question of identity, not as fixed and immutable, nor as the dispersed and schizophrenic subject of postmodernism. Instead Ricoeur proposes narrative as the means whereby the dialectic of change and sameness can be reconciled: ‘The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.’6 This is not to say that everything told is therefore a fiction, but that the mimetic capacity of narrative is able to construct, sustain and interpret the self not only to others but also to oneself, configuring and reconfiguring ‘change [and] mutability, within the cohesion of one lifetime’. 7 Narrative can weave these entangled stories and selves, making concordance from discordance, discovering discordance in what seemed to be ordered in which the life history subject ‘appears both a reader and writer of his [sic] life’, a self who is ‘instructed by the works of a culture that it has applied to itself ’. 8 At the beginning of his recording, Vilaincour described his disinclination to undertake a life history in terms that go straight to the heart of the problem of autobiographical remembering, the agonies of traumatic recollection and the concept of a coherent narrative about the self: ‘[…] for someone like myself it isn’t straightforward or agreeable to go through an autobiography. It’s not a matter of hiding anything, but unlike a person whose life is fairly steady from beginning to the present time, people like myself have really had what is almost several incarnations in one existence due to one’s circumstances, and that makes it very difficult and sometimes painful if one has to recount earlier phases of life because they wouldn’t be just simply memories. One would have to almost physically live oneself back into things one would only feel equanimity about if they actually belonged to somebody else’. 9 It is striking that Vilaincour describes his experiences as neither ‘straightforward ’ nor unique: ‘someone like myself ’, ‘people like myself ’, but equally significant, he testifies to the ‘several incarnations in one existence’ of the plural subject. The apparent organizing strategy offered by chronological sequence is of course often subverted as interviewees offer parenthetical anecdotes, explanations that lead to other narrative threads, all of
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which are woven together throughout the narrative tapestry in answer to the question: ‘who are you?’10 From the start Vilaincour hints at the various threads that make linear narratives problematic. Remembering the past and accounting for it in a narrative mode also takes on the problem of the representation of the temporal dimension of a lived life that enables ‘the configuration of time in narrative and its refiguration by narrative’.11 However, rather than the balm of nostalgic reminiscence of the scenes of yesteryear, Vilaincour articulates an anxiety about remembering a painful past which is not ‘simply memories’; instead, he comments on how ‘one would have to almost physically live oneself back into things’, how memories contain a living dimension that continues into the present and the future. This aspect of recollection is what subverts chronological consistency, and the claims about the linearity of autobiographical discourses; instead the narrative weaves together a contingent coherence from the various voices and scenes of the past. A key aspect of Ricoeur’s philosophy of the subject was to examine and challenge the concept of autonomous individuality, thereby to underscore the ethical function in which the self can act with and for others. Starting with the grammatical function of the personal pronoun, noting the distinctive variations of the French soi, the German Selbst, the Italian sé and the Spanish sí mismo, he remarks on how the French soi is ‘directly defined as a reflexive pronoun’.12 Vilaincour’s sense of his experiences as plural – as one of others ‘like myself ’’– is taken up at the end of the passage quoted with his suggestion that the pain of reliving the past could only be undertaken with any ‘equanimity […] if [it] actually belonged to somebody else’, reinforced by his consistent use of the indefinite pronoun ‘one’. Although it would be possible to link this to a modest disposition, I would like to suggest that there is another element of linguistic selfhood at work in this particular use of ‘one’, which links it to the French reflexivity denoted by both soi and se, a language in which, as noted, Vilaincour was entirely fluent.13 As Ricoeur famously noted: ‘To say self is not to say I’; the self (soi) is elaborated in and through his/her actions and their analysis in the narrative.14 Thus, the philosopher Richard Kearney explains the means of narrative: ‘The idealist romantic self, sovereign master of itself and all it surveys, is replaced by an engaged self which only finds itself after it has traversed the field of foreignness and returned to itself again, this time altered and enlarged, “othered”. The moi gives way to the soi, or more precisely to soi-même comme un autre.’15 Ricoeur noted that ‘to speak is already to translate’, and the life history recording affords interviewees the opportunity to interpret/translate themselves to their interlo cutor and to subsequent listeners.16 The soi that unfolds discovers and re-discovers itself through the signs and stories that give rise to thought. The detour of the self through the other is a fundamental aspect of Ricoeurian ethics which, as I shall argue below, is
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reflected not just in the life history but also in the paintings of Leon Vilaincour. However, I want to emphasize that this engaged self, the self that has ‘traversed the fields of foreigness’ can be heard in the voice of the spoken text. Although the transcript of the recording can provide some access to the ‘who’ of Leon Vilaincour, and also to a literary conception of the authorial voice in the text, his actual speaking voice and his accent were an equally important element, and one that anyone meeting him would have encountered as an inextricable characteristic of the personhood of Leon Vilaincour. What was his accent? French and Polish, perhaps some German, with English at the level of words and at the level of sentences, but undoubtedly continental and European at the level of culture. In recollecting his life as a boy in Cracow, he describes the city: ‘[…] like a smaller Prague, and of course we were all part of the Austro-Hungarian empire since the end of the 18th century. So Vienna is, was, up to a point and maybe still is, absolutely dominant in the influence on people’s lives, on people’s little gestures – you know kissing a lady’s hand – and you had to say in a garbled German, the words “ kiss [küss] die Hand” […] as a child [laughs] and you were told to click your heels together […] and our habit of coffee houses was very much Viennese. All kinds of things were Austrian’.17 Vilaincour identifies specific cultural habits of a vanished world of small, everyday courtly performances, which are not just used here as memories but translate that context for the listener: what it meant to live in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and acquire its habits. Given Vilaincour’s reticence and restrictions in talking about the past except as it might emerge in discussing his works, literature was an area that we both felt might be free of painful memoires. His evocative account of Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) reflects the dream-like quality of the search, or quest for a lost world, which the novel itself poetically produces. Describing the story, Vilaincour notes how ‘nothing is ever clear about that book’, the first part is like ‘part of a dream’, ‘ghostly, a shadow’. Fournier seems, in Vilaincour’s estimation to be writing about purgatory, as though ‘reliving – as if the existence was lived through people with whom a person would have been in contact… so that whatever such a person might have done or experienced… is act ually through the opposite side of the dialogue’.18 It is telling that this description echoes the reasons Vilaincour gave earlier in the recording, quoted above, as his reasons for his ambivalence about recording his life history: ‘One would have to almost physically live oneself back into things one would only feel equanimity about if they actually belonged to somebody else.’ While the description of Le Grand Meaulnes is a key to how loss and recollection function in Vilaincour’s narrative, it is in his discussion of the significance of Polish poetry that his affinity to a plurality of expression is made explicit:
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41 Leon Vilaincour: A Life, 1984–5, 1984 –85, oil on canvas, two parts, each 172.2 × 122.2 cm, London, Tate Britain
‘I have a lot of Polish poetry, which really feeds me a great deal because it’s a wonderful language. It’s so flexible and so utterly unpredictable. The grammatical parts of sentences can be split up, the words can be divided – […] and you take parts of these, maybe a root less, but certainly prefix and suffix, and you can attach them almost at random. You can take a part maybe of a noun and you can attach it to a verb, or to an adverb or an adjective, and it can change the entire sense of sentence. I believe some other East European [languages] – Hungarian I believe is like that; German to a much lesser extent. From what I’ve heard the further you go west in Europe, the more rigid language is and it’s un-adapted to these very fluid divisions and reassembling, so Polish poetry is very important to me.’ 19 Fluid divisions and reassemblings are discernable in the disposition of Vilaincour paintings where nothing is literal (ill. 41). Instead, as the artist Miles Murphy wrote of them: ‘There is a sense of mystery and sombre romance as if the first thing known about each painting was its mood and style. The subsequent activity, slow and elaborate, would seem to be mainly one of identifying: identifying that which exists or brin
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ging into existence the tenuous relationships between the wayward and evanescent appearances and that which is permanent and essential.’ 20 In an echo of Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as made up of both the ephemeral and the eternal, Murphy places the paintings exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in 1983 (all from the Artist’s collection) in their European setting with their motifs that range across Austro-Hungarian, French, Polish politics, applied arts, cultural materials and customs: newspapers, cafes, accordions, epaulettes, letters. Friends and family members, as well as emblematic individuals of European history from the Carolingian Gothic to Napoleon Bonaparte to cultural figures of the 20 th century such as Stefan Zweig, intermingle in the Vilaincour visual penumbra. As he explained in his recording, his aim was to ‘try to paint as if nothing had happened since the 19th century’. Inevitably the contents and themes of these works puzzled British audiences. Absorbed in his own ‘language’, there was no shared narrative, or history adding further poignancy to Vilaincour’s refe rence to the ‘special community’ at Chelsea School of Art in a letter to the artist Prunella Clough. Expressing surprise and disappointment at the negative reception of his exhibition at the New Arts Centre, London, in 1960, Vilaincour reflected on the situation at the time: ‘I thought that a work which had been made in virtual isolation and which was nonconformist that it would at least interest someone, but soon, I realised, in any case it was pointed out to me that it was time when it was very important here [in the UK] to establish a national image and – an image that would be at least a match if not a rival to America […] so that made sense to me. There was no need for things which diverge. [This disappointment] certainly never stopped me working but if anything made me go more even – because I’m a social person, but in my work it made go even more into my private world which to some extent became [pause] impenetrable. That’s a very dramatic word to use, but it was like that […] I didn’t admit any visitors into my world of thought.’ 21 While critics have commented on the trope of exile and loss in Vilaincour’s paintings, how he has ‘suffer[ed] a double separation – not only from the past cultures but also from the past itself ’, one could argue that this is a common narrative shared across cultures, not just Europe. 22 The works however serve no didactic purpose, even though, it could be argued, they belong to the genre of history painting, not history as celebration but history as a palimpsest of disappearing objects and people. In A Life, 1984–5 Vilaincour included in the top right, left panel, an inscription in both Polish and Ukranian from a short story which he felt summarized the subject of the painting: ‘Perhaps one day they will return, master and horse’. He did not include the final sentence that follows: ‘But they never did’ because the paintings are the sites of their return. 23
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So far I have tried to show the plurality and diversity that obtains in both Vilaincour’s account of his life story as well as how this is present in his artworks in which the conscious act of remembering pays tribute to individuals, events and motifs of a distinctively European history. Both also configure a private history that is reassembled from fragments and traces, painting a ‘world of phantoms’, including symbolic images such as storks, ‘as one would see in Austria, Poland, Italy, France, Belgium’ signifiers of ‘coming back to life, coming back to normality’. 24 Despite my emphasis on the plural, cultural and linguistic contexts and experiences of Vilaincour’s narrative identity, his increasing privacy is also an important self-characterization linked to his sense of territory and space. The recording took place in his studio, made up of the two main rooms at the front of a Victorian house: ‘I feel very secure in it, almost to the extent that sometimes my impression is that if anyone comes through the front door, they are going into a place, which is extraterritorial, and, before the EU, I would have thought that people would have to get a visa! [laughter].‘ 25 Later in the recording, he expanded on this extra-territoriality by claiming: ‘I’ve always felt very private as a human being and as a painter. I’m very glad about it, actually. One could so easily slip into [pause] a membership. […] there is only [one] criterion which I forever would want to stand [by] with paintings but with other things, and this is that relationships, human relationships I want and must have only as oneto-one; and that affects everything in me, politically or whatever. There are even bits of vocabulary which I – I can’t stand words like community, social [pause] multi – This modern world which implies larger than oneself. It doesn’t mean that one wants to become egocentric, but I reject being amalgamated, and the sense of one-to-one keeps my distance and my dignity.’ 26 The concept of the masses is of course linked to the ideologies of totalitarian regimes against which the concept of extra-territoriality asserts an immunity, an exemption from ‘territorial jurisdiction in which [an individual or a space] are physically located’. 27 This extraterritoriality is threaded through the narrative defining its limits, the borders and rules by which it is configured: ‘I’ve always felt that my place was not strictly speaking justified here. I appreciated everything and still do, but in a way it’s sort of extraterritorial.’ 28 As Vilaincour stated about the figures in his paintings: ‘I decide who is a friend […] I make my own order.’ 29 His rejection of the mass/multi must not be read as a rejection of the social and the rhetoric of the collective; as noted above, his conception of ‘one’ is the self-reflexive of the French ‘soi’. Moreover, Vilaincour’s espousal of the ethos of dialogue, the one-to-one, signifies his absorption in the history of specific others: ‘The agents […] of an action are caught up in relationships of exchange which, like language, join together the reversibility of roles and the nonsubstitutibility of persons. Solicitude adds the dimension of value, whereby each person is irreplaceable in our affection and our esteem.’ 30
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Transl ation and Linguistic Hospitalit y Languages and the cultures from which they emerge and which they construct and sustain have played an important role in the Vilaincour life history, but as noted above another register of identity is the speaking voice. Many people retain their distinctive accents despite having lived away from their homes for a number of years. Whether this is a conscious or unconscious choice it is not my purpose to analyse; what I aim to propose is the identity effect of retaining an accent that remains ‘foreign’ to the host country. The linguist John E. Joseph has pointed out that, ‘[w]hat is meaningful in linguistic utterances [extends] far beyond their propositional content’. A linguist ‘is interested in all those features of utterances which hearers use to “read” facts about the speaker – geographical and social origin, level of education, gender and sexuality, intelligence, likeability, reliability, and trustworthiness and so on’. 31 In short, the content of the spoken narrative is only one aspect, even though often the most privileged. Joseph’s focus on the presence of the speaker and how identity, cultural and individual, informs language helps to unravel the phenomenon of sounding ‘foreign’. A person’s identity ‘inheres in their voice, spoken, written or signed’ and, I would add, other forms of symbolisation including painting. 32 If, as Joseph states, the function of language is communication and representation, then the presence of an accent is an integral part of both: accents represent and communicate difference. Its opposite, the desire and effort involved in losing an accent signals the desire for assimilation, or as Vilaincour termed it ‘amalgamation’, into the desired group of whatever identity. 33 As Pierre Bourdieu has noted of the political and ideological function of regional accents: ‘Regionalist discourse is performative discourse which aims to impose as legitimate a new definition of frontiers and to get people to know and recognize the region that is thus delimited in opposition to the dominant definition […]. The act of categorization, when it manages to achieve recognition or when it is exercised by a recognized authority, exercises by itself a certain power: “ethnic” or “regional” categories, like categories of kinship, institute a reality using the power of revelation and construction exercised by objectification in discourse.’ 34 The performative function is therefore not to be dismissed as an inability to speak ‘properly’, or to lack the will to learn, but should be understood as a significant element in the representation and communication of identity; it is form and content. An accent functions to signal the speaker’s identity and membership of a group as well as the emotional investment that such membership entails. 35 However, as I have argued in the case of Leon Vilaincour, this identity cannot be easily defined or located given the plurality of his various ‘incarnations’; his accent was one medium of transmitting his commitment to his distinctive selfhood and otherness.
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Alongside the performative quality of difference exists the recourse to foreign phra ses, words or terms, which are not just markers of alterity, but represent the dilemma of how the representational function of language is compromised in translation. In his reminiscence about the custom of kissing a ladies’ hand (‘küss die Hand ’) cited above, the phrase is spoken in German (with a slight, maybe involuntary imitation of an Austrian accent), translated into English, but embedded in the story of the specific context of its use; it is a personal and a cultural anecdote. Throughout the recording English words or terms were carefully weighed, but mainly to indicate that they would do in the present moment of the interview. Vilaincour was always aware of the partiality and temporality of his utterances, that he might think differently on another day, his thoughts and ideas reassembled in another form. Theories of translation all point to the twin dilemmas faced by translators: whether to be faithful to the original, or to the reader?36 In the first case, there is the danger of literalism, but in the second the problem of domesticating and reducing the otherness of the original. Vilaincour’s work of self-translation extends to the nomadic transfers of his person while remaining faithful to the specificities of the historical circumstances of the pasts he has lost. Certainly Ricoeur noted the element of mourning or letting go of the goal of achieving the perfect translation: ‘The emphasis on the labour character of translation refers to the common experience of tension and suffering which the translator undergoes as he/she checks the impulse to reduce the otherness of the other.’ 37 Translation is thus characterized in the trope of loss. Instead, Ricoeur proposed the ideal of equivalence, which ‘is produced by translation rather than presupposed by it’. 38 It is in the process of translation that equivalence emerges; the correct equivalence cannot be assumed as already fixed. This observation also brings into the foreground the importance of the material and conceptual contexts in which the act of translation occurs, and the form in which it is delivered, whether it is spoken, written or symbolized as images. This equivalence, or the ‘construction of the comparable’ creates the third text of translation. 39 Vilaincour’s paintings and narrative occupy very well this third text position that resists the literal, direct, fixed equivalence of signs. As translations they ‘share a common capacity to mediate between a human speaker and a world of meanings (actual and possible)’.40 Although in parenthesis, the conditions of the actual and the possible co-exist in a state of productive equivalence. Vilaincour characterised his paintings: ‘[…] much more like fantasies, combining things and very often bringing completely irrational elements into them which has nothing to do with that period at all, but perhaps much more of now, or on the other hand some very much older things […]. It’s giving me a great chance to use freedom of fantasy, of allowing thoughts to bring their own natural connections without any constraint by any necessity.’41
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In an echo of Vilaincour’s assessment of Le Grand Meaulnes, Murphy notes how his figures are ‘shadowy without logic’, appearing like in old photographs, or as phantoms whose images remain ‘aloof, wrapped in their own thoughts […] accompanied and reflected by a similar implicit and parenthetical structure’.42 So rather than seeing translation as a binary endeavour in the service of ‘two masters’, the original author of the text and the reader, Vilaincour’s paintings and the life story open the way for understanding the plurality that can prevail and work to create the third equivalent iteration, one without hierarchies. As Vilaincour stated elsewhere: ‘I am now lost in my loyalties, like someone lost in a dream. I can’t identify priorities but there are no conflicting loyalties.’43 This contrasts with the perception of some that translation is a ‘metaphor for intercultural relations of inequality’ and therefore any other approach is purely ‘idealistic’. 44 An argument could certainly be made about the inequalities that abounded in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but in the ‘extraterritoriality’ of Vilaincour’s work, figures and objects exist in a mutual fellowship and tolerance, similar to the concept of ‘linguistic hospitality’ elaborated by Ricoeur.45 As Richard Kearney has commented, translation can be seen as a key metaphor in Ricoeur’s philosophy.46 Ricoeur’s ability as a mediator philosopher informs an ethic towards the Other, a critical presence that infiltrates his conception of narrative identity since it is through the Other that one comes to know oneself and to accept the challenge of the strange. It is an encounter highlighted in the work of translation with its dilemma of faithfulness versus betrayal. In order to address this problem, Ricoeur proposed the concept of ‘linguistic hospitality’, the predicament of which is, he suggests, ‘correspon dence without complete adhesion’, that rejects the autonomy and ‘self-sufficiency’ of languages.47 Just as a narrative identity is unfolded in a specific circumstance to a specific listener for a specified purpose, translations are equally subject to the conditions of their production and reception. ‘It is as several people that we define, that we reformulate, that we explain, that we try to say the same thing in another way.’48 Elsewhere Ricoeur has extended what he called a ‘translation ethos’ to include a spiritual dimension which is attuned to the ‘mental universe of the other culture, having taken account of its customs, fundamental beliefs and deepest convictions’,49 echoing the solicitude he proposed in the ethics of the self and the other. 50
Transl ating and Narrating the Past Asked what his paintings would have been like if he had not been living in London, Vilaincour replied: ‘They would have lacked life, I think, because some of their identity comes from two elements meeting each other either in sympathy or as a challenge.’ 51 His work brought together a variety of people: friends, historical figures and objects that express the plurality of cultures, fuelled by his distinctive images of memorialisation.
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Although the figures represented in the diptych A Life, 1984–5 include his mother, his aunt, his mother’s favourite French actor Louis Jouvet, the Polish head of state Józef Piłsudski whose body Vilaincour remembered being taken to see, the date in the title refers to the year in which the painting was made. 52 The past is always re-made in the present, but a life story, a narrative about the self, can always be told and represented differently, as Ricoeur proposed. However, the memories that narratives stimulate are also embedded in particular forms of commemoration – stories, monuments, texts, paintings – that circulate beyond the individual. ‘To speak of memory […] is to put forward the “narrative” function through which this primary capacity of preservation and recollection is exercised at the level of language.’ 53 I suggest that this can be extended to how this capacity is articulated in Vilaincour’s speaking voice, in which his accent unfolds the performance of his narrative identity that testifies to his plural allegiances: ‘If each of us receives a certain narrative identity from the stories which are told to him or her, or from those that we tell ourselves, this identity is mingled with that of others in such a way as to engender second order stories, which are themselves intersections of the story of life […]. We are literally “entangled in stories”.’ 54 Linguistic hospitality, or the hospitality afforded to signs in general, whether recounted in the narrated life story or disposed within the canvas, provoke translations in the search for being chez-soi, at home with the resources of one’s own and other cultures, not reduced but represented with dignity and solicitude. Vilaincour’s work affords evidence of the possibility for a model, which Ricoeur proposed at the conclusion of his ‘new ethos for Europe’ that can contribute to ‘the crucial ongoing debate between the right to universality and the demand of historical difference’. 55
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Notes
Self-Translation –Translation of the Self (Maria Teresa Costa, Hans Christian Hönes) 1 For policy-related perspectives on internationalism in contemporary academia, cf. Fabrice Hénard, Leslie Diamond and Deborah Roseveare: Approaches to Internationalisation and their Implications for Strategic Management and Institutional Practice. A Guide for Higher Education Institutions, OECD 2012; Directorate-General for Internal Policies (ed.): Internationalisation of Higher Education. Study, European Parlament 2015. 2
Julio-César Santoyo: Blank Spaces in the History of Translation, in: Georges L. Bastin and Paul F. Bandia (eds): Charting the Future of Translation History, Ottawa 2006, pp. 11– 43‚ p. 24: ‘Selftranslation has been present in the history of this art and craft at least since the times of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus’; cf. also Michael D. Gordin: Scientific Babel. How Science was done before and after Global English, Chicago/London 2015; Jan Bloemendal (ed.): Bilingual Europe. Latin and Vernacular Cultures. Examples of Bilingualism and Multilingualism, c. 1300–1800, Leiden/Boston 2015. For a recent wide-ranging consideration of intellectual diasporas and their contribution to intellectual history, cf. Peter Burke: Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge, 1500–2000, Waltham/MA 2017.
3
For a widely accepted definition, cf. Rainier Grutman: Self-translation, in: Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (eds): Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 2nd ed., London/New York 2009, p. 260: Self-translation is ‘the act of translating one’s own writings into another language and the result of such an undertaking’.
4
Rainier Grutman: Auto-Translation, in: Mona Baker (ed.): Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Abington 1998, pp. 17–20, p. 17.
5
Mary Besemeres: Translating Oneself: Language and Self hood in Cross-Cultural Autobiography, Bern 2002, p. 162.
6
Santoyo 2006, pp. 11– 43; cf. Anthony Cordingley: Introduction. Self-translation, going global, in: id. (ed.): Self-Translation. Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture, New York 2013, p. 1: ‘The self-translator has been a relatively neglected species within the menagerie of translators’.
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7 Grutman 2009. Indicative for this shift is also the title of Grutman’s article: while speaking of ‘self-translation’ in 2009, he called it ‘auto-translation’ in an earlier edition of the same volume (Grutman 1998), implying a passive automatism. 8
Self-translation was the subject of numerous international conferences (Autotraduzione: teoria ed esempi fra Italia e Spagna e oltre, Pescara 2010; Autotraduzione. Testi e contesti, Bologna 2011; Autotraduction: frontières de la langue et de la culture, Perpignan 2011; Self-translation in the Iberian Peninsula, Cork 2013), edited volumes (Cordingley 2013), special issues (Semicerchio 1999; Quimera 2003; Que-je-sais 2003; In Other Words 2005, Atelier de Traduction 2007 Quaderns: Revista de Traducció 2009; Orbis Litterarum 2013), and reserach groups (Autotrad, directed by Elena Tanqueiro at the Universitad Autonoma de Barcelona). A dedicated online bibliography is edited and constantly updated by Eva Gentes (Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf ): www.self-translation.blogspot.com
9
E.g. Georg Kremnitz: Mehrsprachigkeit in der Literatur, Wien 2004; id.: Mehrsprachige Autoren und ihre Sprachen, in: Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik 6/2015, pp. 17–31; Lyudmila L. Razumova: Literary Bilingualism as Cosmopolitan Practice: Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Nancy Huston, PhD thesis, Stony Brook Univ. 2010.
10 Rainier Grutman (1998, p. 17) calls it ‘a fairly common practice’. An exception is the ‘early’
study by Verena Jung, approaching the question from a linguistic standpoint: English-German SelfTranslation of Academic Texts and its Relevance for Translation Theory and Practice, Frankfurt a.M. 2002.
11 Andrea Ceccarelli, Gabriela Elina Imposti and Monica Perotto (eds): Autotraduzione e riscrit
tura, Bologna 2013.
12 On untranslatability, cf. Barbara Cassin (ed.): Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Diction-
naire des intraduisibles, Paris 2004. The volume was nevertheless translated into English: Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, Princeton 2014.
13 E.g. James Elkins: On Pictures and the Words that fail them, Cambridge 1998; Gottfried
Boehm: Bildbeschreibung. Über die Grenzen von Bild und Sprache, in: Michael R. Müller, Jürgen Raab and Hans-Georg Soeffner (eds): Grenzen der Bildinterpretation, Wiesbaden 2014, pp. 15–38.
14 Cf. Andreas Beyer and Laurent Le Bon (eds): Silence. Schweigen. Über die stumme Praxis der Kunst, Berlin 2015. 15 Johann Joachim Winckelmann: History of the Art of Antiquity, Los Angeles 2006, p. 77; id.: Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, Dresden 1764, p. xxiii: ‘[…] ich hätte mehr sagen können, wenn ich für Griechen, und nicht in einer neuern Sprache geschrieben, welche mir gewisse Behutsamkeiten aufgeleget’. 16 Analysing Winckelmann’s ekphrasis as an act of poetic re-connecting with the past: Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll: Re-membering the figure: the ekphrasis of J.J. Winckelmann, in: Word and Image 21.3/2005, pp. 261–269. Comprehensively on image description in the 18th century: Oliver Kase: Mit Worten sehen lernen. Bildbeschreibung im 18. Jahrhundert, Petersberg 2010. 17 Ernst H. Gombrich and Didier Eribon: Looking for Answers. Conversations on Art and Science,
New York 1993, p. 169.
18 The expectations for the quality of written English vary substantially in different disciplines; in many natural sciences even grammatically faulty English is often not a hindrance for positive peer review; cf. Frank Rabe: Sprachliche und fachliche Anforderungen an Wissenschaftler aus verschiedenen Disziplinen, in: Andreas Hirsch-Weber and Stefan Scherer (eds): Wissenschaftliches Schreiben in Natur- und Technikwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2016, pp. 55–84, pp. 71–72.
180 | Notes
19 Cf. Thomas daCosta Kaufmann: The American Voice. German Historians of Art and Architec-
ture in Exile in the United States, in: Wolkenkuckucksheim 12.1/2007 (special issue on Heaven and Earth. Festschrift to Honor Karsten Harries), s.p.
20 Cf. Karen Michels: Transplantierte Kunstwissenschaft. Deutschsprachige Kunstgeschichte im amerikanischen Exil, Berlin 1999, p. 120. 21 Cf. Antoine Berman: Jacques Amyot, traducteur français. Essai sur les origines de la traduction en France, Paris 2012. 22 Susan Bassnett: The self-translator as rewriter, in: Cordingley 2013, pp. 13–26, p. 15: ‘The term
“self-translation” is problematic in several respects, but principally because it compels us to consider the problem of the existence of an original.’
23 Kremnitz 2004, p. 109; cf. Robert Lafont: L’Auto-traduction, in: Alem Surre-Garcia (ed.): Flor
Envèrsa, Toulouse 1992, p. 39.
24 Verena Jung once argued that ‘the necessary precondition for self-translation is not just bilin-
guality but also biculturality’. Verena Jung: Writing Germany in Exil – the Bilingual Author as Cultural Mediator: Klaus Mann, Stefan Heym, Rudolf Arnheim and Hannah Arendt, in: Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25/2004, pp. 529–546, p. 529.
25 Hans Blumenberg: Der Schmied im Sitzen und andere Denkerposen, in: id.: Die Verführbarkeit des Philosophen, Frankfurt a.M. 2000, pp. 147–152. 26 For writers, this might be a conscious strategy for avoiding automatisms, cf. Magdalena
Winkler: “Beckett ≠ Beckett”. Samuel Becketts Methode der Selbstübersetzung am Beispiel von En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot, diploma thesis Wien 2010, p. 155.
27 Quoted after Tobias Akira Schickhaus: Polypolare Über-Setzungen, in: Raluca Radulescu and Christel Baltes-Löhr (eds): Pluralität als Existenzmuster, Bielefeld 2016, p. 89. 28 Aurelia Klimkiewicz: Self-Translation as broken narrativity: Towards an understanding of the
self ’s multilingual dialogue, in: Cordingley 2013, pp. 189–201.
29 Andreas Beyer: Stranger in Paradise: Erwin Panofsky’s Expulsion to the Academic Parnassus,
in: Goebel and Weigel 2012, Eckart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel (eds): ‘Escape to Life’. German Intellectuals in New York. A Compendium on Exile after 1933, Berlin/Boston 2012, pp. 429– 444, here: p. 429.
30 Richard Krautheimer: Anstatt eines Vorworts, in: id.: Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Europäischen Kunstgeschichte, Köln 1988, pp. 7–37, p. 14. One instance of self-translation in Krautheimer is the essay Die Anfänge der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung first presented as his inaugural lecture in Marburg, published in Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 1929, pp. 49–63 and later in English in Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance Art, New York 1969; cf. his comments in Krautheimer 1988, pp. 297–8. 31 Cf. Jacques Derrida: Le monolinguisme de l’autre, Paris 1996. On this perspective, cf.: Susan
Arndt, Dirk Naguschewski and Robert Stockhammer (eds): Exophonie. Anders-Sprachigkeit (in) der Literatur, Berlin 2007.
32 On translation as hospitality, cf. among others Antoine Berman: L'épreuve de l'etranger. Culture et traduction dans l'Allemagne romantique, Paris 1984; id.: La traduction et la lettre ou l’Auberge du lontain, Paris 1999; Derrida 1996; Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt: La traversée des fleuves. Autobiographie, Paris 1999; Paul Ricoeur: Soi même comme un autre, Paris 1990. 33 Cf. Walter Benjamin: The task of the translator, in: id.: Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926
(ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings), Cambridge/Mass. 2002, pp. 253–263. For an interpretation of this text, which transcends the opposition between original and target text, cf. Antoine Berman: L’Âge de la traduction. ‘La tâche du traducteur’ de Walter Benjamin, un commen-
181 | Notes
taire (ed. by Isabelle Berman in collaboration with Valentina Sommella), Vincennes 2008; Maria Teresa Costa: Filosofie della traduzione, Milano and Udine 2012; Sigrid Weigel: Translation as a Provisional Approach to the Foreignness of Language. On the Disappearance of Thought-Images in Translations of Benjamin’s Writings, in: Id: Walter Benjamin. Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy, trad. by Chadwick Truscott Smith, Stanford 2013, pp. 167–182. 34 Ernst H. Gombrich: Wenn’s euch Ernst ist, was zu sagen / Wandlungen in der Kunstbetrach-
tung, in: Martina Sitt (ed.): Kunsthistoriker in eigener Sache, Berlin 1990, p. 81 (‘Wer sich gerne – so wie ich offenbar – der Sprache überlässt und nicht dagegen kämpft: für den ist Sprache etwas sehr Schöpferisches’). Self-Translation and Its Discontents (Sigrid Weigel)
1 Jan Walsh Hokenson and Marcela Munson: The Bilingual Text. History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation [2007], New York 2014, p. 1; Chiara Montini: Self-translation, in: Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (eds): Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 1, Amsterdam 2010, pp. 306– 308, p. 306. 2
Cf. Olive Classe (ed.): Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, London/Chicago 2000, vol. 2, pp. 1250–52, s. v. ‘Self-Translators’ (Kristine J. Anderson).
3
Susan Bassnett: Translation Studies [1980], 3rd ed., New York 2002, s.p.
4
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Death of a Discipline, New York 2003.
5
Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (eds): Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 2nd ed. New York/London 2009; Bijay Kumar Das: A Handbook of Translation Studies, Delhi 2005; Classe 2000; Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (eds): Handbook of Translation Studies, 4 vols, Amsterdam 2009–2013; Lawrence Venuti (ed.): The translation studies reader, London 2000.
6
Salman Rushdie: Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, London 1992, p. 17.
7
Dana Ba˘dulescu: Rushdie the ‘translated man’, in: Sfera Politicii. Revista de Stiinte Politice 166.12/2011 (special issue on Migratia. Noile dimensiuni ale unui vechi fenomen), pp. 87–96, p. 88 (my emphasis).
8
Homi Bhabha: The Location of Culture, London/New York 1994, p. 2.
9
George Steiner: Extraterritorial. Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution, Middlesex 1975.
10 Rainier Grutman and Trish Van Bolderen: Self-Translation, in: Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter (eds): A Companion to Translation Studies, Oxford 2014, pp. 323–332, p. 330. 11 Ba ˘dulescu 2011, p. 88. 12 One exception is Witold Gombrowicz and the translation of his novel Ferdydurke from Polish into Spanish supported by a whole group of Argentinian colleagues, cf. Grutman and Van Bolderen 2014, p. 328. 13 Grutman and Van Bolderen 2014, p. 327. For translation as a topic of Yoko Tawada, cf. Otmar Ette: TransArea: A Literary History of Globalization, Berlin/Boston 2016, pp. 318–332. 14 Christopher Whyte: Against Self-Translation, in: Translation and Literature 11.1/2002, pp. 64 –71, p. 69. 15 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Kaf ka: Towards a Minor Literature [1975], trad. by Dana Polan, foreword by Réda Bensmaïa, Minneapolis/London 1986. 16 Whyte 2002, p. 67.
182 | Notes
17 Ibid., p. 68. 18 Ibid., p. 69. 19 Mary Louise Pratt: Arts of the Contact Zone, in: Profession (online journal of MLA), 1.1.1991, pp. 33– 40, p. 34. Gottfried Liedl has developed an interesting re-evaluation of the often-idealized translation culture during the so-called Golden Age in Spain in light of such a perspective: Gott fried Liedl: Übersetzungen zwischen den Kulturen im Spanien der Reconquista, in: Daniel Weidner (ed.): Figuren des Europäischen, München 2006, pp. 23– 41. 20 Whyte 2002, p. 71. 21 Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour: Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the ‘First’ Emigration,
Ithaca/London 1989, pp. 89–90.
22 Ibid., p. 112 (my emphasis). 23 Walter Benjamin: The task of the translator [1921], in: Selected Writings, vol. 1 (ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings), Cambridge/Mass. 1996, pp. 253–263, p. 257. 24 For a more detailed discussion of Benjamin’s translation theory, cf. Sigrid Weigel: Translation
as a Provisional Approach to the Foreignness of Language. On the Disappearance of Thought-Images in Translations of Benjamin’s Writings, in: id: Walter Benjamin. Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy, trad. by Chadwick Truscott Smith, Stanford 2013, pp. 167–182.
25 Paul St. Pierre: Translation as Writing Across Languages: Samuel Beckett and Fakir Mohan Sena-
pati, in: TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 9.1/1996, pp. 233–257 [http://id.erudit.org/ iderudit/037246ar]; Brian Fitch: Beckett and Babel: an Investigation in the Status of the bilingual Work, Toronto 1988, p. 134 (my emphasis).
26 Erich Auerbach: Philology and ‘Weltliteratur’ [1952], trad. by Marie and Edward Said, in: The
Centennial Review 13/1969, pp. 1–17, p. 7.
27 Susan Bassnett: The self-translator as rewriter, in: Anthony Cordingly (ed.): Self-translation: brokering originality in hybrid culture, New York 2013, pp. 13–26, p. 15. 28 Classe 2000, ‘Self-Translators’, p. 1251. 29 Jacques Derrida: Des Tours de Babel, in: id.: Difference in translation (ed. and trad. by F. Joseph
Graham), London 1985, pp. 165–208, p. 171.
30 Cf. Dirk Naguschewski, Susan Arndt and Robert Stockhammer (eds): Exophonie – AndersSprachigkeit (in) der Literatur, Berlin 2007. 31 Theodor W. Adorno: On the Use of Foreign Words, in: id.: Notes to Literature, vol. 2, New York
1961, pp. 286–291.
32 Benjamin 1996, p. 257, transl. mod. (my emphasis). 33 Ibid, pp. 258–259, transl. mod. 34 Walter Benjamin: Literary History and the Study of Literature, in: id.: Selected Writings, vol. 2.2 (ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Garry Smith), Cambridge/Mass. 1999, p. 464, transl. mod. 35 Walter Benjamin: Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, in: Gesammelte Schriften vol. IV.1 (ed. by Tillman Rexroth, Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser), Frankfurt a.M. 1972, p. 20. 36 Rainier Grutman: Auto-Translation, in: Mona Baker (ed.): Routledge Encyclopedia of Transla-
tion Studies, London 1998, pp. 17–20, p. 19.
37 Fitch 1988, p. 132.
183 | Notes
38 Verena Jung: Writing Germany in Exile — the Bilingual Author as Cultural Mediator: Klaus
Mann, Stefan Heym, Rudolf Arnheim and Hannah Arendt, in: Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25.5-6/2004, pp. 529–546, p. 532.
39 Ibid, p. 530. 40 Cf. for example Gössmann’s construction of an inner language in: Wilhelm Gössmann: Das literarische Schreiben als Zentrum von Schreiberfahrungen, in: id. (ed.): Schreiben und Übersetzen, Tübingen 1994, pp. 11–29. 41 Hannah Arendt: Denktagebuch 1950–1973 (ed. by Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann),
München/Zürich 2002, pp. 770–771.
42 Jung 2004, p. 532. 43 Ibid., p. 530: ‘Yet it is neither the English original nor the German translation in itself, but the differences between them that enable us to attempt a reconstruction of the possible pre-text.’ 44 As Jacques Lacan does in his ‘return to Freud’; cf. Samuel Weber: Return to Freud. Jacques Lacan’s dislocation of psychoanalysis, trad. by Michael Levine, Cambridge 1991, p. 4. 45 Cf. Sigmund Freud: A difficulty in the path of psycho-analysis, in: ibid.: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (ed. by James Strachey), London 1953–1974, vol. 17, pp. 135–144, p. 143. 46 Sigmund Freud: Remembering, repeating and working-through, ibid. vol. 12, pp. 147–156. 47 Hannah Arendt’s practice of self-translation is an outstanding example for the advantages of such a mode of self-translation. Sigrid Weigel: Poetic difference – sounding through – selftranslation. Hannah Arendt’s Thoughts and Writings between different languages, cultures, and fields, in: Eckart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel (eds): ‘Escape to Life’. German Intellectuals in New York. A Compendium on Exile after 1933, Berlin/Boston 2012, pp. 55–79.
Feminine Inscriptions in the Morellian Method (Francesco Ventrella) This research has been initially supported by a British Academy/Accademia dei Lincei Bursary (2007) and completed thanks to a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Sussex (2013–2016). I would like to thank Silvia Davoli and Brent Ryan Barber for their help with my translations. Special thanks to Lenka Vráblíková, Hans Christian Hönes and Maria Teresa Costa for some productive discussions of feminist theories of translations. 1 Letter from Elizabeth Eastlake to Austen Henry Layard, 16 October 1887, cited in The Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake (ed. by Julie Sheldon), Liverpool 2009, p. 577. In this essay, I will consistently address Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake simply as Eastlake, not to be confused with her husband Charles Lock Eastlake (1793–1965) who played no part in the events discussed here. 2 The Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, vol. 2 (ed. Charles Eastlake Smith), London 1895, p. 187. 3 Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes: Handbook of the Italian Schools in the Dresden Gallery, London 1888. 4 Morelli informed that ‘[c]ette pauvre enfant m’écrit qu’elle est désolée parce que son catalogue de la galerie de Dresde n’a pas eu jusqu’à présent le succès qu’elle espérait, se manque que son éditeur lui marque, qu’il fondra qu’elle paye de sa bourse une cinquantaine de £’. Letter from Giovanni Morelli to Austen Henry Layard, 5 February 1890, British Library (BL) Add. Ms. 38965. Ffoulkes’ Handbook was introduced by Morelli’s disciple Jean Paul Richter, who was very close to Otto Mündler, the notorious travelling agent of Charles Eastlake for the National Gallery.
184 | Notes
5
Cited in Jaynie Anderson: Dietro lo pseudonimo, in: Giovanni Morelli: Della Pittura Italiana. Studii Storico-critici. Le Gallerie Borghese e Doria-Pamhili in Roma (ed. by Jaynie Anderson), Milano 1991, p. 574; cf. also letter from Giovanni Morelli to Austen Henry Layard, 19 December 1887, ‘Layard Papers’, BL Add. Ms. 38965. Already cited, but in Italian translation, by Anderson 1991, p. 574. Constance Ann Jocelyn Ffoulkes was born in 1858 in Holywell, Flintshire North Wales from major John Ffoulkes (who took up Jocelyn from his mother) from Eriviat Hall, Denbighshire and Mary Ann Proctor Beauchamp. Constance was the youngest of seven sisters and never married (National Library of Wales, Eriviat Estate Record GB 0210 Eriviat). The family estate went to the second daughter Edith Caroline when she married Philip Humberstone in 1873 (National Library of Wales, Ms.11982D). Ffoulkes died in 1950 aged 92 in Cheshire leaving a wealth of £12.625, 9s. 2d. (National Probate Calendar, Index of Wills and Administrations, 1858–1966).
6
Ivan Lermolieff [Giovanni Morelli]: Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei. Die Galerien Borghese und Doria Panfili in Rom, Leipzig 1890; id.: Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei. Die Galerien zu München und Dresden, Leipzig 1891; id.: Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei. Die Galerie zu Berlin, Leipzig 1893. Ffoulkes translated only the first two volumes. Giovanni Morelli: Italian Painters: Critical Studies of their Works. The Borghese and Doria-Pamfili Galleries in Rome, trad. by Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes, London 1892; Giovanni Morelli: Italian Painters: Critical Studies of their Works. The Galleries of Munich and Dresden, trad. by Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes, London 1893.
7 Letter from Giovanni Morelli to Austen Henry Layard, 11 October 1890. BL Add. Ms. 38965 (‘Je n’ai jamais connu personnes ni homme ni femme, qui ait montré autant de zèle et de persévérance dans les études que montre cette bonne demoiselle Jocelyn’); cf. Anderson 1991, p. 574. 8 Frizzoni thought that her ‘cult’ for the memory of Morelli would be ‘d’un bon augure pour la réussite de son ouvrage’, letter from Gustavo Frizzoni to Austen Henry Layard, 6 September 1891, BL Add. Ms. 39098; cf. Anderson 1991, p. 574. 9 For a historical analysis of the ways in which Ffoulkes modernised the Morellian method in her later scholarship on Vincenzo Foppa, cf. Francesco Ventrella: Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes and the Modernization of Scientific Connoisseurship, in: Visual Resources 33.1-2/2017 (special issue on Women’s Expertise and the Culture of Connoisseurship, ed. by Meaghan Clarke and Francesco Ventrella), pp. 117–139. 10 Sherry Simon: Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission, New York 1996, p. 1. 11 This gendered binary opinion was challenged only in the 1970s by feminist thinkers influ-
enced by Jacques Derrida’s theories of deconstruction in literature, and most notably through Hélène Cixous’s concept of écriture féminine which can be defined as ‘the inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text’; cf. Elaine Showalter: Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness, in: Critical Inquiry 8.2/1981 (special issue on ‘Writing and Sexual Difference’), p. 185. Against the assumed passivity of translation and translator, feminist deconstructionist theorists have proposed that we look at the agency of the translator in the text. By getting away from the binary concept of equivalence based on original and copy, already challenged by Walter Benjamin, deconstructionist translation theorists have put forward another notion of equivalence based on cultural difference. This important theoretical revision has enabled feminist scholars to engage with a critical reassessment of the ‘traces’ the female translator leaves in the text and analyse to what extent they amount to an inscription of the self as well as an active and political re-inscription of the feminine in language; cf. Barbara Godard: Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation, in: Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere: Translation, history and culture, London 1990, pp. 89–96.
12 Griselda Pollock: Inscriptions in the Feminine, in: Cathérine de Zegher (ed.): Inside the Visible: an elliptical traverse of 20 th century art in, of and from the feminine, Boston 1996, p. 70.
185 | Notes
13 Pamela Gerrish Nunn: Critically Speaking, in: Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.): Women in the Victorian Art World, Manchester 1995, p. 123. 14 In fact, Claire Richter Sherman and Adele M. Holcomb include the translators in their pionee
ring study of Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820–1979, Westport and London 1981. For a recent analysis of Victorian women translators in art history, cf. Hilary Fraser: Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century. Looking Like a Woman, Cambridge 2014, pp. 62–98.
15 On this issue, cf. the review by Francesco Ventrella: The Gender of the Art Writing Genre, in: Oxford Art Journal 40.1/2017, pp. 203–209. 16 Cf. Meaghan Clarke and Francesco Ventrella: Introduction: Women’s Expertise and the Culture of Connoisseurship, in: Visual Resources 33.1-2/2017, pp. 1–10. 17 Elizabeth Mansfield: Introduction, in: id. (ed.): Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, New York and London 2002, p. 1. 18 Cf. Fraser 2014, p. 63. 19 On Morelli’s use of caricature and satire as a form of criticism, cf. Giovanni Morelli: Balvi Mag-
nus und Das Miasma diabolicum. Giovanni Morellis erste pseudonyme Veröffentlichungen (ed. with an introduction by Jaynie Anderson), Würzburg 1991.
20 This expression was famously coined by Wilhelm Bode: The Berlin Renaissance Museum, in: Fortnightly Review 56/1891, p. 509. 21 Henry Layard: Introduction, in: Morelli 1892, p. 29. 22 Anderson 1991, p. 553. The title of this section comes from Anderson’s seminal study ‘Dietro lo pseudonimo’ to which my research is much indebted. 23 Bode 1891, pp. 506–514. Bode’s article also provides an important contemporary insight to understand the institutional competition for old masters at the time and the position that the Berlin gallery started to occupy in the international art world; cf. Jaynie Anderson: The Political Power of Connoisseurship in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Wilhelm von Bode versus Giovanni Morelli, in: Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 38/1996, pp. 107–119. 24 Bode sounds quite explicit on this point (1891, p. 510); cf. Anderson 1996, p. 110. 25 Letter from Giovanni Morelli to Austen Henry Layard, 7 August 1879, BL Add. Ms. 38963 (‘Voglio che sia un Tartaro che venga ad insegnare alla presuntuosa Germania’); cf. Ivan Lermolieff: Die Werke italienischer Meister in den Galerien von München, Dresden und Berlin: Ein kritischer Versuch, Leipzig 1880, pp. iii–viii. The eight pages pertaining to this fictional story were omitted in Louise Richter’s English translation. Giovanni Morelli: Italian Masters in German Galleries. A Critical Essay on the Italian Pictures in the Galleries of Munich, Dresden, Berlin, trad. by Mrs Louise M. Richter, London 1883, pp. v–vii. 26 Ivan Lermlieff [Giovanni Morelli]: Le opere dei maestri italiani nelle gallerie di Monaco, Dresda e Berlino, tradotto dal russo al tedesco per cura del Dr Giovanni Schwarze, e dal tedesco in italiano dalla Baronessa di K… A…, Bologna 1886, pp. i–ii. The term uggioso in Italian is also used to refer to gloomy and grey weather. 27 Letter from Giovanni Morelli to Jean Paul Richter, 3 June 1881, in: Giovanni Morelli and Jean Paul Richter, Malerei der Renaissance: im Briefwechsel von Giovanni Morelli und Jean Paul Richter, 1876–1891 (ed. by Irma Richter), Baden-Baden 1960, p. 164: ‘Die übersetzung ist nämlich alles was Sie nur wollen, bloß nicht italienisch und wollte ich mich hinsetzen, dieselbe zu korrigieren, so müßte ich eben alles ganz und gar umarbeiten.’ The proposition that the Baroness of K. A. may be identified with the countess Killmannsegg of Hanover mentioned in Morelli’s letter advanced by Giacomo Agosti: Cronologia della vita e delle opere, in: Matteo Panzeri (ed.): La figura e l’opera di Giovanni Morelli: Materiali di ricerca, Bergamo 1987, p. 26.
186 | Notes
28 Morelli 1883. Based on the evidence of letters and the manuscript at the Hertziana Library in Rome, Anderson has demonstrated that Louise Richter’s English translation was based on a hea vily revised German version edited by Giovanni Morelli and Jean Paul Richter together to amend mistakes and remove passages which had a mere local interest; cf. Anderson 1991, p. 563, fn. 90. Louise Richter received £50 from George Bell & Sons for her translation. Morelli and Richter 1960, p. 161. 29 Letter from Elizabeth Eastlake to Austen Henry Layard, 13 October 1883, in: Julie Sheldon (ed.): The Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake, Liverpool 2009, p. 527: ‘What has become of Madame Richter’s translation I know not. I have not heard a word about it.’ 30 For an analysis of Richter’s friendship with Morelli, cf. Dietrich Seybold: Das Schlaraffenle-
ben der Kunst. Eine Biografie des Kunstkenners und Leonardo da Vinci-Forschers Jean Paul Richter (1847–1937), München 2014, especially pp. 43–75 and 77–105. Of German origins, Louise Schwab Richter spent her youth in Turkey and a short time in Brighton as well. For a discussion of her position in the social world of connoisseurship, cf. Dietrich Seybold: Louise M. Richter (1850–1938): A Diarist of the Morellian Era, in: id.: Microhistory of Art, http://www.seybold.ch/ Dietrich/LouiseRichter [31/08/2017].
31 Letter from Elizabeth Eastlake to Austen Henry Layard, 10 December 1883, in: Sheldon 2009, p. 529. Eastlake’s annoyance was perhaps also driven by the fact that she had already wanted to translate the book before Louise Richter proposed herself for the job; cf. Anderson 1991, pp. 563–564. 32 Letter from Giovanni Morelli to Austen Henry Layard, 21 December 1885, BL Add. Ms. 38667; cf. Anderson 1991, p. 564. 33 Anderson 1991, p. 568. 34 Princip und Methode, in: Lermolieff 1890, pp. 1–78; cf. Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes: Morelli, Giovanni, in: The Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 28, London 1911, p. 830. For a reconstruction of the content of the unpublished satirical pamphlet gleaned from Morelli’s letters to Layard, cf. Anderson 1991, pp. 569–570. 35 Cf. Anderson 1991, p. 569. Apparently, as we learn from a letter to Layard, in this case too Eastlake thought she would translate the pamphlet, which never happened. Letter from Elizabeth Eastlake to Austen Henry Layard, 17 February 1887, in: Sheldon 2009, p. 566. 36 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, n.d. February 1890, BL Add. Ms. 39045. 37 Letter from Giovanni Morelli to Austen Henry Layard, 5 February 1890, BL Add. Ms. 38965 (‘La pauvre Mlle Jocelyn se donna tant de peine imaginable pour réussir dans son ouvrage, mais, hélas, comme vous l’avez bien observé, il faudra craindre que le peu de gaz qui j’ai mis dans mes pages sera perdu sans de traduction’). 38 Letter from Giovanni Morelli to Austen Henry Layard, 18 February 1890, BL Add. Ms. 38965 (‘[…] si le peu de gaz que j’ai cherché de mettre dans l’original s’y trouve aussi dans cette traduction. Mais, hélas, ce serait peut-être prétendre trop de cette bonne et brave demoiselle. […] Pour moi la chose qui m’importe le plus et à la quelle j’y tiens, c’est que dans la traduction de mon livre on ne m’y fasse pas dire des choses, que je n’ai pas dit’). 39 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, n.d., February 1890, BL Add. Ms. 39045. 40 Ibid. 41 As it happened before, Eastlake originally imagined she would embark on the translation of Morelli’s latest work herself. Letter from Elizabeth Eastlake to Austen Henry Layard, 5 January 1890, in: Sheldon 2009, p. 604.
187 | Notes
42 Elizabeth Eastlake revised Kugler’s handbook in 1874, before the project of a fifth and defini-
tive edition was handed over to Henry Layard in 1887. The fact that both Eastlake and Layard were involved with Ffoulkes’ translation project of Morelli is illuminating as to how Morelli’s Critical Studies came to supersede Kugler’s Handbook as the most up-to-date tool for the study of the Italian schools of art. On British art history, cf. Francis Haskell: The Growth of British Art History and Its debts to Europe, in: Proceedings of the British Academy LXXIV/1988, pp. 203–224. Haskell has perhaps been too quick, however, to praise Charles Eastlake’s contribution to the popularization of German art history in Britain, at the expenses of the work done by Elizabeth Rigby, much before she became Lady Eastlake. For a thorough assessment of the reception of German art historiography in Britain in relation to Morelli’s influence, cf. Donata Levi: Fortuna di Morelli: Appunti sui rapporti fra storiografia artistica tedesca ed inglese, in: Panzeri 1987, pp. 19–54.
43 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, 7 March 1890. BL Add. Ms. 39045. 44 Since the beginning of her career, the Scottish publisher Murray had been instrumental in establishing Lady Eastlake’s voice as a translator, but also as a critic in the Quarterly Review and Edinburgh Review; cf. Susanna Avery-Quash and Julie Sheldon: Art for the Nation. The Eastlakes and the Victorian Art World, London 2011, pp. 128–129. 45 Letter from Giovanni Morelli to Austen Henry Layard, 5 February 1890, BL Add. Ms. 38965 (‘car il y a peux des personnes en Europe qui, comme cette dame, avaient toutes les connaissances nécessaires et la tenure de l’esprit voulue pour juger ce que j’ai dit de bon et de mauvais dans mon volume’). 46 Letter from Giovanni Morelli to Austen Henry Layard, 18 February 1890, BL Add. Ms. 38965 (‘cette dame y raisonne comme un homme, les pensées ont toutes une tournure et un accent viriles’). 47 Letter from Elizabeth Eastlake to Austen Henry Layard, 17 February 1890, in: Sheldon 2009, p. 607. 48 Ibid. 49 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, 23 March 1890, BL Add. Ms. 39045. 50 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, 8 May 1890, BL Add. Ms. 39045. 51 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, 25 June 1890, BL Add. Ms. 39046. 52 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, 23 March 1890, BL Add. Ms. 39045. 53 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, 18 May 1890, BL Add. Ms. 39045. 54 Claude Phillips: Signor Morelli’s New Book, in: The Academy, 3 May 1890, pp. 306. 55 Ibid., p. 307. 56 Ibid. 57 Letter from John Murray to Austen Henry Layard, 3 May 1890, BL Add. Ms. 39045. Murray further explains to Layard that he was still recovering from the pecuniary losses derived from the unsuccessful publishing of five monographs on old masters, and suggested they turned to George Bell & Sons who had published Morelli before. 58 Letter from Robert St John Corbet to Austen Henry Layard, 30 June 1890, BL Add. Ms. 39046. 59 Letter from Robert St John Corbet to Austen Henry Layard, 2 July 1890, BL Add. Ms. 39046. 60 Letter from Giovanni Morelli to Austen Henry Layard, 5 July 1890, BL Add. Ms. 38968. (‘que le public Anglais s’intéresse si peu aux ouvrages sur les beaux-arts que la publication d’un livre comme Lermolieff serait une pure perte’).
188 | Notes
61 Letter from Austen Henry Layard to John Murray, 8 October 1891, The John Murray Archive, Ms. 40680, National Library of Scotland (NLS). 62 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, 3 July 1891, BL Add. Ms. 39098. 63 The discussion of Ffoulkes’ responses to the new isochromatic methods in Morelli’s book deserves a separate treatment. 64 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, 9 July 1891, BL Add. Ms. 39098. 65 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, 6 July 1891, BL Add. Ms. 39098. Ffoulkes called Hertz into question, not without creating further confusion, in order to further endorse her position to Layard: ‘I do not know what to do about the Preface. Miss Hertz has written me a rather ambiguous letter on the subject and I cannot tell whether she really objects to any part being left out. If you have returned from Trent, can I bring the letter for you to see? I mentioned it to Dr Frizzoni and he is certain that what you advised me to omit should be left out, though he seems to have misunderstood the case, & supposes that is Hertz who wishes it omitted instead of the reverse.’ Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, 18 November 1891, BL Add. Ms. 39098. However all Frizzoni really cared for was that the curtailed version of ‘Princip und Methode’ still illustrated the fundamental differences between the method of Morelli and that of Crowe and Cavalcaselle which Bode’s article (1891) had erroneously, and perhaps mischievously, merged; cf. letter from Giovanni Frizzoni to Austen Henry Layard, 13 October 1891, BL Add. Ms. 39098. 66 Austen Henry Layard to John Murray, 8 Oct. 1891. NLS Ms. 40680. The novel was published under the male pseudonym of Harry Hertz: Alide, 2 vols, Stuttgart 1878. A summary of the novel and how it reflected Hertz’s personal relations with Ludwig and Frida Mond is given in Thomas Adam: Transnational Philanthropy: The Mond Family’s Support for Public Institutions in Western Europe from 1890 to 1938, London 2016, pp. 49–52. Hertz was born Jewish, but converted to Protestantism in her thirties. Just before her death, she endowed the Bibliotheca Hertziana of Rome. For an account of her living with the Monds in London, and her apprenticeship in art history with Jean Paul Richter, cf. Louise M. Richter: Recollections of Dr Ludwig Mond, London 1920, pp. 7–16; cf. also Julia Rischbieter: Henriette Hertz: Mäzenin und Gründerin der Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rom, Stuttgart 2004. For her intellectual role as a philanthropist, cf. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer and Anna Lo Bianco (eds): La donazione di Enrichetta Hertz, 1913–2013, Milano 2013. Jaynie Anderson has mentioned her financing the publication only in passing, but without discussing the details of her involvement; cf. Jaynie Anderson: Layard and Morelli, in: Frederick Mario Fales and Bernard Hickey (eds): Austen Henry Layard tra l’Oriente e Venezia, Roma 1987, p. 109. 67 Letter from Henriette Hertz to Austen Henry Layard, 24 July 1891, BL Add. Ms. 39098. 68 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, 28 July 1891, BL Add. Ms. 39098. 69 Letter from Austen Henry Layard to John Murray, 28 July 1891, NLS Ms. 40680. The first vol-
ume was published in 750 copies which cost £200, illustration costs excluded. Letter from John Murray to Austen Henry Layard, 6 August 1891, BL Add. Ms. 39098.
70 Layard’s manuscripts of the introduction reached Murray already in November. Letter from Austen Henry Layard to John Murray, 23 November 1891, NLS Ms. 40680. 71 Letter from Henriette Hertz to Austen Henry Layard, 29 October 1891, BL Add. Ms. 39098: ‘Miss Ffoulkes writes that you would like to know if I wished to be mentioned in your introduction to Lermolieff ’s book. It is a great temptation to be mentioned by you for all eternity, but I think I better resign: it would do no good to the book.’ 72 Letter from Austen Henry Layard to John Murray, 8 October 1891, NLS Ms. 40680. 73 [Elizabeth Eastlake]: Giovanni Morelli: The Patriot and the Critic, in: The Quarterly Review 143/1891, pp. 235–252.
189 | Notes
74 Bode 1891, pp. 506–515. 75 Ibid., p. 509. 76 Ibid., p. 509. 77 Letter from Sidney Colvin to Austin Henry Layard, 17 October 1891, BL Add. Ms. 39098. 78 This point was further expanded in Layard 1892, p. 2. 79 Letter from Austen Henry Layard to John Murray, 26 October 1892, NLS Ms. 40680. As Lady Eastlake started to worry that the publication of Ffoulkes’ translation was too near to dissipate the negative echoes of Bode’s article, she resolved to share with Layard what should have been her introduction ‘which I have written in vindication of my dearest friend’. Letter from Elizabeth Eastlake to Austen Henry Layard, 9 February 1892, BL Add. Ms. 38972. Eastlake emphasizes that her manuscript was also shown to the Empress Frederick ‘who highly approved of it and made one or two excellent suggestions, which I at once adopted’. 80 Anon.: Art, in: Westminster Review, July 1892, p. 462. 81 Books of the Week, in: The Manchester Guardian, Tuesday, 10 May 1892, p. 9. 82 Walter Armstrong: Morelli’s Critical Studies of Italian Painters, in: The Art Journal, July 1892, p. 224; D.N.G.I.: Italian Painting and the Late Giovanni Morelli, in: The Magazine of Art, January 1893, p. 155. 83 Letter from Elizabeth Eastlake to Austen Henry Layard, 28 October 1891; cf. Sheldon 2009, p. 621. 84 On the opportunities that the development of the art press represented for the professionali-
zation of women art writers at the end of the century, cf. Amy M. Von Lintel: ‘Excessive Industry’: Female Art Historians, Popular Publishing and Professional Access, in: Temma Balducci and Heather Belnap Jensen (eds): Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789–1914, Aldershot 2014, pp. 115–129; Meaghan Clarke: Turn-of-the-Century Women Writing about Art, 1880–1920, in: Holly A. Laird (ed.): The History of British Women’s Writing, 1880–1920, London 2016, pp. 258–272; Clarke and Ventrella 2017, pp. 1–10. 85 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to John Murray, 6 July 1892, NLS Ms. 40401. 86 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, 20 July 1891, BL Add. Ms. 39098. The year after, Ffoulkes will make a similar point to Murray with regard to reviews of her translation: ‘I shall be very glad to see any reviews, as I may learn something from them for the translation of the second volume.’ Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to John Murray, 14 April 1892, NLS Ms. 40401. 87 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to John Murray, 13 March 1890, BL Add. Ms. 39045. 88 Lermolieff 1890, p. 236; Morelli 1892, p. 184. The term is actually included in a long quotation from Rumohr’s Drei Reisen in Italien (1832). 89 Lermolieff 1893, p. 174. 90 Anderson 1991, p. 574.
91 Letter from Constance J. Ffoulkes to Austen Henry Layard, 23 March 1890, BL Add. Ms. 39045: ‘[…] would you be very kind as to correct or alter the title of “Princip und Methode” before it [the manuscript] leaves your hands?’ asks a very insecure Ffoulkes to Layard at the beginning of her task. ‘Perhaps it would sound better to say “Method and principles”?’ 92 Morelli 1893, p. 37; Lermolieff 1890, p. 46. 93 Morelli 1893, p. 38.
190 | Notes
94 The Italian translation by Clotaldo Piucco, registrar of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, was edit-
ed by Frizzoni. Giovanni Morelli (Ivan Lermolieff ): Della pittura italiana: studii storico critici: le Gallerie Borghese e Doria Pamphili in Roma, preceduta dalla biografia e dal ritratto dell’autore, illustrata da 81 incisioni, Milano 1897, p. 54.
95 Cf. Carol Gibson-Wood: Studies in the Theory of Connoisseurship from Vasari to Morelli, New York 1988. The shift in the meaning of connoisseurship in Britain is especially important in relation to gender; cf. Ann Bermingham: The Aesthetics of Ignorance: The Accomplished Woman in the Culture of Connoisseurship, in: Oxford Art Journal 16.2/1993, pp. 3–20. 96 Phillips’ review makes explicit that the scientific method was ‘very different from that yield-
ing to a “Gesamteindruck” – to a “Giorgionesker or Raffaelischer Duft” – which Signor Morelli, as a rule, stigmatises as a mere weakness of the abhorred aestheticism of professional type’. Phillips 1890, p. 308. The literature on Morelli’s scientific method is voluminous. Here, I want to make reference to two classics: Carlo Ginzburg: Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm, in: id.: Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, Baltimore 1989, pp. 96–125; and Jaynie Anderson: Giovanni Morelli et sa définition de la ‘scienza dell’arte’, in: Revue de l’art 75/1987, pp. 49–55.
97 Fraser 2014, p. 3. 98 John Ruskin: Sesame and Lilies [1865] (ed. by D. Epstein Nord), New Haven 2002, p. 67. How-
ever, Ruskin’s essay was read differently by different women. Pointing at the fact that men and women should complete each other, he endorsed women’s education to fulfil their gendered mission concluding that ‘a girl’s education should be nearly, in its course and material of study, the same as a boy’s; but quite differently directed’ (p. 403); cf. J. Bush: ‘Special Strengths for Their Own Special Duties’: Women, Higher Education and Gender Conservatism in Late Victorian Britain, in: History of Education 34.4/2005, pp. 387– 405.
99 Caroline Palmer: ‘I Will Tell Nothing That I Did Not See’: British Women’s Travel Writing, Art and the Science of Connoisseurship, 1776–1860, in: Forum for Modern Language Studies 51.3/2015, p. 249. 100 Elizabeth Rigby [Eastlake]: Translator’s Preface, in: Johann David Passavant: Tour of A German
Artist in England, with Notices of Private Galleries, and Remarks on the State of Art [1836], reprint with an introduction by Colin B. Bailey, Welwyn Garden City 1978, p. xix.
101 For a study of Elizabeth Eastlake’s role in the dissemination of German art history in Great
Britain, cf. Levi 1987. For an assessment of German art history in relation to the respectability that Catholic iconographies afforded women art writers, cf. Caroline Palmer: ‘A fountain of the richest poetry’: Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and the Rediscovery of Early Christian Art’, in: Visual Resources 33.1-2/2017 (special issue on Women’s Expertise and the Culture of Connoisseurship, ed. by Meaghan Clarke and Francesco Ventrella), pp. 48–73.
102 Cf. Ventrella 2017. 103 Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes: Misnamed Pictures in the Uffizi Gallery, in: The Magazine of Art 13.1/1890, p. 191. Cf. Ventrella 2017, pp. 117–118. 104 Lermolieff 1890, pp. 254 –255 (‘Welcher aristokratische Vater und zumal welche adelige Frau Mama würde in unserer demokratisch sich geberdenden Zeit ihren vornehmen Töchterlein eine solche “éducation” zumuthen!’). 105 Cf. Jo Devereux: The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England. The Education and Careers of Six Professionals, Jefferson 2016. 106 Sheldon 2009, p. 2. 107 Elizabeth Eastlake: The Englishwoman at School, in: The Quarterly Review 146/1878, p. 66. 108 Ibid., p. 66.
191 | Notes
109 Ibid., p. 68. 110 Her ideas on women’s education are also summarised in a letter from Elizabeth Eastlake to Austen Henry Layard, 17 March 1878, in: Sheldon 2009, pp. 457– 458. 111 Eastlake 1878, p. 49. 112 Bush 2005, p. 393. 113 Lermolieff 1890, p. 258. 114 Morelli 1892, pp. 199–200 (my italics). 115 Letter from Elizabeth Eastlake to Austen Henry Layard, 1 May 1892, BL Add. Ms. 38972. 116 Letter from Elizabeth Eastlake to Austen Henry Layard, 25 November 1892, BL Add. Ms. 38972. 117 The second volume of the Kunstkritische Studien was a revised version of the 1880 book on German Galleries which Louise Richter translated in 1883. Ffoulkes was initially worried of upsetting Richter, but the intervention of Henriette Hertz resolved the matter. Letter from Henriette Hertz to Austen Henry Layard, 1 August 1891, BL Add. Ms. 39098. 118 Letter from Elizabeth Eastlake to Austen Henry Layard, 12 January 1893, BL Add. Ms. 38972. 119 Oana Helena Andone: Gender Issues in Translation, in: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 10.2/2002, pp. 135–150. 120 Cf. Sherry Simon: Creating New Lines of Transmission, in: id. 1996, pp. 37–80. 121 Anon.: Morelli’s Italian Painters, in: The Edinburgh Review, October 1892, p. 349.
Aby Warburg’s Literal and Intermedial Self-Translation (Maria Teresa Costa) 1
Ernst H. Gombrich: Aby Warburg: his aims and his methods. An anniversary lecture, in: Journal of the Warburg and the Courtauld Institutes 62/1999, pp. 268–282, p. 268.
2
Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, introd. by Kurt W. Foster, trad. by David Britt, Los Angeles 1999.
3 Cf. the essays by Irving Lavin and Giovanna Targia in this volume. The term was introduced by Warburg with a different connotation, but Panofsky’s application of the concept became the bestknown. On the difference between the two ‘iconologies’, cf. among others Peter Schmidt: Aby M. Warburg und die Ikonologie, Wiesbaden 1993. 4
Cf. Maria Teresa Costa: Filosofie della traduzione, Milano/Udine 2012, pp. 57–75.
5
Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt: Quand Freud voit la mer. Freud et la langue allemande I, Paris 1988, p. III: ‘[The German language] est indéfiniment inventive, elle donne lieu aux plus admirables trouvailles poétiques et favorise l’expression technique par les possibilités descriptives qu’elle offre.’ (my translation)
6
Ibid.: ‘On peut la décomposer pour en montrer le mécanisme et mettre au jour ce qui la caractérise: la facilité de composition de mots par agglutination de parties trés simples, pour constituer un ensemble complexe […] Tout est à l’avenant, les ressources sont illimitées.’ (my translation)
7
On comparativism in art history, cf. among others Georges Didi-Huberman: L’Album de l’art à l’epoque du ‘Musée imaginaire’, Paris 2013; Peter Geimer: Vergleichendes Sehen oder Gleichheit aus Vesehen? Analogie und Differenz in kunsthistorischen Bildvergleichen, in: Lena Bader, Martin Gaier and Falk Wolf (eds): Vergleichendes Sehen, Paderborn 2010.
192 | Notes
8 The saying is quoted by Gertrud Bing: Aby M. Warburg, in: Rivista storica italiana 72.1/1960, p. 113. 9
Aby Warburg: I costumi teatrali per gli Intermezzi del 1589: i disegni di Bernardo Buontalenti e il ‘Libro dei conti’ di Emilio de’ Cavalieri, in: id.: Gesammelte Schriften. Studienausgabe. Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Renaissance, 2 vols (ed. by Horst Bredekamp and Michael Diers), Berlin 1998 (= Reprint der Ausgabe Leipzig/Berlin 1932), vol. 1, pp. 259–300. For the German original text, cf. pp. 422– 438. For the English translation cf. Warburg 1999, pp. 349– 401. (Appendix: pp. 495–547); id.: Delle ‘ imprese amorose’ nelle più antiche incisioni fiorentine, in: Warburg 1998, pp. 79–88. For the German original text, cf. pp. 331–339; for the English translation, cf. Warburg 1999, pp. 169–183 (Appendix: pp. 431– 435).
10 Giovanni Poggi (1880–1960): from 1907–1910 director of the Bargello, afterwards ‘Soprin
tentente delle province di Firenze, Lucca, Massa, Livorno, Arezzo e Pisa’, and from of 1912 director of the Uffizi. He was part of in the circle of intellectuals working at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, where he met and befriended Warburg.
11 The correspondence between Aby Warburg and Giovanni Poggi is kept at the Warburg Insti-
tute Archive in London (WIA) and at the Archivio Storico delle Gallerie Fiorentine in Florence.
12 Cf. Walter Benjamin: Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4.1 (ed. by
Tillman Rexroth), Frankfurt a. M. 1972, p. 14.
13 Warburg 1998, pp. 331–332. In the manuscript conserved at the Warburg Institute the Italian translation of this expression is annotated by Aby Warburg (in the handwriting by his wife Mary Warburg); cf. WIA III.63.1.5, p. 3. 14 Letter from Giovanni Poggi to Aby Warburg, 11 January 1905, WIA, General Correspondence (GC). 15 Warburg 1998, p. 332; WIA III.63.1.5, p. 2. 16 Warburg 1998, p. 332. In the English translation, the mixture between the two languages is not evident, cf. Warburg 1999, p. 169 (‘[…] most of them depict a pair of courtly lovers’); cf. WIA III.63.1.5, p. 3. 17 Warburg 1998, p. 80 and p. 332; cf. WIA III.63.1.5, p. 3. 18 Warburg 1998, p. 80 and p. 332; cf. WIA III.63.1.5, p. 3 (with Aby Warburg’s handwriting). The English translation is closer to the Italian original words by Warburg; cf. Warburg 1999, p. 169. 19 Warburg 1998, p. 80. 20 Warburg 1998, pp. 80 and 333; cf. WIA III.63.1.5, p. 4. For the English translation, cf. War-
burg 1999, p. 171 (‘the modern art-historical mind’).
21 Warburg 1998, p. 80–81 and p. 333–334; cf. WIA III.63.1.5, pp. 4 and 7 (in Mary Warburg’s handwriting). For the English translation, cf. Warburg 1999, p. 171 (‘tend to be passed over too hastily’; ‘flowery dell’). 22 Warburg 1998, p. 334; cf. WIA III.63.1.5, p. 8. 23 Cf. Warburg 1998, pp. 331–339; For the English translation, cf. Warburg 1999, pp. 431– 435. 24 In a letter to Giovanni Poggi of 11 February 1904, Warburg is referring to Poggi’s work on the ‘Amori di Lorenzo’ (Archivio Storico delle Gallerie Fiorentine, Fondo Giovanni Poggi, Serie I, 23). 25 Cf. letter from Aby Warburg to Giovanni Poggi, 28 June 1905, Archivio Storico delle Gallerie Fiorentine, Fondo Giovanni Poggi, Serie I, 23.
193 | Notes
26 Warburg 1998, p. 335. For the English translation, cf. Warburg 1999, p. 432: ‘I was thus left facing an apparently insoluble riddle, and my excavations in the dark tunnel of Medicean courtly love seemed hopelessly blocked, when I was relieved to hear from the far, Italian, side of the blockage. My friend Giovanni Poggi was there before me. He, too, deep in the Lucrezia riddle, was looking for a way out of the obscure depths of the vita amorosa of the Medici. One winter day in 1902, in the Archivio di Stato in Florence, he saw the light: not through any artistic vision, but as a result of methodical industry, it fell to him to reduce the mysterious two Lucrezias to one. Poggi discovered that the Lucrezia in Alessandra’s letters was not a Gondi, as Guasti had unwarrantably supposed, but a Donati. As the records confirm, she was the wife of Niccolò Ardinghelli, whom she married when she was about fifteen years old, on 26 April 1465.’ 27 WIA III.63.1.5, p. 10. 28 Warburg 1998, p. 83. 29 The correct expression in Italian would be ‘alla francese’. One might speculate whether the ‘z’ is due to the German pronunciation of the Italian ‘c’, a sound that does not exist in German. 30 Warburg 1998, p. 333: ‘Unsere Baldini-tondi geben nun, wie ich in folgendem aufzeigen möchte, einen einzigartigen Einblick in diese kritische Übergangszeit des malerischen Stiles zwi schen spätem Mittelalter und Frührenaissance um etwa 1465’. In the Italian translation by Poggi, ibid., p. 80: ‘Questi “tondi“ ci consentono, come vorrei mostrare in seguito, di penetrare in questo critico periodo di transizione dello stile pittorico tra il tardo Medioevo e la prima Rinascita, cioè circa il 1465.’ 31 Warburg 1999, p. 171. For the German original, cf. Warburg 1998, p. 333: ‘Dieser höchst eigentümliche, bisher trotz seiner drastischen Deutlichkeit nie beachtete Dualismus der eroti schen Kultur kommt daher auf den Deckeln der scatoline d’amore zum Ausdruck: steifer ornamentaler Trachtenrealismus “alla franzese“ scheint sich friedlich mit antikisierender schwungvoll bewegter Gewandung zu verzahnen.’ 32 Warburg 1998, pp. 336–337. The parts in square brackets were added by hand by Warburg. The sentence in Italian is modified by Poggi: ‘[…] prodotti di un felice innesto del ramo sempreverde dell’antichità pagana sull’albero inaridito delle pittura borghese “fiandregiante“’. Warburg put a footnote here referring to some of his previous texts on the ‘Ninfa’: ‘Geburt der Venus und Frühling (1893), I costumi teatrali di B. Buontalenti 1589, negli Atti del R. Istituto Musicale di Firenze del 1895 (non in commercio) e Sandro Botticelli, nel Museum del 1901, p. 22’ (ibid., p. 85). For the English translation, cf. Warburg 1999, p. 174: ‘Lucrezia, on the other hand, is in a curious transitional stage, sartorially speaking, between burdensome contemporary high fashion, alla franzese, and a sprightly ideal costume, all’antica. On her head she wears a fermaglio, the weighty and ostentatious headdress with which, in their pride of possession, the mercantile citizens of Florence adorned their brides; but her hair is dressed alla ninfale and flows back freely. A pair of wings, proper attributes of the Etruscan Medusa, rises up from her temples: a symbol directly borrowed from antiquity, and thus an indication of the elevated, ideal nature of the figure. The rest of her costume shows the same contrast between prosaic reality and the ideal. The bodice is fashionably low-necked […] but the skirt, from which her feet emerge in pagan nakedness, was never seen with so lightsome a swirl of any contemporary flesh-and-blood woman. […] Those figures revived the loftier antique style of life in motion, as we find it in the homeward-bound Judith, or in the angelic companion of Tobias, or in the dancing Salome, who emerged on biblical pretexts from the workshops of Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, Botticelli, and Ghirlandaio, grafting eternal shoots of pagan antiquity onto the withered rootstock of Flemish-influenced bourgeois painting.’ 33 Warburg 1999, p. 176. The German original, Warburg 1998, p. 338: ‘der antike Schmetterling (hat) die burgundische Larve gesprengt; Victorienhaft wallt das Gewand, und auch die Medusenflügel am Kopf, willkommene helfende Flugwerkzeuge der schwebenden Nynfe, haben die stumfsinnig prahlerische Spitzhaube verjagt’.
194 | Notes
34 In the English translation, Warburg 1999, p. 177: ‘[…] as an organic transitional stage to the
free mythological easel painting on canvas’.
35 From this very perspective, he seems to tread the opposite way that art history traditionally
follows: if art history emerges as a translation of images into language (one thinks of ekphrasis), Warburg from 1924 until his death in 1929 almost always transforms texts into images or constellations of images.
36 Aby Warburg: Gesammelte Schriften. Studienausgabe. vol. II.1, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (ed.
by Martin Warnke, in collaboration with Claudia Brink), Berlin 2008. For an English translation of the introduction to the Atlas: Aby Warburg: The Absorption of the Expressive Values of the Past, trad. by Matthew Rampley, in: Art in Translation 1.2/2009, pp. 273–283.
37 Letter from Aby Warburg to Jacques Mesnil, 3 October 1928, WIA, GC: ‘Es ist ein weitläufiges System von Kleiderhaken, in dem ich alle die kleinen und grossen Textilia vom Webstuhl der Zeit aufzuhängen möchte.’ 38 Cf. Aby Warburg: Gesammelte Schriften. Studienausgabe vol. II.2. Bilderreihen und Ausstellun-
gen (ed. by Uwe Fleckner and Isabella Woldt), Berlin 2012, p. vii.
39 In a letter of 1930 to the publisher Teubner, Fritz Saxl refers to Warburg’s intention to add two textual volumes to the Mnemosyne Atlas. In his mind, they would have enriched the Atlas with some commentaries to the panels, and some supplementary material as notes from diaries, confe rences, and letters. In Saxl’s words: ‘We possess a very rich legacy of unpublished materials, which when put together in the manner of a mosaic, will doubtlessly yield that text. It is to be expected that we will largely be able to work Warburg’s aphoristic notes into the atlas.’ Warburg 2008, p. xix. 40 Karl Sierek: Images oiseaux. Aby Warburg et la théorie des médias, trad. by Pierre Rusch, Paris
2009, p. 131.
41 Georges Didi-Huberman: Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet. L’œil de l’ histoire 3, Paris 2011, p. 12. 42 It must not be forgotten that the only trace of the image constellations are the photographs made by one of Warburg’s collaborators before he took down the composition, built another one and so forth. 43 Cf. Aby Warburg: Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bürgertum [1902], in: Warburg 1998, p. 96. For the English translation, cf. Warburg 1999, pp. 185–221 (Appendix pp. 435– 450). 44 Cf. Hermann Osthoff: Vom Suppletivwesen der indogermanischen Sprachen, Heidelberg 1899.
This text is quoted several times by Warburg. Between 1903 and 1906 – in the period during which he was working on the essay Dürer und die italienische Antike (1905) – he wrote an unpu blished text entitled Festwesen, in which he speaks about a mutual influence between Ghirlandaio and Hugo van der Goes, and refers to Osthoff ’s text: ‘I do not want to overrate the formula I have found for it, but there exist in the field of visual arts a phenomenon, which is as the one Osthoff has observed in linguistics, a switch and supplementation of the roots used in the superlative forms.’ In the German original: ‘Ich will die Formel, die ich dafür gefunden habe, nicht überschätzen, aber es gibt eben auf dem Gebiete der bildenden Kunst, wie Osthoff auf sprachlichem Gebiet betrachtet hat, ein Suppletivwesen, ein Austausch- und Ersatzwesen der Superlativen Formen.’ Quoted after Ernst H. Gombrich: Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography, Oxford 1970, pp. 178–179.
45 Warburg 2009, p. 277–278. In the German original text, Warburg 2008, p. 3: ‘Inventar […] der antikisierenden Vorprägungen, die auf die Darstellung des bewegten Lebens im Zeitalter der Renaissance mitstilbildend einwirkten’. 46 Aby Warburg: Dürer und die italienische Antike, in: Warburg 1998, pp. 443– 449. For the Eng-
lish translation: Warburg 1999, pp. 553–558 (appendix pp. 729–731).
195 | Notes
47 Cf. Salvatore Settis: Aby Warburg. Il demone della forma. Antropologia, storia, memoria, in: Engramma 100/2012, pp. 271–289, here p. 275. 48 It is interesting to recall that the reception of this word brought with it its misinterpreta-
tion. One might think for instance about Panofsky’s translation as ‘typification’ or ‘iconographic formula’, through which the main intention of the original concept gets lost; cf. François Albera: ‘“L’Exorcist” (Review of Georges Didi-Huberman, Maurizio Ghelardi, Roland Recht, Martin Warnke, Dieter Wuttke: Relire Panofsky, Paris 2008, and Ludwig Binswanger and Aby Warburg: La Guérison infinie. Histoire clinique d’Aby Warburg (ed. by Davide Stimili), Paris 2007), in: 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze 57/2009 [http://journals.openedition.org/1895/4026].
49 Warburg 2009, p. 278. In the German original, Warburg 2008, p. 3: ‘Schon 1905 war dem Verfasser bei solchen Versuchen die Schrift von Osthoff über das Suppletivwesen der Indogerma nischen Sprachen zu Hilfe gekommen: er wies zusammenfassend nach, daß bei Adjektiven und Verben ein Wortstammwechsel in der Komparation oder Konjugation eintreten kann, nicht nur ohne daß die Vorstellung der energetischen Identität der gemeinten Eigenschaft oder Aktion darunter leidet, obwohl die formale Identität des wortgeformten Grundausdrucks wegfällt, sondern daß der Eintritt eines fremdstämmigen Ausdrucks eine Intensifikation der ursprüng lichen Bedeutung bewirkt.’ 50 Osthoff 1899, p. 3: ‘[W]örter und wortformen, die [in den indogermanischen sprachen] mit einander sich zu einem flexionssystem verbinden, wie die einzelnen kasus eines substantivs, die verschiedenen zeitformen eines verbs, insgemein bekanntlich auch wurzelverwandtschaftlich unter sich eng zusammenhängend sind’ (my translation). 51 Ibid.: ‘unregelmässigkeiten, anomalien der formenbildung’; ‘defektiven beschaffenheit gewis-
ser wortstämme’ (my translation).
52 Ibid.: ‘Die stellvertretung braucht sogar nicht notwendig dadurch bedingt zu sein, dass ein for-
maler mangel bei einem der zur gruppenbildung zusammentretenden stämme vorliegt.’
53 Ibid., p. 46: ‘[... dass] in der sprachentwicklung die bezeichnung der “individuellen vorstel-
lungen” früher dagewesen sein müsse, als diejenige der “allgemeinen begriffe”’; cf. Georg Curtius: Grundzüge der griechischen Etymologie, Leipzig 1858, pp. 97 et seq.
54 Osthoff 1899, pp. 50 and 78. Osthoff refers here to a work by Warburg’s teacher Hermann Use-
ner: Götternamen. Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung, Bonn 1896.
55 Warburg 2009, p. 278. In the German original, Warburg 2008, p. 3: ‘Mutatis mutandis läßt
sich ein ähnlicher Prozess auf dem Gebiet der kunstgestaltenden Gebärdensprache feststellen, wenn etwa die tanzende Salome der Bibel wie eine griechische Mänade auftritt, oder wenn eine fruchtkorbtragende Dienerin Ghirlandajos im Stil einer ganz bewußt nachgeahmten Victorie eines römischen Triumphbogens herbeieilt.’
56 Cf. Didi-Huberman 2011, p. 20. 57 Cf. Ernst Bloch: Erbschaft dieser Zeit, Frankfurt a. M. 1973. On the reception of Bloch in art historiography, cf. Frederic J. Schwartz: Blind Spots. Critical Theory and the History of Art in twentieth-century Germany, New Haven/London 2005. 58 Cf. the introduction of the present volume, pp. 11–19. 59 The geographic map is indicated by Warburg as a ‘Wanderstrassenkarte des Kulturaustausches zwischen Norden-Süden-Osten-Westen’. It is not simply about a description of space, but also a description of migration and exchange through spaces and cultures. Cf. Claudia Wedepohl: Ideengeographie: Ein Versuch zu Aby Warburgs ‘Wanderstraßen der Kultur’, in: Helga Mitterbauer and Katharina Scherke (eds): Ent-grenzte Räume: Kulturelle Transfers um 1900 und in der Gegenwart, Wien 2005, pp. 227–251.
196 | Notes
60 Didi-Huberman 2011, p. 20. 61 WIA III.97.1.1, fol. 10.
Edgar Wind’s Self-Translations (Giovanna Targia) 1
Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der Antike, vol. 1, Die Erscheinungen des Jahres 1931, in Gemeinschaft mit Fachgenossen bearbeitet von Hans Meier, Richard Newald, Edgar Wind (ed. by the Bibliothek Warburg), Leipzig/Berlin 1934. For some information on the genesis of the project and on the role played by Richard Newald in planning the Bibliography as a periodical publication, cf. Dorothea McEwan: Fritz Saxl – Eine Biografie: Aby Warburgs Bibliothekar und erster Direktor des Londoner Warburg Insitutes, Wien 2012, pp. 163–165.
2 This breakup is documented, for instance, in a recriminatory letter Teubner sent to Warburg’s nephew, Erich M. Warburg, on 3 April 1935, which is preserved in the Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), Family Correspondence (FC). 3 The first volume of the Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, as well as the first of the Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, appeared in 1923, while Aby Warburg was still in the sanatorium Bellevue in Kreuzlingen; cf. letter from Fritz Saxl to Aby Warburg, 11 June 1923, WIA, General Correspon dence (GC), accompanying the first volume of Vorträge as a birthday present. 4 Aby Warburg: Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Renaissance. Gesammelte Schriften, 2 vols (ed. by Gertrud Bing with the collaboration of Fritz Rougemont), Leipzig 1932 (printed in 1933). An editorial irregularity bears witness to the political climate: the short text entitled Ernst Cassirer. Warum Hamburg den Philosophen Cassirer nicht verlieren darf, due to occupy the pages 614 –620 of vol. 2 of Warburg’s Gesammelte Schriften, was deleted from the index and suppressed at the very last moment in the process of printing, so that the page-numbering of the volume skips from 614 to 621, as noted by Dieter Wuttke; cf. Aby Warburg: Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen (ed. by Dieter Wuttke), 3rd ed., Baden-Baden 1992, p. 547. 5 As it emerges from the aforementioned letter to Erich M. Warburg (WIA, FC, 3 April 1935): ‘Es kann dahingestellt bleiben, welche Gründe die Übersiedlung der Bibliothek Warburg nach London veranlasst haben sowie ob es sich um eine einstweilige Verlegung handelt oder nicht. Tatsache ist und bleibt, dass erst die Übersiedlung die Kritik an den Veröffentlichungen der Bibliothek Warburg instand setzte, von Emigranten-Wissenschaft zu sprechen. Wie die mit dieser Kennzeichnung festgestellte Emigration sich im einzelnen erklärt, kann an der Tatsache nichts ändern, dass eben durch diese Kennzeichnung der Vertrieb der Warburg-Veröffentlichungen durch eine deutsche Firma sich verbietet, wie das Verlagsschreiben vom 8.2. es ausdrückt.’ 6
A Bibliography on the Survival of the Classics, vol. 1, The Publications of 1931 (ed. by The Warburg Institute), London et al. 1934. A second and a third volume of the Bibliography were already in preparation, involving a large number of contributors, when the Library migrated to London; eventually only a second volume was published with an English frontispiece under the variant title A Bibliography of the Survival of the Classics, vol. 2, The Publications of 1932–1933, London 1938. On the London publishing house, cf. Simon Nowell-Smith: The House of Cassell 1848–1958, London 1958. On the early reception see the reviews by Stephen Gaselee, in: Medium Aevum 5.2/1936, pp. 144 –146 and Emerson Buchanan, in: The Journal of Philosophy 33.14/1936, pp. 389–391; cf. also Graham Whitaker: A Moment in Time: From the Digital Record of a Migrating Library, in: Tom D. Kilton and Ceres Birkhead (eds): Migrations in Society, Culture, and the Library: WESS European Conference, 22–26 March 2004, Paris 2005, pp. 216–232.
7 The German printing company (that would also print subsequent publications of the Warburg Institute) was J. J. Augustin in Glückstadt, near Hamburg.
197 | Notes
8 Cf. Ernst Cassirer: Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, vol. 10), Leipzig/Berlin 1927, p. v. 9 Cf. among others Ulrich Raulff: Kreis ohne Meister. Stefan Georges Nachleben, 2nd ed., München 2012, pp. 11–18. 10 Bibliography 1934, p. v. 11 Many years later, on 5 June 1968, Wind wrote to Ernst H. Gombrich that the English version ‘was done under pressure and shows it’: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Wind 64, folder 1. 12 Cf. John M. Krois: Kunst und Wissenschaft in Edgar Winds Philosophie der Verkörperung, in: Horst Bredekamp et al. (eds): Edgar Wind. Kunsthistoriker und Philosoph, Berlin 1998, pp. 181– 205, p. 184, who refers to a personal communication from Edgar Wind’s late wife, Margaret. 13 For biographical information, cf. Hugh Lloyd Jones: A Biographical Memoir, in: Edgar Wind: The Eloquence of Symbols. Studies in Humanist Art (ed. by Jaynie Anderson), 3rd ed., Oxford 1993, pp. xiii–xxxvi, and Krois 1998. 14 The dissertation has only recently been published in its entirety: Edgar Wind: Aesthetischer
und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand. Ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der Kunstgeschichte (ed. by Pablo Schneider), Hamburg 2011. The two published excerpts are: id.: Aesthetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand. Ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der Kunstgeschichte, Auszug aus der Inaugural-Dissertation, Universität Hamburg, 1922 (12 pp.); id.: Zur Systematik der künstlerischen Probleme, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 18/1925, pp. 438– 486.
15 Edgar Wind: Theory of Art versus Aesthetics, in: Philosophical Review 34/1925, pp. 350–359:
the text is a version of a paper read at the 24th annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association at Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 30 December 1924.
16 Edgar Wind: Contemporary German Philosophy, in: The Journal of Philosophy 22/1925, pp. 477– 493 and 516–530. 17 Edgar Wind: Mathematik und Sinnesempfindung. Materialien zu einer Whitehead-Kritik, in:
Logos. Zeitschrift für systematische Philosophie 21/1932, pp. 239–280, p. 272. For a recent analysis of this text, cf. Sascha Freyberg: Ereignis und Objekt. Zur Whitehead-Kritik von Edgar Wind und John Dewey, in: Franz Engel and Sabine Marienberg (eds): Das Entgegenkommende Denken. Verstehen zwischen Form und Empfindung, Berlin 2016, pp. 39–54.
18 Cf. the observations made by Bernhard Buschendorf: ‘War ein sehr tüchtiges gegenseitiges Fördern’: Edgar Wind und Aby Warburg, in: Idea. Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 4/1985, pp. 165–209, pp. 172–176. For a recent reappraisal of Wind’s role in the history of pragmatism, cf. Tullio Viola: Peirce and Iconology: Habitus, Embodiment, and the Analogy between Philosophy and Architecture, in: European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 1/2012, pp. 6–31. 19 Edgar Wind: Experiment and Metaphysics, in: Edgar S. Brightman (ed.): Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, Harvard University 1926, New York 1927, pp. 217–224; id.: Das Experiment und die Metaphysik. Zur Auflösung der kosmologischen Antinomien [1934] (ed. with an afterword by Bernhard Buschendorf and an introduction by Brigitte Falkenburg), Frankfurt a.M. 2001. 20 Ernst Nagel, in: The Journal of Philosophy 31/1934, S. 164 –165, and Wind [1934] 2001, pp. 63–69. 21 Subtitle of the essay on Three Decades of Art History in the United States; cf. Panofsky 1955,
pp. 329–330; cf. the essay by Irving Lavin, pp. 91–97.
22 Cf. Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg (Gesammelte Schriften. Stu
dienausgabe, vol. VII) (ed. by Karen Michels and Charlotte Schoell-Glass), Berlin 2001, p. 104.
198 | Notes
23 On this point, cf. Franz Engel: Though This Be Madness: Edgar Wind and the Warburg Tradi-
tion, in: Sabine Marienberg and Jürgen Trabant (eds): Bildakt at the Warburg Institute, Berlin 2014, pp. 87–115, pp. 92–93.
24 Warburg 1932, pp. 487–558. 25 Tagebuch 2001, pp. 536, 539, 542, 545–546; cf. also Warburg’s report to the Kuratorium of the KBW dated 21 August 1929, in: Warburg 1992, pp. 307–309, p. 309. 26 In WIA III.90.5 is preserved a typescript of 64 folios (the first page is missing), with handwrit-
ten corrections by Ruth Wind. Cf. Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, Introduction by Kurt W. Forster, trad. by David Britt, Los Angeles 1999, pp. 597–697. On Warburg’s self-translations, cf. the essay by Maria Teresa Costa, pp. 56–76.
27 Erwin Panofsky: Korrespondenz. Eine kommentierte Auswahl in fünf Bänden, vol. 3, Korres
pondenz 1950 bis 1956 (ed. by Dieter Wuttke), Wiesbaden 2006, pp. 746–747.
28 Ernst H. Gombrich: Aby Warburg 1866–1929 [1966] in: Kulturforum Warburg (ed.): Aby
Warburg. Von Michelangelo bis zu den Puebloindianern, Warburg 1991, pp. 9–21, p. 13. Gombrich refers here to the same opinion expressed by Gertrud Bing in her introduction to the first Italian translation of a selection of Warburg’s writings, carried out by Emma Cantimori and published under the title La rinascita del paganesimo antico. Contributi alla storia della cultura, raccolti da G. Bing, Firenze 1966, pp. vii–xxxi, p. xi. 29 Cf., for instance, William S. Heckscher: The Genesis of Iconology, in Stil und Überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes: Akten des 21. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Bonn 1964, vol. 3. Theorien und Probleme, Berlin 1967, pp. 239–262, pp. 240–241: ‘[…] the words “iconology” and “Warburg method”, and justifiably so, have virtually become interchangeable’. 30 Cf. Antoine Berman: L’Épreuve de l’ étranger. Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne roman-
tique, Paris 1984, pp. 15–17.
31 Edgar Wind, in: The Times Literary Supplement, 25 June 1971; the review appeared anony-
mously and was reprinted in: id. 1993, pp. 106–113, p. 113.
32 Edgar Wind: Warburgs Begriff der Kulturwissenschaft und seine Bedeutung für die Ästhetik, in: Vierter Kongress für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Hamburg, 7.–9. Oktober 1930, supplement to the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 25/1931, pp. 163– 179; now in id.: Heilige Furcht und andere Schriften zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Philosophie (ed. by John Michael Krois and Roberto Ohrt), Hamburg 2009, pp. 83–111. In what follows, I quote from the English translation: Wind 1993, pp. 21–35. Notes, sketches and correspondence related to the congress, and dating from the beginning of 1928 until the end of October 1929 are preserved in WIA IV.51: Aesthetischer Kongress Hmbg. 1929; cf. also Andrea Pinotti: Wind, Warburg et la ‘Kunstwissenschaft’ comme ‘Kulturwissenschaft’, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 61.2/2016, pp. 267–279. 33 Wind 1993, p. 21. 34 Ibid. 35 Wind 1993, p. 27. Cf. Friedrich Theodor Vischer: Das Symbol [1887], in: id.: Kritische Gänge,
München 1922, pp. 420– 456; Bernhard Buschendorf: Zur Begründung der Kulturwissenschaft: der Symbolbegriff bei Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Aby Warburg und Edgar Wind, in: Bredekamp et al. 1998, pp. 227–248, and Matthew Rampley: Zur Vischer-Rezeption bei Warburg, in: Barbara Potthast and Alexander Reck (eds): Friedrich Theodor Vischer: Leben, Werk, Wirkung, Heidelberg 2011, pp. 299–320.
36 Wind 1993, p. 29; Warburg 1992, p. 307.
199 | Notes
37 Cf. Fritz Saxl: Rinascimento dell’antichità. Studien zu den Schriften Aby Warburgs [1922], reprinted in: Warburg 1992, pp. 347–399. 38 Cf. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher: Über den Umfang des Begriffs der Kunst in Bezug auf
die Theorie derselben [1831/32], in id.: Ästhetik (1819/25). Über den Begriff der Kunst (1831/32) (ed. by Thomas Lehnerer), Hamburg 1984, pp. 158–188, pp. 161–162. The German word for ‘reflection’ is here ‘Besinnung’, which has a contiguous meaning to that of ‘Besonnenheit’ (a frequent occurrence in Warburg’s texts, as is well known); cf. ibid., p. 11: ‘Die Kunst ist also hier die Identität der Begeisterung, vermöge deren die Aeußerung aus der inneren Erregung herrührt, und der Besonnenheit, vermöge deren sie aus dem Urbilde herrührt.’
39 Report written by Fritz Saxl and addressed to Erich M. Warburg, dated February 1934: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Wind 240, folder 2. At present, two different editions of Warburg’s Fragments are available: Aby Warburg: Frammenti sull’espressione. Grundlegende Bruchstücke zu einer pragmatischen Ausdruckskunde (ed. by Susanne Müller, with an Italian translation by Maurizio Ghelardi and Giovanna Targia), Pisa 2011; Aby Warburg: Fragmente zur Ausdruckskunde (Gesammelte Schriften. Studienausgabe, vol. IV) (ed. by Ulrich Pfisterer and Hans Christian Hönes), Berlin/München 2015. 40 Wind 1993, p. 33. Interestingly, the concept of periodicity was among the main themes War-
burg sketched for the programme of the Congress of Aesthetics, cf. WIA IV.51.5.
41 The text of the Memorandum was published by Dieter Wuttke as an appendix to his essay: Aby
M. Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft [1993/1994], in: id: Dazwischen. Kulturwissenschaft auf Warburgs Spuren, vol. 2, Baden-Baden 1996, pp. 737–765, pp. 762–765.
42 Cf. Dieter Wuttke: Die Emigration der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg und die Anfänge des Universitätsfaches Kunstgeschichte in Großbritannien, in: id. 1996, pp. 695–722, and Bernhard Buschendorf: Auf dem Weg nach England – Edgar Wind und die Emigration der Bibliothek Warburg, in: Michael Diers (ed.): Porträt aus Büchern. Bibliothek Warburg und Warburg Institute, Hamburg – 1933 – London, Hamburg 1993, pp. 85–128. 43 Wind is alluding to the dangers threatening Humanism through contemporary attempts to break away from the Graeco-Roman tradition; cf. Bibliography 1934, p. xii: ‘The last section “Humanismus und Gegenwart” is somewhat humorous. It shows Germany defending its “Third Humanism” with all the help of scientific accuracy but unable to safe-guard its “Humanistic Gymnasium” from rhetorical attacks.’ 44 A similar distinction surfaces also in the writings of Ernst Cassirer, who had been closely con-
nected to the Warburg circle since his first years in Hamburg; cf. in particular Cassirer’s critique of Windelband’s and Rickert’s concepts of Kulturwissenschaft in his essay Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften. Fünf Studien [1942], in: Ernst Cassirer: Werke (Hamburger Ausgabe), vol. 24. Aufsätze und kleine Schriften (1941–1946) (ed. by Claus Rosenkranz), Hamburg 2007, pp. 355– 486, pp. 393–394. Cassirer’s choice of the term Kulturwissenschaften for the title of this work – rather than the term Geisteswissenschaften, which he employs in other contexts – explicitly suggests his affiliation with the spirit and scopes of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. In this respect see the ‘Translator’s introduction’ in Ernst Cassirer: The Logic of the Cultural Sciences. Five Studies, trad. and with an introduction by Stephen G. Lofts, foreword by Donald Phillip Verene, New Haven/London 2000, pp. xviii–xix, and p. xvi, note 6: ‘To translate Kulturwissenschaften as “humanities” instead of using the somewhat unusual English term, “sciences of culture”, would thus have meant to obscure Cassirer’s aim of searching for the unity behind the “sciences” of culture and of nature.’ As is well known, Wilhelm Dilthey used the more ‘Hegelian’ term Geisteswissenschaft, whereas Neokantian philosophers preferred the younger word Kulturwissenschaft. For an outline of the history of these concepts, cf. the entries Geisteswissenschaften (A. Diemer) and Kultur, Kulturphilosophie (W. Perpeet), in: Joachim Ritter (ed.): Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 3, Basel/Stuttgart 1974, pp. 211–215 and vol. 4, Basel/Stuttgart
200 | Notes
1976, pp. 1309–1324; cf. also Hartmut Böhme: Kulturwissenschaft, in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 2, Berlin/New York 2000, pp. 356–359. 45 Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie 1934, p. vi. 46 Ibid. 47 Wind 1993, p. 34. This idea is intimately connected to a crucial Peircean sentence (as pointed out by Viola 2012): ‘It is the belief men betray, and not that which they parade which has to be studied’: Issues of Pragmaticism [1905], in: The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2 (ed. by the Peirce Edition Project), Bloomington/Indianapolis 1998, p. 349n. 48 Völkischer Beobachter 5/1935, p. 5 and 23/1935, p. 6 (reprinted in: Dieter Wuttke (ed.): Kosmopolis der Wissenschaft. E.R. Curtius und das Warburg Institute. Briefe 1928 bis 1953 und andere Dokumente, Baden-Baden 1989, pp. 296–298), where investigations on the survival of the classics are labelled as wholly unnecessary, as ‘Wissenschaft über die Wissenschaft und damit typisch jüdisches Denken’. On some of the sad consequences which followed, cf. Joist Grolle: Percy Ernst Schramm – Fritz Saxl. Die Geschichte einer zerbrochenen Freundschaft, in: Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (eds): Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990, Weinheim 1991, pp. 95–114, pp. 102–108. 49 Bibliography 1934, p. v. 50 Ibid., p. v–vi. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., pp. viii–ix. 53 Samuel Butler: Unconscious Memory: A Comparison between the Theory of Dr. Ewald Hering and the ‘Philosophy of the Unconscious’ of Dr. Edward von Hartmann; with Translations from these Authors, London 1880; Ewald Hering: Über das Gedächtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der orga nisierten Materie: Vortrag gehalten in der feierlichen Sitzung der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien am 30. Mai 1870, in: id.: Fünf Reden (ed. by H.E. Hering), Leipzig 1921, pp. 5–31. 54 Fritz Saxl: The History of Warburg’s Library (1886–1944), in: Ernst H. Gombrich: Aby War-
burg. An Intellectual Biography, London 1970, pp. 325–338, p. 337.
55 Gertrud Bing: Fritz Saxl, 1890–1948. A Memoir, in: Donald James Gordon (ed): Fritz Saxl 1890–1948. A Volume of Memorial Essays, London 1957, pp. 1– 46, p. 28. 56 Cf. Warburg 1992, p. 612. 57 Fritz Saxl in Gombrich 1970, pp. 335–336, where, with reference to the review of the
Völkischer Beobachter, Saxl noted that the Bibliography was ‘an enterprise as dry and non-political as any humanistic institute could produce’.
58 See, in this regard, the subsequent polemic and breakup between Wind and Saxl, documented by a dramatic exchange of letters immediately following Wind’s resignation from the Institute in 1945 (a letter Wind sent to Gertrud Bing on 15 June 1945 has been published in Engel 2014, pp. 107–115), and narrated in a long letter Wind addressed to Jean Seznec in the summer 1954 about the general situation at the Warburg Institute, and preserved, together with Seznec’s answer dated 25 September 1954, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Wind 7, folder 5.
201 | Notes
American Panofsky (Irving Lavin) 1 Erwin Panofsky: Meaning in the Visual Arts. Papers in and on Art History, New York 1955, pp. 321–346. The essay was published simultaneously and with the same title in the predecessor of the Art Bulletin, the College Art Journal XIV-1/1954, pp. 7–27. 2 Karen Michels: Transplantierte Kunstwissenschaft. Deutschsprachige Kunstgeschichte im amerikanischen Exil, Berlin 1999. 3
Colin Eisler: Kunstgeschichte American Style. A Study in Migration, in: Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (eds): The Intellectual Migration. Europe and America, 1930–1960, Cambridge/ Mass. 1969, pp. 544 –629.
4 Andreas Beyer: Stranger in Paradise: Erwin Panofsky’s Expulsion to the Academic Parnassus, in: Eckart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel (eds): ‘Escape to Life’. German Intellectuals in New York. A Compendium on Exile after 1933, Berlin/Boston 2012, pp. 429– 444. 5 Quoted after Panofsky 1955, p. 332. The dictum was also quoted in an essay by a devoted pupil and protégé of Panofsky, Harry Bober: The Gothic Tower and the Stork Club, in: Arts and Sciences 1/1962, pp. 1–8. 6 Panofsky 1955, p. 1: ‘And when the Nazis ousted all Jewish officials in the spring of 1933, I happened to be in New York while my family were still at home.’ 7
Panofsky 1955, p. 324.
8
Ibid.
9 On Marquand, cf. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin: The Eye of the Tiger. The Founding and Development of the Department of Art and Archaeology, 1883–1923, Princeton 1983, pp. 8–9; on Johns Hopkins University, cf. Hugh Hawkins: Pioneer. A History of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore 2002. 10 Cf., for instance, Allan Marquand: A New Logical Machine, in: Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 21/1886, pp. 303–07. 11 Allan Marquand: Luca della Robbia, Princeton 1914; id.: Giovanni della Robbia, Princeton
1920.
12 Colum P. Hourihane: Classifying subject matter in medieval art. The index of Christian art at Princeton University, in: Visual resources 30.3/2014, pp. 255–262. 13 Earl Baldwin Smith: Early Christian Iconography, and a School of Ivory Carvers in Provence,
Princeton 1918.
14 The concept of Iconology has been much studied and was deeply embedded in the culture of
the Warburg Institute, but it is curious that one of its most devoted and learned refugee scholars (not a Jew) and a favourite student and friend of Panofsky reported that the term Iconology did not appear prominently in Warburg’s own work. William S. Heckscher: The Genesis of Iconology, in: Stil und Überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes. Akten des 21. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte in Bonn, 3 vols, Berlin 1967, vol. 3, pp. 239–262, cf. pp. 260, 262.
15 On Flexner, cf. Thomas Neville Bonner: Iconoclast. Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning,
Baltimore 2002; on the IAS, cf. Steve L. Batterson: Pursuit of Genius. Flexner, Einstein, and the Early Faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study, Wellesley/Mass. 2006.
16 Panofsky 1955, p. 324. 17 Ibid., p. 327. 18 Ibid., p. 328.
202 | Notes
19 Ibid., p. 329; cf. also Michels 1999, pp. 59–69. 20 Erwin Panofsky: On Movies, in: Bulletin of the Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University, June 1936 (the date is mistakenly given as 1934 in some sources), pp. 5–15; id.: Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures, in: Transition XXVI/1937, pp. 121–33, and in: Dwight Leonard Durling: A Preface to Our Day, New York 1940, pp. 57–82; Erwin Panofsky: Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures, in: Critique. A Review of Contemporary Art I/1947, pp. 5–28 (the evaluation I quote is from the editors’ preliminary note). I rely for bibliographical information on Erwin Panofsky: Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft (ed. by Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen), Berlin 1974 (copy with addenda by Gerda Panofsky through 1992 in the library of the Institute for Advanced Study); cf. id.: Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures, in: id.: Three Essays on Style (ed. by Irving Lavin), Cambridge/Mass. et al. 1997, pp. 91–126. 21 Cf. Regine Prange: Stil und Medium. Panofskys ‘On Movies’, in: Bruno Reudenbach (ed.): Erwin Panofsky, Berlin 1994, pp. 171–190. 22 Cf. also Irving Lavin: Panofskys Humor, in: Erwin Panofsky: Die ideologischen Vorläufer des Rolls Royce Kühlers & Stil und Medium im Film, Frankfurt a.M. 1993, pp. 7–15. 23 Quoted after Abraham Pais: A Tale of Two Continents. A Physicist’s Life in a Turbulent World,
Princeton 1997, p. 205.
24 Ibid. 25 The most exhaustive collection of these dicta by Panofsky was made by William Hekscher and
is today archived in the Warburg Haus Hamburg.
Frederick Antal or a Connoisseur Turned Social Historian of Art (Jennifer Cooke) 1
John Berger: Frederick Antal. A Personal Tribute, in: Burlington Magazine XCVI/1954, pp. 259–260, p. 259. 2 Anna Wessely: Antal and Lukács – The Marxist Approach to the History of Art, in: The New Hungarian Quarterly 73/1979, p. 114; cf. also Michel Laclotte: Histoires de musées. Souvenirs d’un conservateur, Paris 2003, p. 26. On Gombrich, cf. Miranda Carter: Anthony Blunt: His Lives, London 2001, p. 127; on the reception of Hauser’s theories, cf. Michael R. Orwicz: Critical Discourse in the Formation of a Social History of Art: Anglo-American Response to Arnold Hauser, in: Oxford Art Journal VIII/1985, pp. 52–62. 3 Frederick Antal: Remarks on the method of art-history [1949], in: id.: Classicism and Romanticism with other studies in art history, London 1966, pp. 175–89, pp. 175–176. 4 Klassizismus, Romantik und Realismus in der französischen Malerei von der Mitte des XVIII. Jahrhunderts bis zum Auftreten Géricaults, PhD thesis, Univ. of Vienna 1914, later published in excerpts as Frederick Antal: Reflections on Classicism and Romanticism, in: Burlington Magazine LXVI/1935, pp. 159–163, 166–168; LXVIII/1936, pp. 130–133, 136–139, 141; LXXVII/1940, pp. 72–75, 78–80; LXXVII/1940, pp. 188, 190–192; LXXVIII/1941, pp. 14, 18–22; reprinted in Antal 1966, pp. 1– 45. The original manuscript in German has been recently published; cf. id.: Klassizismus, Romantik, Realismus (ed. by Nicos and Yannis Hadjinicolau), Zürich/Berlin 2014. 5
On Lukács, cf. Michael J. Thompson (ed.): Georg Lukács Reconsidered. Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics, London 2011.
6 Hans Aurenhammer: Inventing ‘Mannerist Expressionism’: Max Dvorˇák and the History of Art as History of the Spirit, in: Kimberly A. Smith (ed.): The Expressionist Turn in Art History: A Critical Anthology, Farnham 2014, pp. 187–208, p. 197.
203 | Notes
7
Robert Born: Budapest und die Entwicklung des sozialgeschichtlichen Ansatzes in der Kunstgeschichte, in: Dietlind Hüchtker and Alfrun Kliems (eds): Überbringen – Überformen – Überblen den. Theorietransfer im 20. Jahrhundert, Köln/Wien/Weimar 2011, pp. 93–123; id.: World Art Histories and the Cold War, in: Journal of Art Historiography 9/2013, https://arthistoriography. files.wordpress.com/2013/12/born.pdf.
8 For the personal recollections of some of its members, like Hauser and De Tolnay, cf. Kristóf Nyíri: Arnold Hauser on his Life and Times, in: The Hungarian Quarterly 80/1980, pp. 92–98; Arpád Timár: Charles de Tolnay’s Links with Hungary, in: The Hungarian Quarterly 83/1981, pp. 133–138; Mary Gluck: Georg Lukács and His Generation 1900–1918, Cambridge/Mass. 1985, pp. 11– 42; cf. also Éva Karádi and Erzsébet Vezér (eds): Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis, Frankfurt a.M. 1985; Anna Wessely: Der Diskurs über die Kunst im Sonntagskreis, in: Hubertus Gassner (ed.): Wechsel-Wirkungen. Ungarische Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik, Marburg 1985, pp. 541–553. 9
On Lukács’s aesthetics, cf. Margit Köves: ‘To Dance in Chains’. Aesthetics and Ethics in ‘History of Development of the Modern Drama’, in: Social Scientist 7–8/2005, pp. 17– 49, and Györgi Lukács: Notes on Georg Simmel’s Lessons, 1906/07, and on a ‘Sociology of Art’, c. 1909, Ostfildern 2011.
10 The influence of neo-Kantian philosophy on Lukács’s theories on art is discussed in Tyrus Miller: The Non-Contemporaneity of György Lukács. Cold War Contradictions and the Aesthetics of Visual Art, in: Acta Historiae Artium LVI/2015, pp. 309–322. 11 Quoted in Timár 1981, p. 135. 12 Born 2011, pp. 106–108. 13 Cf. Julia Szabó-Marosi: Hungarian Political Changes in 1918–1919: Evolution and Revolution in the Arts and Politics, in: Klaus Herding (ed.): Changements et continuité dans la création artistique des révolutions politiques, Strasbourg 1992, pp. 117–134. 14 Anna Wessely: Die Auf hebung des Stilbegriffs – Frederick Antals Rekonstruktion künstler-
ischer Entwicklungen auf marxistischer Grundlage, in: Kritische Berichte 2–3/1976, pp. 16–34, pp. 21–22.
15 Cf. Paul Stirton: Frederick Antal, in: Andrew Hemingway (ed.): Marxism and the History of Art. From William Morris to the New Left, London 2006, pp. 45–66, p. 50. 16 Enrico Castelnuovo: Roberto Longhi nella storia dell’arte del XX secolo, in: id.: La cattedrale tascabile. Scritti di storia dell’arte, Livorno 2000, pp. 132–143, pp. 140–141; Alessandra Giovannini Luca and Alice Pierobon (eds): Per una storia sociale dell’arte: bilanci, esperienze, prospettive. Intervista a Enrico Castelnuovo, in: Contesti. Rivista di microstoria 1/2014, pp. 159–178, pp. 163– 164. 17 Laura Gallo: ‘Vita Artistica’ / ‘Pinacotheca’ (1926–1932), Poggio a Caiano 2010, pp. 37–39, 70–71. 18 Frederick Antal: Un capolavoro inedito del Parmigianino, in: Pinacotheca I/1928, pp. 49–56; cf. Nikolaus Pevsner: Gegenreformation und Manierismus, in: Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 1925, p. 243. In the winter semester 1920–1921 Max Dvoř ák gave his last lecture course in Vienna, ‘Die Entwicklung der Barockkunst’, which spanned from Michelangelo’s late years, to Tintoretto, to Parmigianino and Federico Barocci; cf. Aurenhammer 2014, p. 188. 19 Frederick Antal: The Problem of Mannerism in the Netherlands, in: Antal 1966, pp. 71–72, note 2. 20 Roberto Longhi: Viatico per cinque secoli di pittura veneziana [1946], Firenze 1985, p. 33; cf.
Castelnuovo 2000, p. 141. In 1935, Gian Alberto Dell’Acqua lamented a rather cold acceptance of
204 | Notes
Dvoř ák’s theories in Italy as a result of dominating Crocean aesthetics: Gian A. Dell’Acqua: L’arte italiana nella critica di Max Dvorˇák, Firenze 1935, especially pp. v–vii. 21 Roberto Longhi: Ricordo dei Manieristi, in: L’Approdo 1/1953, pp. 55–59, p. 58. 22 Undated letter from Frederick Antal to Roberto Longhi quoted in Gallo 2010, p. 71: ‘Il manierismo è l’esagerazione, un sviluppo incredibile delle tendenze umanistiche ed erudite del Quattrocento. Ma ci sono anche altre correnti nel manierismo che si distinguono artisticamente e spiri tualmente.’ 23 Frederick Antal: La pittura italiana tra classicismo e manierismo, Roma 1977, p. 84. 24 Longhi 1953, p. 58. 25 Károly Kókai: Impulse der Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte im Werk von Frederick Antal, in: Maria Theisen (ed.): Wiener Jahrbuch Kunstgeschichte LIII/2004 (special issue on Wiener Schule. Erinnerungen und Perspektiven), pp. 109–119, p. 114. Erwin Panofsky: Ein Bildentwurf des Jacopino del Conte, in: Belvedere XI/1927, p. 50, note 1. 26 Unpublished lecture mentioned in Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg (Gesammelte Schriften – Studienausgabe vol. VII) (ed. by Karen Michels and Charlotte SchoellGlass), Berlin 2001, p. 158; cf. also Erwin Panofsky: Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968. Eine kommentierte Auswahl in fünf Bänden. Vol. 1: Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1936 (ed. by Dieter Wuttke), Wiesbaden 2001, p. 245. 27 Frederick Antal: Studien zur Gotik im Quattrocento: einige italienische Bilder des Kaiser-Frie-
drich-Museums, in: Jahrbuch der preussischen Kunstsammlungen XLVI/1925, pp. 3–32; cf. Julius von Schlosser: Die Kunst des Mittelalters, Berlin/Neubabelsberg 1923. Schlosser’s influence is also evident in Antal’s connecting of art to contemporary literature. In his thesis, Antal defined ‘Pseudo-Klassizismus’ as a ‘rein äusserliche Bewunderung der Antike’ (Antal 2014, p. 13), usually limited solely to the subject of paintings. This distinction, almost anticipating Panofsky’s principle of disjunction, was omitted in the excerpts the Hungarian later published in The Burlington Magazine.
28 Harald Olbrich: Gotik im Quattrocento oder: Der ausgebliebene Dialog zwischen Frederick Antal und Aby Warburg, in: Friedrich Möbius (ed.): Stil und Gesellschaft: ein Problemaufriss, Dresden 1984, pp. 219–224. 29 Cf. Emily J. Levine: Dreamland of Humanists. Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School, Chicago/London 2013. 30 On the Warburg-Antal incident, analysed from documentary evidence, cf. Nicos and Yannis Hadjinicolau: Form als Ausdruck von Geschmack, in: Antal 2014, pp. 191–229, pp. 202–216. 31 Wilhelm Pinder: Introductory Note, in: Kritische Berichte I/1927–1928, s.p. 32 On the historiography, cf. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann: Toward a Geography of Art, Chicago/ London 2004, especially pp. 68–88. 33 Cf. letter from Frederick Antal to Roberto Longhi, quoted in Gallo 2010, p. 71. 34 Frederick Antal: Review of Haendcke: Der französisch-Deutsch-Niederländische Einfluss, in:
Kritische Berichte I/1927–1928, pp. 19–23.
35 Id.: Review of Longhi: Un San Tomaso del Velazquez, in: Kritische Berichte II/1928–1929,
pp. 144 –149; cf. Roberto Longhi: Un san Tomaso di Vélazquez e le congiunture italo-spagnole tra il ‘5 e il ‘600, in: Vita artistica II/1927, pp. 4 –12.
36 Antal 1928–1929, pp. 148–149; cf. Wolfgang Stechow: Review of Hans Kauffmann: Der
Manierismus in Holland und die Schule von Fontainebleau, in: Kritische Berichte I/1926–1927, pp. 54 –64.
205 | Notes
37 Frederick Antal: Zum Problem des niederländischen Manierismus, in: Kritische Berichte II/1928–1929, pp. 207–256. This article was singled out to appear in an English translation in his posthumously collected essays; cf. id.: The Problem of Mannerism in the Netherlands, in: Antal 1966, pp. 47–106. 38 Fritz Saxl: Review of Mayer: Dominico Theotocopuli el Greco, in: Kritische Berichte I/1927– 1928, pp. 86–96; cf. Karin Hellwig: Saxl’s approach to Spanish art: Velázquez and El Greco, in: Journal of Art Historiography 5/2011, https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/ hellwig.pdf. Meyer Schapiro: Über den Schematismus in der Romanischen Kunst, in: Kritische Berichte zur Kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur 1/1932–1933, pp. 1–21. Incidentally, in 1914 Longhi had also criticised Mayer’s history of Spanish painting for that same lack of European perspective; cf. Roberto Longhi: Review of Mayer: Geschichte der Spanischen Malerei, in: L’Arte XVII/1914, pp. 317–319. 39 Hans Jantzen: Zur Beurteilung der gothischen Architektur als Raumkunst, in: Kritische Berichte
I/1927–1928, pp. 12–18.
40 Cf. Evonne A. Levy: Sedlmayr and Schapiro correspond, 1930–1935, in: Wiener Jahrbuch für
Kunstgeschichte LIX/2010, pp. 235–263, pp. 243–244.
41 Hans Sedlmayr: Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft, in: Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen
I/1931, pp. 7–32; cf. Ian Verstegen: The ‘Second’ Vienna School as Social Science, in: Journal of Art Historiography 7/2012, https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/verstegen.pdf.
42 Meyer Schapiro: The New Viennese School, in: Art Bulletin XVIII/1936, pp. 258–266. 43 Cindy Persinger: Reconsidering Meyer Schapiro and the Vienna School, in: Journal of Art His-
toriography 3/2010, https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/media_183174_ en.pdf.
44 Daniel Snowman: The Hitler Emigrés. The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism, London 2002, p. 53. 45 Peter Burke: Translatio Studii: The Contribution of Exiles to the Establishment of Sociology and
Art History in Britain, 1933–1960, in: Arbor CLXXXV/2009, pp. 903–908, p. 905.
46 For an early attempt of establishing art history as a university subject in Britain, see Hans Christian Hönes’s essay in this volume. 47 ‘Theories are abhorred by the English in general and by the learned in particular. […] The Eng-
lish are much more literary than artistic, and rather sceptical of art as an academic study.’ Quoted in Dorothea McEwan: Mapping the Trade Routes of the Mind: The Warburg Institute, in: Edward Timms and Jon Hughes (eds): Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation. Refugees from National Socialism in the English-Speaking World, Wien/New York 2003, p. 42.
48 Cf. Johannes Feichtinger: The Significance of Austrian Emigré Art Historians for English Art Scholarship, in: Timms and Hughes 2003, pp. 51–69, and John Onians: Wilde, Pevsner, Gombrich...: la ‘Kunstgeschichte’ en Grande-Bretagne, in: Perspective 2/2007, pp. 194 –206. On the Courtauld: Peter Lasko: The Courtauld Institute of Art and Art History in Britain, in: Revue de l’Art 30/1975, pp. 114 –115. 49 Dorothea McEwan: Warburg’s and Saxl’s assessment of the Wiener Schule, in: Journal of Art Historiography 1/2009, https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/media_139130_ en.pdf. 50 Quoted after Antal 2014, pp. 191–192; Frederick Antal: Some Examples of the Role of the Maenad in Florentine Art of the Later Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries, in: Journal of the Warburg Institute I/1937, pp. 71–73; id.: Hogarth and His Borrowings, in: Art Bulletin XXIX/1947, pp. 36– 48.
206 | Notes
51 Anthony Blunt: From Bloomsbury to Marxism, in: Studio International CLXXXVI/1973,
pp. 164 –168, p. 167: ‘During the next three or four years almost every intelligent undergraduate who came up to Cambridge joined the Communist Party at some time during his first year’; cf. also John Roberts: Introduction: Art Has No History! Reflections on Art History and Historical Materialism, in: id. (ed.): Art Has No History! The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art, London 1994, pp. 6–7.
52 Frederick Antal: Über Museen in der Sowjetunion [1932], in: Kritische Berichte 2–3/1976, pp. 5–13. On Antal’s political radicalisation in the final years of Weimar Republic, cf. Hadjinicolau 2014, pp. 226–228. 53 Cf. Donald D. Egbert: English Art Critics and Modern Social Radicalism, in: Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism XXVI/1967, pp. 29– 46, pp. 34 –35. On Read’s involvement, cf. Herbert Read: To the readers of the Burlington Magazine, in: Burlington Magazine LXXV/1939, p. 179; Benedict Nicolson: Editorial. Herbert Read and the Burlington Magazine, in: Burlington Magazine CX/1968, pp. 433– 434; Tom Steele: Arnold Hauser, Herbert Read and the Social History of Art in Britain, in: Gyula Ernyey (ed.): Britain and Hungary: contacts in architecture and design during the nineteenth and twentieth century. Essays and studies, vol. 3, Budapest 2005, pp. 200–213.
54 ‘It became impossible in Germany to write and publish a book dealing with history from this point of view’, quoted in Johannes Feichtinger: Wissenschaft zwischen den Kulturen. Österreichi sche Hochschullehrer in der Emigration 1933–1945, Frankfurt a.M. 2001, p. 361. 55 Carter 2001, pp. 128–129. 56 Francis D. Klingender: Marxism and Modern Art: An Approach to Social Realism, London 1943;
id.: Art and the Industrial Revolution, London 1947; id.: Hogarth and English Caricature, London 1944; Frederick Antal: Art and the Industrial Revolution, in: Burlington Magazine XC/1948, p. 85.
57 Letter from Frederick Antal to Györgi Lukács, 25 November 1946, quoted in Wessely 1979, p. 123: ‘Despite the fact that I am able to write more or less as I please in this country, I feel intellectually isolated; this cannot be cured otherwise than by reading and by occasional contacts.’ 58 The manuscript Raphael between Classicism and Mannerism. Four Lectures on 16th and 17th
Century Painting in Central Italy was first published in Italian: Frederick Antal: La pittura italiana tra classicismo e manierismo, Roma 1977, followed by a German edition, Raphael zwischen Klassizismus und Manierismus: eine sozialgeschichtliche Einführung in die mittelitalienische Malerei des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, Gießen 1980. I shall here refer to the Italian edition.
59 Antal 1977, pp. 18–19. To this effect, he redefined the ‘mannerist’ component in his Hogarth
book as a style aimed at creating a ‘general effect of unreality’, though opening to a ‘wealth of realistic detail’; cf. Frederick Antal: Hogarth and his Place in European Art, London 1962, p. 53.
60 Antal 1977, p. 19: ‘Per considerare obiettivamente i due stili cinquecenteschi, bisogna
conoscere lo sfondo sociale di quell’arte.’
61 Ibid., p. 23. 62 Frederick Antal: Reflections on Classicism and Romanticism [1935–1941], in: Antal 1966,
pp. 1– 45.
63 Id.: Observations on Girolamo da Carpi, in: Art Bulletin XXX/1948, pp. 81–103. 64 Id.: Florentine Painting and Its Social Background, London 1948. 65 Lorenz Dittmann (ed.): Kategorien und Methoden der deutschen Kunstgeschichte 1900–1930,
Stuttgart 1985; cf. also Christian Fuhrmeister: Reine Wissenschaft: Art History in Germany and the Notions of ‘Pure Science’ and ‘Objective Scholarship’ 1920–1950, in: Mitchell B. Frank and
207 | Notes
Daniel Adler (eds): German Art History and Scientific Thought. Beyond Formalism, Farnham 2012, pp. 161–177. 66 Deborah L. Krohn: Antal and His Critics: A Forgotten Chapter in the Historiography of the Ital-
ian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, in: Wessel Reinink and Jeroen Stumpel (eds): Memory & Oblivion. Proceedings of the XXIXth International Congress of the History of Art, vol. 1, Dordrecht 1999, pp. 95–99, p. 96.
67 Wessely 1979, p. 117. 68 Antal 1948, pp. 4 –9. 69 Meyer Schapiro: Style, in: Alfred L. Kroeber (ed.): Anthropology Today. An Encyclopaedic Inventory, Chicago/London 1953, pp. 310–311. 70 Frederick Antal: Remarks on the method of art history, in: Burlington Magazine XCI/1949,
pp. 49–52; XCI/1949, pp. 73–75, reprinted in Antal 1966, pp. 175–189.
71 George Thomson: Aeschylus and Athens: a study in the social origins of drama, London 1941;
George M. Trevelyan: English Social History: a survey of six centuries: Chaucer to Queen Victoria, London 1942; Jack Chen: Soviet Art and Artists, London 1944; Sidney Finkelstein: Art and Society, New York 1947.
72 Letter from Frederick Antal to Györgi Lukács, 25 November 1946, quoted in Wessely 1979, p. 123. 73 Antal 1966, pp. 187–188. 74 Carter 2001, p. 126: ‘He [Antal] was tall, dark, attractive, often irascible and given to extreme
views; even his fellow émigrés thought of him as a loner’.
75 Hans Gronau: Frederick Antal, Florentine Painting and its Social Background, in: Burlington Magazine XC/1948, pp. 297–298, p. 298; cf. Theodor E. Mommsen: Antal’s Florentine Painting, in: Journal of the History of Ideas XI/1950, pp. 369–379; Martin Weinberger: Antal, Florentine Painting, in: College Art Journal X/1951, pp. 199–202. 76 Antal 1948, pp. 164 –165. 77 Millard Meiss: Antal, Florentine Painting, in: Art Bulletin XXXI/1949, pp. 143–150. 78 Archives of American Art, Millard Meiss Papers. Letter from Frederick Antal to Millard Meiss, 22 February 1949: ‘In England where the intellectuals are much more conservative than in America, the method we are both using, has far more adversaries than you over there can imagine.’ 79 Letter from Millard Meiss to Ernst H. Gombrich, 29 June 1955, Archives of American Art, Mil-
lard Meiss Papers.
80 John Pope-Hennessy: Learning to Look, London 1991, p. 305. 81 Quoted after David Kettler and Volker Meja: Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism. The
Secret of these New Times, New Brunswick/London 1995, p. 182.
82 Norbert Elias: The Civilizing Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, Oxford 1994, pp. 5–30; cf. Paul Stirton: Frederick Antal and Peter Peri: Art, Scholarship and Social Purpose, in: Visual Culture in Britain XIII/2012, pp. 207–225, p. 214. 83 Frederick Antal: Fuseli Studies, London 1956. 84 Dagobert Frey: Das englische Wesen in der bildenden Kunst, Stuttgart 1942; Nikolaus Pevser: The Englishness of English Art, New York 1956; Edgar Wind: Borrowed Attitudes in Reynolds and Hogarth, in: Journal of the Warburg Institute II/1938–1939, pp. 182–185; cf. Ronald Paulson:
208 | Notes
Review of Edgar Wind: Hume and the Heroic Portrait, in: Eighteenth-Century Studies XX/1987, pp. 472– 475. 85 Antal 1962. 86 Antal 1966, p. 188. 87 Francis Haskell: Review of Classicism and Romanticism, in: Burlington Magazine CX/1968, pp. 161–162, p. 162. Antal 1966, p. 189.
Strangers in a Foreign Language (Burcu Dogramaci) 1 Nikolaus Pevsner: Die Geschichte der Kunstakademien, trad. by Roland Hans Floerke, München 1986, p. 1. The publishers continue: ‘Die nun im Druck vorliegende Rückübersetzung von Roland Floerke versucht, in sachlicher und sprachlicher Hinsicht den Anforderungen, die man unter den besonderen Umständen an eine solche Arbeit stellt, zu entsprechen.’ 2
‘Dem Verhältnis zur Heimat verwandt war in den Jahren des Exils die Beziehung zur Muttersprache. In einem ganz bestimmten Sinn haben wir auch sie verloren und können kein Rückerstattungsverfahren einleiten. […] Es wurde uns aber darum nicht im gleichen Maße, wie die Muttersprache sich feindlich zeigte, die fremde zur wirklichen Freundin. Sie verhielt und verhält sich reserviert und nimmt uns nur zu kurzen Höflichkeitsbesuchen auf. Man spricht bei ihr vor, comme on visite des amis, was nicht dasselbe ist, wie wenn man bei Freunden einkehrt. La table wird niemals der Tisch, bestenfalls kann man sich daran sattessen. Selbst einzelne Vokale, und mochten ihnen die gleichen physikalischen Qualitäten eignen wie den heimischen, waren fremd und sind es geblieben’ (Jean Améry: Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten [1966], 7th ed., Stuttgart 2012, pp. 98–101). For the English translation, cf. id.: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, Bloomington/IN 1980, pp. 51–53, for this topic, see also Doerte Bischoff et al. (eds): Sprache(n) im Exil (Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch, vol. 32), München 2014.
3 The mass dismissal of university professors began as early as the 1933 summer semester, immediately after the seizure of power; cf. Michael Grüttner: Wissenschaft, in: Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml and Hermann Weiß (eds): Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, 5th ed., München 2007, pp. 143–165. 4 Cf. Udo Steinbach: Geschichte der Türkei, München 2000, pp. 21– 40; Klaus Kreiser and Christoph K. Neumann: Kleine Geschichte der Türkei, Bonn 2005, pp. 383– 422. 5
There is a notable coincidence between the ten-year anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1933 and the law passed in Germany on April 7, 1933, ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ (German: Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums), which marked the beginning of the academic emigration; cf. Anne Dietrich: Deutschsein in Istanbul. Nationalisierung und Orientierung in der deutschsprachigen Community von 1843 bis 1956, Opladen 1998, p. 266.
6 Cf. Ali Teoman Germaner, in: Elisabeth Weber-Belling: Auf den Spuren meines Vaters in Istanbul, May 22nd to May 30th 1998, unpublished Manuscript, p. 4, Archive Rudolf Belling, Krailing. 7 The architect Paul Bonatz, who in the 1940s and 1950s was Professor for Architecture at the Technical University Istanbul wrote in one of his letters about his assistant Kemali Söylemezo ğ lu: ‘Die Ermahnung war nötig, weil Kemali manchmal schneidenhart zu Studenten ist, und nicht liebenswürdig gegen die Assistenten. Wenn ich beim Korrigieren der “Mondscheinhaut” oder der “Rosenstreuenden” liebenswürdige Dinge auf Deutsch sage, und dafür ein Lächeln erhoffe, diese aber still und ernst bleiben, dann sage ich ihm: “Kemali, du hast das nicht richtig übersetzt” und er meint “sie verdienen es nicht” – was soll ich da machen?’ (Letter from Paul Bonatz to Hans Volkart, 28 November 1951, Family archive Paul Bonatz, Stuttgart).
209 | Notes
8
Wolfgang Gleissberg: Astronomie in der Türkei, in: Sterne und Weltraum 6.12/1967, pp. 275– 279, p. 276. Gleissberg learnt Turkish in only 10 months, so he was able to give lectures in Turkish.
9 Çinici recorded a lecture from the academic term 1951/1952; cf. Clemens Holzmeister and Behruz Çinici: Mimarlık Tarihi Ders Notları 1951/52 ITÜ, Istanbul 1995. 10 Uğ ur Tanyeli: A note to the lecture, in: Holzmeister/Çinici 1995, pp. 157–165, p. 164. 11 Letter from Erica Taut to Isaburo Ueno, 1 February 1939, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, BrunoTaut-Archiv, BTS 01-16 and 17. 12 In 1948, Taut’s book was published in Japan. 13 First published in: Arkitekt 1–2/1943, pp. 27–32; Arkitekt 5–6/1943, pp. 121–126; Arkitekt
7–8/1943, pp. 174 –178. Reuter’s articles in Turkey are accessible in German and English; cf. Heinz Reif and Barı ş Ülker (eds): Herausforderung und Inspiration. Ernst Reuter als Stadtreformer in der Türkei. Challenges and Inspirations. Ernst Reuter as an Urban Reformer in Turkey, Berlin 2015.
14 Cf. Gustav Oelsner: Ş ehircilik, in: Arkitekt 3– 4/1945, pp. 71–74, p. 71: ‘Siedlung, Siedlung
lâzım’ (‘We need Settlements, Settlements’). For the concept of ‘Heimstätte’ (‘homestead’), cf. Gustav Oelsner: İ skan Semetleri ve ş ehir in ş acılı ğ ı, in: Arkitekt 1–2/1944, pp. 25–26, p. 34.
15 Gleissberg 1967, p. 277. 16 Cf. Ru ş en Kele ş (ed.): Ernst Reuter’in Anısına – Zum Gedenken an Ernst Reuter, Ankara 1986,
p. 153.
17 Cf. Ernst Reuter: Komün Bilgisi, Ankara 1940, pp. 333–342; Fehmi Yavuz: Der Professor in der Türkei, in: Kele ş 1978, pp. 27–33, p. 30. 18 Ernst Egli, quoted in Werner Meier: So erlebte ein Auslandsschweizer die neue Türkei, in:
Schweizer Illustrierte Zeitung 37/1941, pp. 1238–1240, p. 1239.
19 Cf. Burcu Dogramaci: Kulturtransfer und nationale Identität. Deutschsprachige Architekten, Stadtplaner und Bildhauer in der Türkei nach 1927, Berlin 2008. 20 Cf. Osman Turan: Mukaadime, in: 60. doğ um yılı münasebetiyle Fuad Köprülü Armağ anı,
Istanbul 1953, p. xix.
21 Cf. Birinci Türk Tarihi Kongresi Konferanslar-Müzakere Zabitları, Ankara 1932, pp. 160–161. 22 Cf. Selçuk Mülayim: Sanat Tarihinin Attilası Josef Strzygowski, in: Sanat Tarihi Ara ş tirmaları
Dergisi 8/1989, pp. 65–69, p. 68.
23 Cf. Josef Strzygowski: Türkler ve Orta Asya Sanatı Meselesi [1933], in: id., Heinrich Glück
and Fuat Köprülü: Eski Türk Sanatı ve Avrupa’ya Etkisi, 2nd ed., Ankara 1975, pp. 1–118, pp. 85–6.
24 Cemal Köprülü: Cumhuriyetimizin Ellinci Yılı Vesilesiyle: En Eski Türk Plâstik Sanatları Hakkında, in: Strzygowski/Glück/Köprülü 1975, pp. v–xv, p. vi: ‘[…] Türklerin büyük sanat abideleri yarattı ğ ının ve Türk milletinin plastik sanat vadisinde orijinal eserler yarattı ğ ının bizzat Strzygowski gibi dünyaca ş öhret yapmı ş büyük bir âlim tarafından doğ rulanması Türklü ğ ümüz hesabına kültürümüzün yükseli ğ ini gösteren en büyük bir propagandadır’. 25 Cf. Josef Strzygowski, in: Birinci Türk Tarihi Kongresi 1932, p. 161. 26 Cf. Ernö Marosi: Josef Strzygowski als Entwerfer von nationalen Kunstgeschichten, in: Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters and Barbara Schellewald (eds): Kunstgeschichte im ‘Dritten Reich’, Berlin 2008, pp. 103–113. 27 Cf. Oktay Aslanapa: Türkiye’ de Avsturyalı Sanat ve Tarihçileri Sanatkârlar, Istanbul 1993, p. 9.
210 | Notes
28 Ernst Diez: Türk Sanatı. Ba ş langıcından Günümüze Kadar, Istanbul 1946, p. ii: ‘ Şimdi
ne ş retmekte oldu ğ umuz bu kitap ölçüde, mimarî ve küçük sanatlar sahasından seçilen eserlere dayanarak, monümental sanatın millî kaynaklarını göstermek ve umumî bir tâbirle İ slâm sanatı denilen bir sanat kompleksi içinden Türk unsurlarını ayırt etmek iste ğ ile yazılmı ş tır. Bundan ba ş ka Türk sanatının Osmanlılar devrindeki tekâmülü üzerinde de ayrıca durulmu ş , ve monümental cami mimarîsinin aynı devirdeki Avrupa Barok Mimarisînden daha a ş a ğ ı kalmadı ğ ı gösterilmeye çalı ş mı ş tır.’ 29 Ibid., p. 197. 30 Cf. Semavi Eyice: Ernst Diez, in: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı-Islam Ansiklopedesi, Vol. 9, Ankara 1993, p. 287. 31 Ernst Diez: Simultaneity in Islamic Art, in: Ars Islamica 4/1937, pp. 185–189, p. 189. 32 Cf. Diez 1946, pp. 48 and 51. 33 Ibid., pp. 25 and 28. 34 Ibid., p. 93. 35 Cf. Josef Strzygowski: Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa. Ergebnisse einer vom kunst historischen Institut der Universität Wien 1913 durchgeführten Forschungsreise, 2 vols, Wien 1918. 36 Diez 1946, pp. 170–174. He claimed however that the effect of the interior of Hagia Sophia and the Ottoman mosques illustrate that imitating technical structures did not lead to creating an own style, since such a style is based on a specific worldview and a ‘soul’; cf. ibid., p. 193. 37 Sedat Çetinta ş : ‘Türk Sanatı’ kitabının çe ş itli hataları, in: Mimarlık 2/1948, pp. 20–21, p. 21. 38 Tahsin Öz: Türk sanatı Kitabı dolayısıyle, in: Vatan 22.1/1947, unpag: ‘Enesaslı mimari organların Ermeni eserlerinden alındı ğ ı, Ermenin ustalarının çalı ş tı ğ ı, yine en önemli cami ve türbe plânlarının kilise örne ğ i oldugunu iddia etmektedir, ki bu takdirde Türk mimarisi nerede kalıyor? Kitabına niçin Türk san’atı ismini veriyor? Hatta müsaade Eder Lerse, Türk sanatı kürsüsüne lüzum Kalır mi.’ 39 Ernst Diez: Endosmosen, in: Felsefe Arkivi 2.1/1947, pp. 221–238, p. 221: ‘Kein Kunst
historiker wird die hohe Eigenart der seldschukischen Bauornamentik bestreiten, doch ist es besonders seine Aufgabe, die Ursprünge und die Herkunft der einzelnen Bau- und Ornamentformen zu ergründen.’
40 Ibid. 41 Cf. Vâla Nureddin [Vâ-Nû]: Gelelim yerli profesörlere, in: Ak ş am, 8 April 1949. 42 Cf. Walter Höflechner and Götz Pochat: 100 Jahre Kunstgeschichte an der Universität Graz. Mit einem Ausblick auf die Geschichte des Faches an den deutschsprachigen österreichischen Universitäten bis in das Jahr 1938, Graz 1992, pp. 81–82. 43 Aslanapa 1993, p. 9: ‘Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi’nde ayrı bir dal olarak Sanat Tari-
hi derslerinin ba ş laması 1943 yılı Ekim ayında Prof. Dr. Ernst Diez tarafından gerçekle ş tirilmi ş tir. Viyana’da dünyaca ünlü Strzygowskı Sanat Tarihi Enstitüsünde kariyerini yapmı ş olan Ernst Diez ile Istanbul’da ve ilk defa memleketimizde ilmî ve sistemli Sanat Tarihi çalı ş maları ba ş lamı ş tır. Aynı tarihte ben de onun asistanı olarak göreve katıldım, böylece memleketimizdeki Sanat Tarihi çalı ş maları Viyana Stryzgowski ekolüne ba ğ lanmı ş olmaktadır.’ 44 This may include, for example, the ‘Skopostheorie’ by Hans J. Vermeer: Übersetzen als kulturel-
ler Transfer, in: Mary Snell-Horby (ed.): Übersetzungswissenschaft. Eine Neuorientierung, 3rd ed., Tübingen 1994, pp. 30–53, p. 41; cf. also Said El Mtouni: Exilierte Identitäten zwischen Akkulturation und Hybridität, Würzburg 2015, p. 247.
211 | Notes
‘Always living in a foreign tongue…’ (Uwe Fleckner) 1
Letter from Carl Einstein to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, undated [June–July 1924], in: Carl Einstein and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler: Correspondance 1921–1939 (ed. by Liliane Meffre), Marseille 1993, pp. 151–152, 151: ‘Das ist kein Land mehr, um konzentriert zu arbeiten’; cf. letter from Carl Einstein to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, undated [spring 1924], ibid., pp. 148–149.
2 Cf. Uwe Fleckner: Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert. Fragmente einer intellektuellen Biographie, Berlin 2006, pp. 415 ff. 3 Letter from Carl Einstein to Ewald Wasmuth, 28 November 1931 [incorrectly dated ‘28/ XV/31’], Marbach am Neckar, Schiller-Nationalmuseum / Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Nachlass Ewald Wasmuth. The letter was given a publisher’s title and published; cf. Carl Einstein: Leben in China um die Mingzeit herum (1931), in: Alternative 75/1970, pp. 263–265; id.: Präludium (ed. by Rolf-Peter Baacke and Jens Kwasny), Berlin 1979, pp. 64 –67. 4 Letter from Carl Einstein to Ewald Wasmuth, 28 November 1931: ‘Wir sprechen immer noch voltaire und racine. kültüre. wir besitzen ein bidet und keinen hitler; esprit, on vit avec le sourire; latinité et mesure. on mange l’oignon, méditerranée; l’ail; noch stinkt vergil. die sonne homers ist stark eingeregnet und die clarté ähnelt verzweifelt einem gemeinplatz. aber was wollen Sie, hier pöbeln keine nazis. das ist trotzdem angenehm.’ 5 Letter from Carl Einstein to Ewald Wasmuth, 15 February 1932, Marbach am Neckar, SchillerNationalmuseum / Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Nachlass Ewald Wasmuth: ‘ich möchte nicht als emigrant enden […] und für heinesche jammerlappen fehlt mir die schlankheit’. 6
Carl Einstein, untitled handwritten note, 30 January 1934, Berlin, Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Carl-Einstein-Archiv: ‘wie ist ein atem tot, dem kein bekanntes wort entgegenschwillt, wie sind meine augen tot, die nicht mehr die mir vertrauten menschen sehen. […] das leben des einzelnen ist sinnlos und unlebendig, man tönt in den stummen luftleeren raum. ein schmerz arbeitet in mir, ein perpetuum mobile von schmerz.’
7
Cf. Carl Einstein: Georges Braque, Paris/London/New York 1934 (XXe siècle, vol. 7). For Einstein’s book, cf. Hans Joachim Dethlefs: Die Überwindung des Ästhetischen. Über Carl Einsteins Braque-Projekt, in: Text und Kritik 95/1987 (special issue on Carl Einstein), pp. 23– 43; Nicola Creighton: Vergeblich – Unentbehrlich. Carl Einstein, Georges Braque und die Ästhetik, in: Klaus H. Kiefer (ed.): Die visuelle Wende der Moderne. Carl Einsteins ‘Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts’, München 2003, pp. 113–129; Nicola Creighton: The paralysis of ‘fight or flight’. Carl Einstein’s ‘Georges Braque’ and ‘Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen’ in the context of Weimar crisis literature and theory, in: Gustav Frank, Rachel Palfreyman and Stefan Scherer (eds): Modern Times? German Literature and Arts Beyond Political Chronologies / Kontinuitäten der Kultur: 1925–1955, Bielefeld 2005, pp. 273–291; Dominique Chateau: La puissance ontologique de la peinture. À propos du ‘Georges Braque’ de Carl Einstein, in: Marianne Kröger and Hubert Roland (eds): Carl Einstein im Exil. Kunst und Politik in den 1930er Jahren / Carl Einstein en exil. Art et politique dans les anneés 1930, München 2007, pp. 241–248; Lucien Massaert: Einstein / ‘Braque’. De la projection imaginaire à la structure subjective, ibid., pp. 249–263; Joyce Cheng: ‘Georges Braque’ et l’anthropologie de l’image onirique de Carl Einstein, in: Gradhiva 14/2011 (special issue on Carl Einstein et les primitivismes), pp. 144 –163; David Quigley: Cubist Communities: Carl Einstein’s ‘Georges Braque’, in: Nicola Creighton and Andreas Kramer (eds): Carl Einstein und die europäische Avantgarde / Carl Einstein and the European Avant-Garde, Berlin/Boston 2012, pp. 255–264; Uwe Fleckner: The Joy of Hallucination. On Carl Einstein and the Art of Georges Braque, in: Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life. 1928–1945, exhibition catalogue, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis / Phillips Collection, Washington 2013, pp. 52–73; Uwe Fleckner: Das Glück der Halluzination. Carl Einstein über die Kunst von Georges Braque, in: Carl Einstein: Über Georges Braque und den Kubismus. Vorgestellt von Uwe Fleckner, Zürich/Berlin 2013, pp. 203–235; Maria Stavrinaki: Les Braque de Carl Einstein: entre stabilité classique et mythe romantique, in: Georges Braque. 1882–1963 (ed. by Brigitte Léal), exhibition catalogue, Grand Palais – Galeries nationales, Paris 2013, pp. 152–161.
212 | Notes
8 Letter from Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler to Vincenc Kramá ř, 28 January 1935, Prague, National Gallery, Archive: ‘Das Buch von Einstein – das ich sehr schätze, das aber mehr von Weltanschauung handelt als von Braque’; cf. Jana Claverie et al. (eds): Vincenc Kramár. Un théoricien et collectionneur du cubisme à Prague, Paris 2002, pp. 333–334, p. 334. 9
Einstein 2013, p. 16: ‘Soziologie oder Ethnologie der Kunst’.
10 Ibid.: ‘Uns beschäftigen Kunstwerke lediglich soweit, als sie Mittel enthalten, das Wirkliche, die Struktur des Menschen und die Weltbilder abzuändern, also als Hauptfrage steht, wie können Kunstwerke einem Weltbild eingeordnet werden oder wie zerstören und überschreiten sie dies.’ 11 Ibid., p. 30: ‘Schon am Kubismus und noch stärker an der romantischen [i.e. surrealist] Epoche Braques erweist sich die ästhetische Stilformel als unzureichend, da man diesmal nicht mit einer Uminterpretierung sich begnügte, sondern, wir sprechen zunächst vom Kubismus, die Funktion des Sehens selbst abänderte. Später wird man dann zur irrationalen Vision und metamor photischen Kunst gelangen und neue Objekte erschaffen, d. h. visuelle Mythen.’ Einstein consis tently described the dissident Surrealism that he approved of as ‘romantic’ art, in contrast to the doctrinaire Surrealism of the André Breton group; cf. Fleckner 2006, pp. 357 et seq. 12 Einstein 2013, pp. 132–133: ‘In diesen Arbeiten suchte man Befreiung von Geschichte und Zivilisation. Zu solchem befähigt das Halluzinative, d. h. die Zerstörung des bewußten Ichs und der konventionellen Umwelt. So kurvt in diesen Bildern ein ausgeprägtes Todesmotiv; die bewusste Person stirbt ab.’ 13 Ibid., p. 53, p. 140, p. 145, p. 150 and p. 169. 14 Cf. ibid., p. 148. 15 Ibid., p. 138: ‘Schon hierdurch entwächst den späten Bildern des Braque eine ungemeine menschliche Bedeutung. Nun treiben die seelischen Kräfte freier und ungebundener und der Schauende ist den konventionellen Identifikationen, dem üblichen Beobachten enthoben.’ 16 On these questions, cf. Uwe Fleckner: Fatigué de l’identité biologique. Carl Einstein, André
Masson, Pablo Picasso et la révolte contre la mort, in: Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 117/2011, pp. 11–25.
17 Einstein 2013, p. 143: ‘Dies bleibt wichtig für die seelische Situierung des Spätwerks Braques, daß es aus einer Inkongruenz von Vision und rational Wirklichem, von ahnender Seele und mechanisiertem Ich aufwuchs, daß endlich der Künstler sich weigerte, dem convenu des Wirk lichen sich zu unterwerfen, sondern die Anpassung des Wirklichen an die Vision fordert. Damit aber gewinnt die Stellung von Künstler und Kunstwerk eine völlig veränderte Bedeutung; das Bild ist nicht mehr Interpretation des Gegebenen, sondern enthält die Forderung, die Wirklichkeit nach den Bildern selber umzusehen.’ 18 Cf. Carl Einstein: Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen (ed. by Sibylle Penkert), Reinbek bei Hamburg
1973.
19 Cf. Einstein 2013, pp. 237 et seq. (note of the editor). 20 Wilhelm Hausenstein: Negerplastik, in: März 3/1915, pp. 102–104, p. 104. 21 Einstein 1934, p. 13. 22 Cf. Josef Strzygowski: Recherche scientifique et éducation. Traduit de l’allemand par Edouard Ciprut (Les Documents bleus. Les Arts, vol. 5), Paris 1932. Edouard Ciprut may in turn be the same person as Edouard-Jacques Ciprut, who in the 1960s published on subjects including 16 th and 17th century architecture and sculpture. I am very grateful to David Quigley for this observation. 23 Cf. Carl Einstein: Georges Braque (ed. by Liliane Meffre), Bruxelles 2003.
213 | Notes
24 For the planned publication date, cf. letter from Carl Einstein to Vincenc Kramá ř, 18 Febru-
ary 1933, in: Vincenc Kramář. From Old Masters to Picasso, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery, Prague 2000–2001, p. 204.
25 Letter from Carl Einstein to Ewald Wasmuth, 15 February 1932: ‘immer in einer fremden sprache leben ist auf die dauer tödlich’. 26 Carl Einstein, untitled handwritten note, 18 February 1933, Berlin, Stiftung Archiv der Akad-
emie der Künste, Carl Einstein Archiv: ‘jude, deutschsprechend, in frankreich. jude ohne gott und ohne kenntnis unserer vergangenheit, deutschsprechend, doch gewillt die deutsche Sprache nicht wie meine Landsleute und gleichzungigen faul und müde versacken zu lassen. in frankreich, d. i. ohne Leser. / ich werde jetzt jeden tag mich kurz mit mir unterhalten; denn seit langem bin ich von gleichsprachigen menschen und büchern gänzlich abgeschnitten. nie werde ich in französischer Dichtung zu hause sein; denn ich träume und sinniere deutsch. also nun bin ich durch Hitler zu völliger Heimatlosigkeit und fremdheit verurteilt.’ The note was given an editor’s title and published; cf. Carl Einstein: Vorweggenommener Epilog, in: Klaus Siebenhaar, Hermann Haarmann and Hansgeorg Schmidt-Bergmann (eds): Carl Einstein. Prophet der Avantgarde, Berlin 1991, p. 90.
27 Cf. Ernst Doblhofer: Exil – eine Grundbefindlichkeit des Individuums seit der Antike, in: Her-
mann Haarmann (ed.): Innen-Leben. Ansichten aus dem Exil, Berlin 1995, pp. 13– 40, pp. 21 et seq.; Theodor W. Adorno: Schutz, Hilfe und Rat, in: id.: Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben [1951], Frankfurt am Main 1986, pp. 32–34, p. 32: ‘Every émigré intellectual, without exception, is damaged and does well to acknowledge the fact, unless he wishes to be cruelly taught about it behind the tightly closed doors of his amour-propre […] his language has been expropriated, and the historical dimension from which his insight drew its strength has been destroyed.’
28 Letter from Carl Einstein to Ewald Wasmuth, 28 November 1931: ‘im übrigen will ich nun endlich diese ästhetik [i.e. the Braque book] abschliessen; ich habe genug davon und das kunscht buch, das ich noch machen muss, wird mein letztes sein. ich habe genug davon, es kotzt mich an. auch genug von theorien. wir sind mit diesen tapeten lange genug überklebt. entweder kommen dann ganz andere sachen oder herr einstein schreibt nicht mehr.’ ‘Kunschtbuch’, an untranslatable pun on Kunstbuch (‘art book’), is evidently a reference to Goethe’s friend, the artist and art writer Heinrich Meyer (nicknamed ‘Kunschtmeyer’ because of his typically Swiss pronunciation of ‘Kunst’ as ‘Kunscht’), and hence an ironic dig at art as part of highbrow bourgeois culture. 29 For the great art-history projects of the 1930s, cf. Carl Einstein: Werke. Texte aus dem Nachlaß I (ed. by Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar), Berlin 1992 (Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 4), pp. 286 et seq.
Translating Art History, Transmitting Humanitas (Mingyuan Hu) 1 Fou Lei read literature at the Sorbonne (1928–1930) and audited at the École du Louvre (c. 1929–1930). 2
In 1942, Fou Lei re-translated Vie de Beethoven (1903) by Romain Rolland, having first translated it in 1932 and published it in part in 1934; the re-translation was published in full in 1946 after the war. In 1947, Fou Lei re-translated his unpublished 1942 wartime translation of Civilisation (1918) by Georges Duhamel before sending it to the printers. In 1952–1953, he re-translated and re-published Jean-Christophe (1904 –1912) by Romain Rolland, having first translated it in 1936–1941 and published it in 1937–1941. In 1951, he re-translated Le Père Goriot (1835) by Balzac, his first translation having been made in 1944 and published in 1946; in 1963, he translated the book for a third time.
214 | Notes
3
Letter from Fou Lei to the European and American Department of People’s Literature Publi shing House 人民文學出版社歐美文學組, 26 February 1959, cf. Fou Lei’s Letters to His Friends 傅雷致友人書信, Nanjing 2010, p. 179: ‘而迄今為止, 我國尚無一部比較詳盡的西洋藝術史.’
4 An earlier translation released by Qunyi Publishing House 群益出版社 in 1949, by the Kyototrained Shen Qiyu 沈起予 (1903–1970), appears to exist. This publication is virtually unknown. 5 Fou 2010, p. 179: ‘實際所謂“藝術哲學”是作者解釋藝術史時所用的觀點與方法,一方面也是以藝 術史來證明作者對於藝術的理論.— —原著論列繪畫雕塑部分占全書百分之八十,文學部分占百分之十 五,建築及音樂占百分之五. 原著第一編只是第二、三、四編的緒論; 至第五編方純以理論為主. […] 因此, 人文出版此書,固作為文藝理論書籍,但實際上等於同時出版一部西洋美術史.’ Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this essay from Chinese and French are the author’s own. 6
Fou Lei: Translator’s Preface to Taine’s ‘Philosophie de l’art’ 丹納《藝術哲學》譯者序, in: Complete Works of Fou Lei 傅雷全集, vol. 16, Shenyang 2002, pp. 5–6: ‘我們在今日看來,丹納更大的缺點 倒是在另一方面: 他雖則竭力挖掘精神文化的構成因素,但所揭露的時代與環境,只限於思想感情,道德 宗教,政治法律,風俗人情,總之是一切屬於上層建築的東西. 他沒有接觸到社會的基礎;他考察了人類 生活的各個方面,卻忽略了或是不夠強調最基本的一面——經濟生活.《藝術哲學》儘管材料如此豐富, 論證如此詳盡,仍不免予人以不全面的感覺,原因就在於此. 古代的希臘,中世紀的歐洲,十五世紀的意大 利,十六世紀的佛蘭德斯,十七世紀的荷蘭,上層建築與社會基礎的關係在這部書裏沒有說明. 作者所提 到的繁榮與衰落只描繪社會的表面現象,他還認為這些現象只是政治,法律,宗教和民族性的混合產物; 他完全沒有認識社會的基本動力是在於生產力與生產關係.’
7 For an analysis of Fou Lei’s 1929 translator’s preface to Philosophie de l’art, cf. Mingyuan Hu: Fou Lei: An Insistence on Truth, Leiden 2017, pp. 74 –86. 8 Fou 2002, vol. 16, p. 6: ‘但除了這些片面性與不徹底性以外,丹納在上層建築這個小範圍內所做的 研究工作,仍然可供我們做進一步探討的根據. 從歷史出發與從科學出發的美學固然還得在原則上加以 重大的修正與補充,但丹納至少已經走了第一步 […].’ 9 Hippolyte Taine: Philosophie de l’art, 2 vols, Paris 1918, vol. 1, p. 132: ‘La créature architecturale est ici saine […]. Elle n’est point l’œuvre de l’imagination surexcitée, mais de la raison lucide.’ 10 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 130: ‘Le langage est devenu noble en même temps qu’il est devenu clair […]. Le
style devient tout d’un coup exquis, et l’esprit tout d’un coup adulte.’
11 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 110: ‘[…] sous le mot poétique, comme sous une eau transparente, on voit appa-
raître l’enchaînement indissoluble des faits et les démarcations indestructibles des choses. Nos sciences les admettent aujourd’hui, et l’idée grecque de la destinée n’est rien de plus que notre idée moderne des lois. Tout est déterminé, voilà ce que prononcent nos formules et ce qu’ont pressenti leurs divinations’
12 Ludwig Wittgenstein: Culture and Value (ed. by G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki
Nyman, trad. by Peter Winch), Oxford 1998, p. 28e: ‘[...] philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.’
13 Taine 1918, vol. 1, p. 270: ‘Je suis resté bien des fois debout sur les quais de l’Escaut, regardant la grande eau blafarde, faiblement ridée, où nagent des carènes noirâtres. Le fleuve luit, et, sur son ventre plat, la lumière trouble allume çà et là des reflets vagues.’ Fou Lei’s translation is still more poetic, cf. Fou 2002, vol. 16, p. 162: ‘我常常站在埃斯科河的岸上, 望著一大片顏色慘白的水, 漣波微 動, 上面浮着黑黝黝的船, 河流閃閃發光, 昏暗的日色在平坦的河身上零零星星映出一些模糊的反光.’ 14 Taine 1918, vol. 2, pp. 151–152: ‘Presque tout notre vocabulaire philosophique et scientifique est étranger; pour nous en bien servir, nous sommes obligés de savoir le grec et le latin; et le plus souvent nous nous en servons mal. Ce vocabulaire technique a inséré quantité de ses mots dans la conversation courante et le style littéraire; d’où il arrive qu’aujourd’hui nous parlons et nous pensons avec des termes pesants et difficiles à manier.’
215 | Notes
15 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 151: ‘Comparez la première et la plus puissante des éducations, celle que donne la langue, en Grèce et chez nous. Nos langues modernes, italien, espagnol, français, anglais, sont des patios, restes déformés d’un bel idiome qu’une longue décadence avait gâté et que des importations et des mélanges sont encore venus altérer et brouiller. Ils ressemblent à ces édifices construits avec les débris d’un temple ancien et avec d’autres matériaux ramassés au hasard; en effet, c’est avec des pierres latines, mutilées, raccordées dans un autre ordre, avec des cailloux du chemin et un plâtras tel quel, que nous avons fait la bâtisse dans laquelle nous vivons, d’abord un château gothique, aujourd’hui une maison moderne. Notre esprit y vit, parce qu’il s’y est fait; mais combien celui des Grecs se mouvait plus aisément dans la sienne!’ 16 Letter from Fou Lei to René Étiemble, 24 February 1963, Bibliothèque nationale de France: ‘Enfin, mes travaux pendant les dernières cinq années commencent à être publiés un à un: la Rabouilleuse de Balzac et la Philosophie de l’Art de Taine ont déjà paru, je compte de vous en envoyer un exemplaire en pensant que peut-être ces traductions sont-elles utiles à aider vos étudiants à apprendre le chinois parlé et le style moderne dont je suis considéré comme un des rares puristes de nos jours.’ 17 Taine 1918, vol. 1, p. 136: ‘On voit que les cavaliers sont au courant de la littérature grecque et latine, qu’ils connaissent l’histoire, qu’ils sont versés dans la philosophie […]. D’ailleurs, si ardue que soit la matière et si vive que soit la dispute, ils gardent toujours le style élégant des expressions; ils sont puristes, comme le seront plus tard les beaux diseurs de l’hôtel de Rambouillet, contemporains de Vaugelas et fondateurs de notre littérature classique.’ 18 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 124: ‘Trois conditions sont nécessaires pour que l’homme puisse goûter et produire la grande peinture. – Il faut d’abord qu’il soit cultivé.’ 19 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 103: ‘Dans le legs que nous avons reçu de l’antiquité se trouve une collection, la plus riche que nous ayons, d’arguments captieux et de paradoxes.’ For Fou Lei’s annotation in his manuscript, cf. Fou 2002, vol. 16, p. 224: ‘我國春秋戰國及先秦時代亦然如此.’ 20 Taine 1918, vol. 2, pp. 110–111: ‘C’est un ordre, Kosmos, une harmonie, un bel arrangement régulier de choses qui subsistent et se transforment par elles-mêmes.’ For Fou Lei’s annotation in his manuscript, cf. Fou 2002, vol. 16, p. 227: ‘這種對天地萬物的看法與古代中國人完全一致.’ 21 Taine 1918, vol. 2, p. 111: ‘Plus tard, les stoïciens le compareront à une grande cité gouvernée par les meilleures lois. Il n’y a point de place ici pour les dieux incommensurables et vagues, ni pour les dieux despotes et dévorateurs. Le vertige religieux n’entre point dans les esprits sains et équilibrés qui ont conçu un pareil monde.’ For Fou Lei’s annotation in his manuscript, cf. Fou 2002, vol. 16, p. 227: ‘我們中國人即如此!’ 22 Taine 1918, vol. 1, pp. 77–78: ‘Peuples exterminés, monuments détruits, champs dévastés, villes incendiées, industrie, beaux-arts et sciences mutilés, dégradés, oubliés, la crainte, l’ignorance et la brutalité partout répandues et établies; […] Au XIe siècle, sur soixante-dix ans, on compte quarante années de famine. […] On en était arrivé aux mœurs des anthropophages […] puisque le souvenir du passé empirait la misère présente, et que les quelques têtes pensantes, qui lisaient encore l’ancienne langue, sentaient obscurément l’immensité de la chute et toute la profondeur de l’abîme dans lequel le genre humain s’enfonçait depuis mille ans.’ 23 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 115: ‘En Grèce, il s’est subordonné ses institutions, au lieu de se subordonner à elles. Il a fait d’elles un moyen, et non un but.’ In the handwritten manuscript of his own translation, Fou Lei underlined the following: ‘在希臘, 人叫制度隸屬於人, 而不是人隸屬於制度. 他把制度 作為手段, 不以制度為目的.’ Cf. Fou 2002, vol. 16, p. 230. 24 Taine 1918, vol. 2, p. 152: ‘Il faut quinze ans à un écrivain pour apprendre à écrire, non pas avec génie, car cela ne s’apprend pas, mais avec clarté, suite, propreté et précision. […] S’il ne l’a pas fait et qu’il veuille raisonner sur le droit, le devoir, le beau, l’État et tous les grands intérêts de l’homme, il tâtonne et trébuche; il s’embarrasse dans les grandes phrases vagues, dans les lieux communs sonores, dans les formules abstraites et rébarbatives: voyez là-dessus les journaux et les discours
216 | Notes
des orateurs populaires; c’est surtout le cas des ouvriers intelligents, mais qui n’ont point passé par l’éducation classique; ils ne sont pas maîtres des mots ni, partant, des idées; ils parlent une langue savante qui ne leur est point naturelle; pour eux, elle est trouble: c’est pourquoi elle trouble leur esprit […].’ Fou Lei underlined the following in his manuscript: ‘你們可以看看報紙和通俗演說家的 講話; 而在一般聰明而未受古典教育的工人身上尤其顯著; 他們不能控制字眼, 因之也不能控制思想; 他 們講着一種高深而不自然的語言, 對他們是一種麻煩, 擾亂他們的頭腦.’ Cf. Fou 2002, vol. 16, p. 251. 25 Letter written in English by Fou Lei to Fou Ts’ong and Zamira Menuhin, 15 April 1961, The Fou Family Trust. I am grateful to Fou Min, Fou Lei’s younger son, for sending me a copy of this letter. 26 ‘不學詩, 無以言’, in: The Analects 論語·季氏. For an alternative translation, cf. book 16 of The Confucian Analects, in: The Chinese Classics, trad. by James Legge, London 1861. 27 Taine 1918, vol. 2, p. 170: ‘Quand nous voulons nous figurer une poésie lyrique, nous pensons aux odes de Victor Hugo ou aux stances de Lamartine; cela se lit des yeux ou tout au plus se récite à mi-voix, à côté d’un ami, dans le silence du cabinet; notre civilisation a fait de la poésie la confidence d’une âme qui parle à une âme. Celle des Grecs était, non seulement débitée à haute voix, mais déclamée, chantée au son des instruments, bien plus encore, mimée et dansée.’ 28 The author’s interview with Fou Ts’ong, London, March 2016. 29 Taine 1918, vol. 2, p. 179: ‘Les vers qui nous restent n’en sont qu’un fragment; l’accent, la mimique, le chant, les sons des instruments, la scène, la danse, le cortège, vingt accessoires, qui les égalaient en importance, ont péri.’ 30 For the Han chronicle, cf. Sima Qian 司馬遷: Life of Jing Ke 荊軻傳, in: Records of the Grand
Historian 史記 (c. 94 BC): ‘風蕭蕭兮易水寒,壯士一去兮不復還’ (‘Winds cry and waters chill. Once gone, the warrior returns not.’). For an alternative translation, cf. Sima Qian: Records of the Grand Historian, trad. by Burton Watson, Hong Kong/New York 1993, p. 174. For the Tang poem, cf. Cui Hao 崔顥 (704 –754): Yellow Crane Tower 黃鶴樓詩: ‘黃鶴一去不復返, 白雲千載空悠悠’ (‘Once gone, the yellow crane returns not. In eternity, white clouds desolately dwell.’).
31 Letter from Fou Lei to Jean Daniélou, 17 September 1931, Archives jésuites de la Province de France; cf. Hu 2017, p. 121. 32 Taine 1918, vol. 2, p. 220: ‘[…] nous voici arrivons à la place vide que l’on reconnaît encore, où s’élevait son piédestal, et d’où sa forme auguste a disparu.’ For Fou Lei’s annotation in his manuscript, cf. Fou 2002, vol. 16, p. 289: ‘作者不僅謂菲狄阿斯所作的帕拉斯——雅典娜神像久已毀滅, 整 個希臘雕塑的傳統也久已中斷.’ 33 Letter from Fou Lei to Fou Ts’ong, 26 June 1961, The Fou Family Trust; cf. Hu 2017, p. 182: ‘那樣的時代是一去不復返的了, 正如一個人從童年到少年那個天真可愛的階段一樣, 也如同我們的先秦 時代、兩晉六朝一樣.’ 34 Erwin Panofsky: Art History as a Humanistic Discipline, in: Eric Fernie (ed.): Art History and
Its Methods: A Critical Anthology, London 1995, p. 185.
35 Letter from Fou Lei to Fou Ts’ong, 2 June 1963, The Fou Family Trust: ‘歷史上受莫名奇妙的指責 的人不知有多少. 連伽俐略、服尓德、巴爾扎克輩都不免, 何況區區我輩!’ 36 Hannah Arendt: Karl Jaspers: A Laudatio, in: id.: Men in Dark Times, London 1970, p. 76. 37 Taine 1918, vol. 1, pp. 92–93: ‘Lisez dans Racine […] Si violente que soit leur passion, Hermi-
one, Andromaque, Roxane, Bérénice, gardent le ton de la meilleure compagnie. Mithridate, Phèdre, Athalie, prononcent, en expirant, des périodes correctes; un prince doit représenter jusqu’au bout, et mourir en cérémonie.’ Fou 2002, vol. 16, p. 72: ‘[…] 臨死的說話還是句讀分明. 因為貴人從頭至尾 要有氣派, 死也要死得合乎禮法.’
38 Jacob Burckhardt: The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, Oxford/London 1945, p. 84.
217 | Notes
Seductive Foreignness (Hans Christian Hönes) 1 Letter from Karl Marx to Adolf Cluss, 17 April 1853, in: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Werke, vol. 28, Berlin 1963, pp. 584 –585: ‘Der süsse Gottfried hat sich soweit hinaufscherwenzelt, daß ihm gestattet worden, in einer Halle der Londoner Universität seine alten Vorlesungen über christliche Kunst des Mittelalters vor einem Londoner Publikum zu wiederholen. […] Er hält sie in einem abominablen Englisch, ablesend von einem Manuskript. Beim Beginn der Vorlesungen mit Applaus empfangen, fiel er im Verlauf vollständig durch […]. Edgar Bauer, der da war – vorigen Dienstag hielt K[inkel] seine erste Vorlesung –, hat mir ausführlich berichtet. Es soll wirklich kotzjämmerlich miserabel gewesen sein.’ All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. 2
Anonymous: Dr. Kinkel’s Vorlesungen, in: Deutsches Athenäum 6/1853, pp. 6–7: ‘so ging die Vorlesung über alle Erwartung von Statten’.
3 Henry Crabb Robinson: Diary Vol. 35, 1851–1853, Ms. Dr Williams’s Library London, p. 194v (24 May), p. 179r (18 April), p. 184v (26 April). 4 Cf. Christine Lattek: Revolutionary Refugees. German Socialism in Britain, 1840–1860, Milton Park 2006, pp. 83–109; Martin Warnke: Jacob Burckhardt und Karl Marx, in: Hans R. Guggisberg (ed.): Umgang mit Jacob Burckhardt, München 1994, pp. 135–158. 5 Gottfried Kinkel: Lecture the Sixth: The present state of the arts, Universitäts- und Landes bibliothek (ULB) Bonn, S2707, p. 28v. 6
Letter from Gottfried Kinkel to Charles Caleb Atkinson, 16 April 1853 (Flaxman Papers Vol. IV. Correspondence of Maria Denman, British Library Add. Ms. 39783, p. 315v).
7 Anonymous 1853, p. 7: ‘Der englischen Sprache Kinkels merkte man es freilich an, dass er noch im Kampfe mit derselben begriffen sei, dass er derselben seinen Gedankenreichtum nicht völlig eindrücken kann. […] Die Form des Vortrags fiel überhaupt bei den Zuhörern mehr und mehr in den Hintergrund, erregte doch der Gehalt, der Geist und die individuelle Anschauung des Redners, bis zum Schluss hin die Theilnahme des Publikums.’ 8
Ibid.: ‘[…] die Fehler schienen eher einen “pikanten” als ungünstigen Eindruck auf das eng lische Publikum zu machen’.
9 Ibid.: ‘Sie enthielt viele neue Gedanken, eine sinnige, oft poetische Auffassung und machte durch die originelle und total deutsche Art und Weise der Entwickelung einen guten Eindruck auf die Zuhörer. […] die deutsche philosophische Form muss ganz bei Seite geschoben werden, um einer klaren, ganz verständlichen Form Platz zu machen […]’. 10 I have recently discovered the manuscripts for this lecture at the ULB Bonn. For a short codi-
cological description of the find, cf. Hans Christian Hönes: Die Geburt der Kunstgeschichte in England: Gottfried Kinkels Vorlesungen am University College London 1853, in: Kunstchronik 68/2015, pp. 487– 491.
11 A biography of Kinkel, living up to modern standards, is still missing. The best overview, including an excellent review of the literature, is provided by Bernhard Walcher: Vormärz im Rheinland. Nation und Geschichte in Gottfried Kinkels literarischem Werk, Berlin 2010. On Kinkel as an art historian, cf. Wolfgang Beyrodt: Gottfried Kinkel als Kunsthistoriker, Bonn 1979. 12 No other than Aby Warburg recommended Kinkel’s writings, alongside Jacob Burckhardt’s, to his students, naming him as the most important precursor of his own methodology of Kulturwissenschaft; cf. Dieter Wuttke: Nachwort, in: Aby Warburg: Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen (ed. by Dieter Wuttke), Baden-Baden 1979, pp. 601–638, p. 636. 13 Beyrodt 1979, pp. 197–211, 460– 462; ibid.: Kunstgeschichte als Universitätsfach, in: Peter
Ganz (ed.): Kunst und Kunsttheorie 1400–1900, Wiesbaden 1991, pp. 313–333.
218 | Notes
14 For the broader context, cf. Jonathan Sperber: Rhineland Radicals. The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849, Princeton 1991. 15 Succinctly on the ‘Kinkel myth’: Beyrodt 1979, pp. 12–36. 16 Walcher 2010. 17 For a literary eyewitness report of this escape, see the memoirs of Carl Schurz who acted as Kinkel’s escape agent; cf. Carl Schurz: Reminiscences. Vol. 1, 1829–1852, s.l. 1907. 18 Kinkel himself introduced his lecture at UCL with the words: ‘I am fully aware of the difficul-
ties, by which I am surrounded in speaking on so elevated a topic in a language of which two years since I did not understand a single word’ (Gottfried Kinkel: Lecture the First. Early Christian Art, ULB Bonn, S2705, p. 48). He also commented on his ‘Unfahigkeit im Englischen’ in a letter to his wife, written directly after his arrival in England (Letter from Gottfried to Johanna Kinkel, 12 January 1851, in: Monika Klaus (ed.): Liebe treue Johanna! Liebster Gottit! Der Briefwechsel zwischen Gottfried und Johanna Kinkel 1840–1858, vol. III, Bonn 2008, p. 1126).
19 Anonymous: Soiree of the Athenaeum Verein, in: The Manchester Examiner and Times, Wednes-
day 24 November 1852, p. 6.
20 Letter from Gottfried to Johanna Kinkel, 17 February 1852, in: Klaus 2008, p. 1271: ‘Ich sprach dort Englisch (ablesend) und deutsch (frei)’. 21 Manchester Examiner and Times, 5 November 1853, p. 10. 22 Klaus 2008, pp. 1142, 1144, 1167, 1171, 1172, 1180, 1183, 1199, 1203, et passim. 23 Letter from Johanna to Gottfried Kinkel, 8 January 1852 and 21 January 1852, ibid., pp. 1242, 1252. 24 Letter from Gottfried to Johanna Kinkel, 1 November 1853, ibid., p. 1281. 25 Rosemary Ashton: Little Germany. Exile and Asylum in Victorian England, Oxford 1986. 26 Gottfried Kinkel: Lecture the second. The arts during the Middle Ages, ULB Bonn S2705,
p. 42; id.: Lecture the fifth. The Arts in the northern Countries, ULB Bonn S2705, p. 22v.
27 Gottfried Kinkel: Pocket Diary, Tuesday 12 April 1853, ULB Bonn S2680b: ‘Nachmittags mit Frau Hering den Vortrag durchgesehen’; cf. letter from Johanna Kinkel to Gottfried Kinkel, 21 January 1852, in: Klaus 2008, p. 1257: ‘Sehr lieb habe ich besonders Herings gewonnen; die haben sich wie nahe Verwandte meiner angenommen, als ich da lag. Frau H[ering] hat mir stärkende Gelees gekocht, Correspondenzen besorgt, für mich abgeschrieben, um meine Brust zu schonen, und mir die Kinder verwahrt.’ I owe this reference to Wolfgang Beyrodt. 28 Henry Crabb Robinson: Diary Vol. 35, 1851–1853, Ms. Dr Williams’s Library London, p. 179r. (18 April). 29 For a recording of his voice: Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 10 April 1992 [http://www.bbc. co.uk/programmes/p0093y4d]. 30 Gottfried Kinkel: Lecture the Sixth. The present state of Sculpture and Painting, ULB Bonn S2707, pp. 29r, 29v. 31 Ibid., p. 28r. 32 For once, Marx’ judgment seems to be quite right when stating that Kinkel gave his lectures at UCL ‘in der Hoffnung, sich zum Professor der Ästhetik in der Londoner Universität heranzuschwindeln’ (Marx/Engels 1963, p. 584). In fact, an application for the post of Professor of English at UCL was almost successful; cf. Rosemary Ashton: Gottfried Kinkel and University College
219 | Notes
London, in: Peter Alter and Rudolf Muhs (eds): Exilanten und andere Deutsche in Fontanes London, Stuttgart 1996, pp. 23– 40. 33 ULB Bonn S2707, pp. 26v, 28r. 34 To name just a few newspapers who covered the news of his escape: Dundee, Perth, and Cupar Advertiser, 26 November 1850, p. 1; The Examiner, 30 November 1850, pp. 3, 4; Reynold’s Newspaper, 24 November 1850, p. 3; Morning Chronicle, 18 November 1850, p. 2; Hull Advertiser and Exchange Gazette, 22 November 1850, p. 3. 35 George Hooper: Kinkel is Free!, in: The Leader, 16 November 1850, p. 813. 36 Anonymous: Dr. Kinkel’s Lectures, in: The Manchester Examiner and Times, 3 November 1852,
p. 6.
37 Anonymous: Recent Disturbances at Bonn, in: The Examiner, 30 December 1848, p. 7. 38 Letter from Jenny Marx to Friedrich Engels, 7 January 1852, in: Marx/Engels 1963, p. 630:
‘Der künftige Präsident der deutschen Republik, der den hiesigen Krämern nachjagt um seine jöttlichen Gedichte vorzulesen und gelegentlich einen Abendfraß zu erschnappen.’
39 Marx’s situation during the early 1850s was characterized by ‘complete isolation from the
other German political exiles in London’ (Jonathan Sperber: Karl Marx. A nineteenth-century life, New York/London 2013, p. 273).
40 Gottfried Kinkel: Selbstbiographie 1838–1848, Bonn 1931, pp. 173, 200: ‘Auch dämmerte mir als herrlichstes Ziel die Kulturgeschichte meines Volkes entgegen. […] Diesem Werke sollte die wissenschaftliche Kraft meines Lebens gewidmet sein. […] Die wissenschaftliche Aufgabe meines Lebens, die deutsche Kulturgeschichte’. 41 Manchester Examiner and Times, 5 November 1853, p. 10 42 Kinkel: Lecture the second, p. 25. 43 Ibid., p. 36. 44 Ibid., pp. 33, 28. 45 Ibid., p. 35. 46 Kinkel: Lecture the sixth, pp. 15v, 24r; id.: Lecture the first, p. 20; id.: Lecture the third, p. 92. 47 Kinkel: Lecture the first, p. 14; id.: Lecture the fourth, p. 7v; id.: Lecture the sixth, pp. 8r, 18v, 11v. 48 Aurelia Klimkiewicz: Self-Translation as broken narrativity: Towards an understanding of the
self ’s multilingual dialogue, in: Anthony Cordingley (ed.): Self-Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture, London 2013, pp. 189–201.
49 Kinkel: Lecture the first, p. 1. 50 Gottfried Kinkel: Geschichte der bildenden Künste bei den christlichen Völkern, Bonn 1845,
p. 180.
51 Kinkel: Lecture the first, p. 1; Kinkel 1845, p. 181. 52 Kinkel 1845, p. 181: ‘Ja es fehlt nicht an Zeugnissen dass diese Räume in den Verfolgungen
auch den Lebenden zu kurzem Versteck dienten.’
53 Kinkel: Lecture the first, pp. 2–3. 54 Kinkel 1845, p. 181; Kinkel: Lecture the first, p. 3.
220 | Notes
55 Kinkel 1845, pp. 181–182. 56 Kinkel 1845, pp. 187–8: ‘So müssen wir mit einer im Ganzen wenig zureichenden Anschau-
ung uns begnügen. Denn die Originale selbst sollen, vielleicht durch den Zutritt der äußeren Luft, gegenwärtig fast gänzlich ausgeblichen sein.’
57 Kinkel: Lecture the First, p. 7. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 60 Gottfried Kinkel: Vorlesungen über Kunstgeschichte der modernen Völker, Bonn 1846/47, ULB
Bonn S2694, pp. 17, 22.
61 Kinkel 1845, s.p. (Prospectus). 62 Gottfried Kinkel: Vorlesungen über Geschichte der niederländischen Malerei vom Mittelalter bis
zur Gegenwart, Bonn 1846/47, ULB Bonn, S2694, p. 32.
63 University College London. Minutes of Senate No. 3 1853–1870, 13 February 1853, UCL Records
Office, GA/UOL/MINS/SEN/3: ‘Resolved, that the Senate cannot recommend the Council to accede to Professor Kinkels application from an apprehension that such a course could not succeed – either among our own Students, from stress of other occupations, or with the General Public who would be unlikely to come to this College for a Class of Lectures with which the Royal Institution and similar Institutions furnish them.’ 64 London Daily News, 25 May 1852, p. 3. 65 Henry Crabb Robinson: Diary Vol. 35, 1851–1853, Ms. Dr Williams’s Library London, p. 179r. (18 April). 66 Letter from Malwida von Meysenbug to Gottfried Kinkel, 13 April 1853, in: Malwida von Meysenbug: Briefe an Johanna und Gottfried Kinkel. 1849–1865 (ed. by Stefania Rossi and Yoki Kikuchi), Bonn 1982, p. 95. 67 Anonymous: Dr. Kinkel’s Lectures, in: The Manchester Examiner and Times, 3 November 1852,
p. 6: ‘As a lecturer he proved himself exceedingly attractice […]. Kinkel was a very handsome man, of regular features and herculean stature, being over six feet in height and a picture of strength.’ Schurz 1907, p. 99: ‘[…] a fine physical organisation, and a full and variable voice […]’.
68 Meysenbug 1982, p. 95. 69 Gottfried Kinkel: A Lecture on the Origin of Art, 1845, ULB Bonn S2705. 70 Ibid., p. 2r. 71 Anon.: Newbury Literary Insitution – Lecture on Sculpture, in: Reading Mercury, 25 February
1854, p. 4.
72 Walcher 2010, p. 68 (with many references), who also mentions that ‘von der Forschung auch
Kinkels Redetalent immer wieder thematisiert [wurde], ohne aber tatsächlich auf die Reden einzugehen’. 73 Schurz 1907, pp. 99–100: ‘He had a wonderful voice, both strong and soft, high and low, powerful and touching in its tone, gentle as a flute and thundering like a trombone – a voice which seemed to command all the registers of the church organ. To listen to him was at the same time a musical and an intellectual joy.’ 74 Lattek 2006, p. 96.
221 | Notes
75 On the phenomenon of consciously retaining one’s accent: Ewelina Debaene and John Harris: Divergence, Convergence and Passing for a Native Speaker: Variations in the Use of English by Polish Migrants in Ireland, in: David Singleton and Vera Regan (eds): Linguistic and Cultural Acquisition in a Migrant Community, Bristol et al. 2013, pp. 85–105.
Identity, Voice and Translation in the Life and Work of Leon Vilaincour (Linda Sandino) 1 Life history recording of Leon Vilaincour, interviewed by Linda Sandino, 2003– 4, Artists’ Lives © British Library, catalogue reference C466/177, tapes 01–12. For more information www. bl.uk/nls/artists. 2
Anne Karpf: The Human Voice: The Story of a Remarkable Talent, London 2006, p. 182.
3 This and other factual information were kindly shared with me in email correspondence with Maria Vilaincour, 22 June 2016, and 26 July 2016. I am very grateful to her for sharing her memories and stories about her father. 4 Richard Morphet: Leon Vilaincour. Artist. Obituary, in: Sunday Telegraph, 30 April 2016. http://w w w.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/0 4/30/ leon-vilaincour-artist--obituary/ [accessed May 2016]. 5
Letter from Leon Vilaincour to Prunella Clough, Tate Ref. 200511/1/1/66.
6
Paul Ricoeur: Oneself as Another, London/Chicago 1992, pp. 147–8.
7 Paul Ricoeur: Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trad. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, London/Chicago 1988, p. 246. 8
Ibid.
9 Vilaincour 2003, 1A 00:49. Spoken extracts appear in italics to distinguish them from the written quotations. 10 Richard Kearney: Introduction, in: Paul Ricoeur: On Translation, London 2006, p. xix. 11 Ricoeur 1988, p. 4. 12 Ricoeur 1992, p. 1. 13 Ibid., p. 2; cf. also Hannah Arendt’s concept of self-translation as a ‘sounding through’ of voices from the past, discussed in the essay by Sigrid Weigel, pp. 34 –35. 14 Ricoeur 1992, p. 18. 15 Kearney 2006, p. xix. 16 Quoted after Kearney 2006, p. xi. 17 Vilaincour 2003, 2A 05:59. 18 Vilaincour 2003, 1B 16:01–26:15. 19 Vilaincour 2003, 2A 02:30. 20 Miles Murphy: Leon Vilaincour, Exhibition catalogue, Serpentine Gallery, London 1983, p. 2. 21 Vilaincour 2003, 5A 20:19. 22 Richard Morphet: A Listener’s Perspective: on hearing Leon Vilaincour’s recording made with Linda Sandino, in: National Life Stories Annual Report and Accounts 2005/2006, in partnership with the British Library, London 2006, p. 10.
222 | Notes
23 David Hodge: Summary: Leon Vilaincour: A Life 1984–5, Tate, London 2014 http://www.tate. org.uk/art/artworks/vilaincour-a-life-t07338 [accessed 22 June 2016]. 24 Vilaincour 2003, 7A 23:03. 25 Vilaincour 2003, 1A 03:35. 26 Vilaincour 2003, 5A 23:09. 27 Forensic Architecture: Lexicon, Extraterritoriality, http://www.forensic-architecture.org/
lexicon/extraterritoriality/ [accessed June 2016].
28 Vilaincour 2003, 6A 10:03. 29 Leon Vilaincour 1983, p. 5. 30 Ricoeur 1992, p. 193. 31 John E. Joseph: Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious, London/New York 2004,
p. 24.
32 Joseph 2004, p. 20. 33 Karpf 2006, pp. 277–8. 34 Pierre Bourdieu: Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge/Mass. 1991, p. 223 35 Joseph 2004, p. 77. 36 Ricoeur 2006; Joseph 2004; cf. Susan Bassnett: Translating Across Cultures, in: Susan
Hunston (ed.): Language at Work, Clevedon 1998, pp. 72–85.
37 Kearney 2006, p. xv. 38 Ricoeur 2006, p. 35. 39 Ricoeur 2006, p. 36. 40 Kearney 2006, p. xiii. 41 Vilaincour 2003, 5A 06:25. 42 Murphy 1983, p. 2. 43 Vilaincour 1983, p. 9. 44 Bassnett 1998, p. 77. 45 Ricoeur 2006, pp. 23–24; see also the introduction to this volume, pp. 13–21. 46 Richard Kearney: Paul Ricoeur and the Hermenutics of Translation, in: Research in Phenomenology 37/2007, pp. 147–159. 47 Kearney 2006, p. xvi. 48 Ricoeur 2006, p. 25. 49 Paul Ricoeur: Reflections on a new ethos for Europe, in: id.: The Hermeneutics of Action (ed. by Richard Kearney), London et al. 1996, pp. 3–14, p. 5. 50 Ricoeur 1992, p. 193. 51 Vilaincour 2004, 7B 20:47. 52 Hodge 2014, n.p.
223 | Notes
53 Ricoeur 1996, p. 6. 54 Ricoeur 1996, p. 6. 55 Ricoeur 1996, p. 11.
224 | Notes
Inde x
Adams, Henry 94 Adorno, Theodor W. 29, 183, 214 Alberti, Leon Battista 11 Améry, Jean 111, 209 Anderson, Jaynie 41, 43, 51, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 198 Anderson, Kristine J. 28, 51, 182, 185, 186, 187, 190 Anguissola, Sofonisba 53, 54 Antal, Frederic 17, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209 Apuleius 160 Arendt, Hannah 33, 34, 148, 181, 184, 217, 222 Armstrong, Walter 50, 190 Arnheim, Rudolf 33, 181, 184 Aslanapa, Oktay 119, 120, 122, 210, 211 Atkinson, Charles Caleb 150, 218 Auerbach, Erich 27, 183 Aurenhammer, Hans 100, 203, 204 B Baacke, Rolf-Peter 212 Baldini, Baccio 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 194 Baltrušaitis, Jurgis 104 Balzac, Honoré de 141, 147, 214, 216 Barr, Alfred 96 Bassnett, Susan 22, 27, 28, 181, 182, 183, 185, 223
225 | Index
Bataille, Georges 126 Baudelaire, Charles 172 Bauer, Edgar 149, 218 Baykal, Bekir Sıtkı 115 Beaujour, Elizabeth Klosty 26, 183 Beazley, John Davidson 94 Beckett, Samuel 8, 12, 22, 25, 27, 33, 126, 180, 181, 183 Belling, Rudolf 113, 209 Benesch, Otto 100, 104 Benjamin, Walter 26, 27, 30, 31, 91, 181, 182, 183, 185, 193 Berger, John 99, 106, 203 Beyer, Andreas 17, 93, 180, 181, 202, 231 Bhabha, Homi 23, 182 Bing, Gertrud 59, 61, 77, 81, 88, 193, 197, 199, 201 Binswanger, Ludwig 81, 196 Blixen, Karen (Isak Dinesen) 22 Bloch, Ernst 74, 196 Blumenberg, Hans 16, 181 Blunt, Anthony 106, 109, 203, 207 Bode, Wilhelm 41, 46, 49, 50, 51, 186, 189, 190 Boileau, Nicolas 139 Bonaparte, Napoleon 172 Botticelli 70, 194 Bourdieu, Pierre 174, 223
Braque, Georges 18, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 212, 213, 214 Breton, André 213 Brodsky, Joseph 22 Burckhardt, Jacob 85, 87, 148, 217, 218 Burke, Peter 105, 179, 206 Butler, Howard Crosley 94 Butler, Samuel 88, 201 C Cai, Yuanpei 137 Çakıroğ lu, Necribe 113 Calder, Alexander 126 Cameron Smith, Roberta 167 Carlyle, Thomas 85, 88 Cassirer, Ernst 80, 84, 197, 198, 200, 205 Castelnuovo, Enrico 101, 204 Çetinta ş , Sedat 121, 211 Cézanne, Paul 100 Chaplin, Charlie 97 Chen, Jack 109, 208 Çinici, Behruz 113, 210 Ciprut, Edouard 132, 133, 213 Çıtako ğ lu, Niyazi 115 Clark, Kenneth 106 Clement of Alexandria 160 Clough, Prunella 172, 222 Cluss, Adolf 149, 218 Colvin, Sidney 49, 51, 56, 57, 190 Confucius 146 Cook, Walter W. S. 93 Crabb Robinson, Henry 149, 154, 161, 218, 219, 221 Crawford, W. Rex 91 D da Carpi, Girolamo 107, 207 Daniélou, Jean 146, 217 Darwin, Charles 85, 88 David, Jacques-Louis 45, 110, 161, 191, 192, 199, 208, 212, 213, 222, 223 Dehio, Georg 15 Della Robbia (family) 94 Derrida, Jacques 18, 29, 181, 183, 185 Dessoir, Max 84 Dewey, John 80, 198 Didi-Huberman, Georges 71, 192, 195, 196, 197 Dvoř ák, Max 99, 100, 101, 103, 105, 108, 109, 204, 205 E Eastlake, Elizabeth 37, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 184, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192 Egli, Ernst 112, 113, 115, 118, 210
226 | Index
Einstein, Carl 18, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 202, 212, 213, 214 Eisler, Colin 92, 202 El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) 104, 206 Elias, Norbert 110, 208 Étiemble, René 141, 147, 216 Ettlinger, Leopold 15 F Fabriano, Gentile da 107 Federman, Raymond 22 Ffoulkes, Constance Jocelyn 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192 Finkelstein, Sidney 109, 208 Finlay-Freundlich, Erwin 113 Fiorillo, Domenico 161 Fitch, Brian 27, 33, 183 Flavius, Josephus 11, 179 Flexner, Abraham 95, 202 Fou Lei 18, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 214, 215, 216, 217 Fou Min 136, 147, 217 Fournier, Alain 170 Fou Ts’ong 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 217 Frankl, Paul 15 Fraser, Hilary 40, 186, 191 Frazer, James 88 Frederick the Great 11 Freud, Sigmund 34, 130, 184, 192 Frey, Dagobert 110, 208 Frizzoni, Giovanni 48, 52, 185, 189, 191 Fülep, Lajos 100 Fürst, Bruno 103 Fuseli, Henry 110, 208 G Galilei, Galileo 147 Gallo, Laura 101, 204, 205 Gassner, Hubertus 204 Gerrish Nunn, Pamela 39, 186 Ghirlandaio 60, 73, 194, 195 Giacometti, Alberto 126 Giedion, Sigfried 109 Giotto (Giotto di Bondone) 102, 106, 109 Gleissberg, Wolfgang 113, 116, 210 Glück, Heinrich 119, 210, 212 Goebbels, Josef 87 Goldschmidt, Adolf 81 Goldschmidt, Georges-Arthur 60, 181, 192 Gombrich, Ernst H. 14, 19, 59, 83, 99, 105, 109, 155, 180, 182, 192, 195, 198, 199, 201, 203, 206, 208
Gozzoli, Benozzo 65 Green, Julian 22, 121 Grutman, Rainier 11, 33, 179, 180, 182, 183 H Haendcke, Berthold 103, 205 Haskell, Francis 110, 188, 209 Hausenstein, Wilhelm 132, 213 Hauser, Arnold 99, 100, 105, 109, 203, 204, 207 Hegel, Georg W. F. 139 Heine, Heinrich 127, 180 Hekscher, William S. 15, 203 Hering, Ewald 85, 88, 153, 201, 219 Hertz, Henriette 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 57, 189, 192 Heym, Stefan 33, 181, 184 Hitler, Adolf 93, 105, 112, 126, 131, 133, 206, 214 Hogarth, William 106, 110, 206, 207, 208 Holzmeister, Clemens 113, 210 Homer 126 Hugo, Victor 146, 195, 217 Huston, Nancy 12, 180 J Jantzen, Hans 105, 206 Jaspers, Karl 148, 217 Jolas, Eugène 126 Joseph, John E. 94, 174, 183, 223 Jouvet, Louis 177 Joyce, James 126, 212 Jung, Verena 33, 34, 180, 181, 184 K Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry 125, 127, 212, 213 Kant, Immanuel 100 Karpf, Anne 165, 222, 223 Kaschnitz von Weinberg, Guido 105 Kaufmann, Hans 103, 181, 205 Kearney, Richard 169, 176, 222, 223 Keaton, Joseph Frank Buster 97 Kerr, Alfred 111 Kinkel, Gottfried 18, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 218, 219, 220, 221 Kircher, Athanasius 11 Klimkiewicz, Aurelia 17, 181, 220 Klingender, Francis 99, 106, 109, 207 Köhler, Wolfgang 91 Kolatan, Adnan 114, 115, 116 Köprülü, Mehmet Fuat 118, 119, 210 Kortner, Fritz 111 Krautheimer, Richard 17, 109, 181 Kugler, Franz 45, 188 Kun, Béla 100, 101 L
227 | Index
Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de 146, 217 Lamprecht, Karl 137 Lanvin, Jeanne 166, 167 Lányi, Jenö 105 Layard, Austen Henry 37, 38, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56, 57, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192 Leiris, Michel 126 Lermolieff, Ivan (see Morelli, Giovanni) 38, 40, 41, 46, 49, 51, 54, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 85, 86 Löffelholz, Gustawa 166 Longhi, Roberto 101, 103, 104, 204, 205, 206 Lukács, Györgi 100, 106, 108, 109, 203, 204, 207, 208 M Mannheim, Karl 100, 105, 108, 110, 204, 208 Mann, Klaus 33, 181, 184 Mansfield, Elizabeth 39, 186 Marosi, Ernö 204, 210 Marquand, Allan 94, 202 Marx, Jenny 149, 150, 151, 156, 157, 163, 218, 219, 220 Marx, Karl 149, 150, 151, 156, 157, 163, 218, 219, 220 Masaccio (Tommaso di ser Giovanni di Mone Cassai) 106, 107 Masson, André 127, 213 Mather, Frank J. 94 Mathieux, Johanna 152 Mayer, August L. 104, 206 McLean, Sorley 26 Meier, Hans 78, 197, 210 Meiss, Millard 109, 208 Mesnil, Jacques (Dwelshauvers, JeanJacques) 71, 195 Meysenbug, Malwida von 161, 221 Michelangelo (Michelangelo Buonarroti) 106, 199, 204 Michels, Karen 181, 198, 202, 203, 205 Miró, Joan 127 Mond, Frida 48, 189 Mond, Ludwig 48, 189 Morelli, Giovanni 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192 Morey, Charles Rufus 94, 95 Murphy, Miles 171, 172, 176, 222, 223 Murray, John 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 57, 188, 189, 190 N
Nabokov, Vladimir 8, 12, 22, 180 Nagel, Ernst 80, 81, 198 Neumann, Franz L. 91, 209 Newald, Richard 78, 197 Newson, George 166 Nietzsche, Friedrich 85, 86, 125, 130, 147 Norton, Charles Eliot 94 O Oelsner, Gustav 116, 123, 210 Offner, Richard 100 Origen of Alexandria (Origen Adamantius) 160 Orwell, George 141 Osthoff, Herman 72, 73, 195, 196 Otto-Dorn, Katharina 119 Öz, Tahsin 121, 211 P Pächt, Otto 105 Palmer, Caroline 53, 191 Panofsky, Erwin 7, 8, 14, 15, 17, 59, 80, 81, 82, 83, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 102, 103, 108, 146, 181, 192, 196, 199, 202, 203, 205, 217 Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola) 101, 102, 204 Passavant, Johann David 45, 161, 191 Pater, Walter 88 Pauker, Zygmund 166 Peirce, Charles S. 80, 94, 198, 201 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 142 Pevsner, Nikolaus 15, 101, 110, 111, 204, 206, 209 Phillips, Claude 46, 188, 191, 212 Picasso, Pablo 127, 213, 214 Piłsudski, Józef 177 Pinder, Wilhelm 103, 105, 205 Plato 86 Poggi, Giovanni 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 193, 194 Pollock, Griselda 39, 185 Pontormo, Jacopo da 102, 106, 107 Pope-Hennessy, John 109, 208 Porter, Arthur Kingsley 94, 182 Poussin, Nicolas 106 R Racine, Jean 126, 148, 217 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) 106, 107, 207 Rasch, Martin 87 Read, Herbert 106, 109, 148, 207 Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn) 106 Reuter, Ernst 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 210 Reynolds, Joshua 110, 208 Richter, Jean Paul 43, 46, 184, 186, 187, 189
228 | Index
Richter, Louise 43, 46, 186, 187, 189, 192 Rickert, Heinrich 87, 200 Ricoeur, Paul 165, 168, 169, 175, 176, 177, 181, 222, 223, 224 Riegl, Alois 85, 86, 100, 105, 108 Rigby, Elizabeth (see Eastlake, Elizabeth) 53, 184, 187, 188, 191 Rushdie, Salman 23, 24, 182 Ruskin, John 52, 191 S Sachs, Paul, Joseph 94 Saussure, Ferdinand 34 Saxl, Fritz 77, 85, 88, 89, 104, 105, 106, 109, 195, 197, 200, 201, 206 Schapiro, Meyer 104, 105, 109, 206, 208 Schiller, Friedrich 86, 212 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 85, 200 Sciolla, Gianni 99 Sedlmayr, Hans 105, 206 Simon, Sherry 39, 57, 185, 192, 197 Sirel, Nijat 113 Smith, Earl Baldwin 94, 167, 182, 183, 184, 197, 202, 203 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 22, 182 Springer, Anton 73 Stechow, Wolfgang 103, 205 Steiner, George 23, 182 Stirton, Paul 100, 204, 208 St. John Corbet, Robert 46 St. Pierre, Paul 27, 183 Strzygowski, Josef 81, 99, 103, 112, 119, 121, 122, 132, 210, 211, 213 Swarzenski, Georg 103 Swoboda, Karl Maria 105 Symonds, John Adington 88 T Tagore, Ibrahim 12 Taine, Hippolyte 18, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 215, 216, 217 Taut, Bruno 114, 210 Tawada, Yoko 16, 25, 182 Thomson, George 109, 208 Tillich, Paul 91 Tolnay, Charles de 100, 204 Trevelyan, George M. 109, 208 Tylor, Edward B. 73 U Usener, Hermann 87, 196 V Van der Weyden, Roger 96, 161 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 97, 126 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor 85, 88, 199 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 126, 142, 147
von Schlosser, Julius 102, 205 W Waagen, Gustav 45, 161 Warburg, Aby 8, 9, 13, 14, 17, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 102, 103, 105, 108, 109, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 218, 229, 232 Warburg, Eric M. 8, 9, 13, 14, 17, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 102, 103, 105, 108, 109, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 218, 232 Wasmuth, Ewald 125, 126, 134, 212, 214 Weigel, Sigrid 12, 13, 18, 21, 181, 182, 183, 184, 202, 222 Wessely, Anna 108, 203, 204, 207, 208 Weyhe, Erhard 127
229 | Index
Whitehead, Alfred North 80, 198 Whyte, Christopher 25, 26, 182, 183 Wilde, Johannes 100, 109, 206 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 14, 85, 139, 180 Wind, Edgar 17, 59, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 105, 109, 110, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 208, 209 Windelband, Wilhelm 87, 200 Wind, Ruth 17, 59, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 105, 109, 110, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 208, 209 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 140, 215 Wittkower, Rudolf 109 Wölfflin, Heinrich 15, 60, 81, 85, 86, 99, 100 Y Yontuç, Kenan 113 Z Zhu Meifu 147, 148 Zweig, Stefan 172 Zwemmer, Anton 127
Picture Credits
Author: 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 / Sybille EbertSchifferer and Anna Lo Bianco (eds): La donazione di Enrichetta Hertz, 1913-2013, Milano 2013: 3 / © London, Warburg Institute: 5, 12 / © Florence, Archivio Storico delle Gallerie Fiorentine, Fondo Giovanni Poggi: 6 / Aby Warburg: Gesammelte Schriften. Studienausgabe. Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Renaissance [1932), vol. I.1-2, Berlin 1998, pl. XI, XIII, XIV: 7, 8, 9 / © Berlin, Landesarchiv, Papers of Ernst Reuter: 18 / Istanbul, Papers of Oktay Aslanapa: 21 / © The Fou Family Trust: 27, 29, 30, 31 / © The Berguerand Family Archive: 28 / © London, Trustees of the British Museum: 32 / © London, Lebrecht Photo Library: 38 / London, Southbank Centre, Arts Council Collection [© estate of Leon Vilaincour, 1993]: 39 / © London, Tate: 40.
230 | Picture Credits
Acknowledgments
The origin of the present volume goes back to an international conference held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence in 2015. Both conference and book are the outcome of the activities of the International Research Group “Bilderfahrzeuge. Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology” – an international collaboration between five research institutes all across Europe. We would like to thank the directors of the project who supported our ideas and made this book possible. Andreas Beyer, speaker of the “Bilderfahrzeuge”, enthusiastically encouraged our ideas and provided support wherever possible. The editors owe a special debt of gratitude to Gerhard Wolf, director of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence (Max-Planck-Institut), for trusting in the project, for his invaluable advices and especially for hosting the initial conference and agreeing to publish this volume as a co-publication of the KHI in the series of the Warburg-Haus. We are also very grateful to Uwe Fleckner for his suggestion to publish this volume in the Studien aus dem Warburg-Haus and accompanying its production with a scrupulous editorial eye. The volume has profited enormously from the many conversations with our colleagues of the ‘Bilderfahrzeuge’ team. Special thanks are due to those who have also lent their practical support on more than one occasion: Johannes von Müller, Eckart Marchand and Stuart Moss. With De Gruyter, Katja Richter, Verena Bestle and Anja Weisenseel have shepherded the volume through production. We would like to thank Beryl Korot for granting the reproduction rights for the cover illustration, as well as the team of bitforms Gallery, in particular Steve Sacks and Aliza Morell, for liaising with the artist.
231 | Acknowledgments
A note on the cover illustration
Beryl Korot’s Babel 1 (1980) seemed an ideal visual commentary on the topic of selftranslation. In two columns, the artist has depicted verses from the Hebrew Bible, both encoded in an alphabet of the artist’s invention, and reminiscent of writing systems such as Braille. The left column is rendering the English version of the story of the Tower of Babel, the right the Hebrew original. Following the Western reading direction from left to right, the beholder is led from translation back to original – but due to the highly inflected structure of Hebrew, the writing/code appears fragmentary, dotted over the canvas instead of forming recognisable units of words and sentences. Instead of revealing the text, the opacity of the signs is even increased – a fitting commentary on the confusion of languages that Babel brought along. In this respect, the work might be emblematic for the frictions and metamorphoses of text and meaning that so many protagonists of the chapters of this book experienced while self-translating and re-translating their work and professional identities.
232 | A note on the cover illustration
Studien aus dem Warburg-Haus, Bd. 19 zugleich eine Publikation des Kunsthistorischen Instituts Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut) und des Forschungsverbundes “Bilderfahrzeuge. Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology”.
ISBN 978-3-11-048587-5 eISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-049125-8 eISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-049047-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Costa, Maria Teresa, editor. | Hönes, Hans Christian, editor. Title: Migrating histories of art : self-translations of a discipline / edited by Maria Teresa Costa, Hans Christian Hönes. Description: Berlin ; Boston : De Gruyter, 2018. | Series: Studien aus dem Warburg-Haus ; [Band 19] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018029291 (print) | LCCN 2018029603 (ebook) | ISBN 9783110491258 (electronic Portable Document Format (pdf ) | ISBN 9783110485875 (hardback) | ISBN 9783110490473 (e-book epub) | ISBN 9783110491258 (e-book pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Art--Historiography. | Self-translation. | Communication in learning and scholarship. | BISAC: ART / History / General. | ART / General. | HISTORY / General. | HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century. Classification: LCC N7480 (ebook) | LCC N7480 .M54 2018 (print) | DDC 700.9--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029291 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Beryl Korot, Babel 1, 1980, acrylic on hand-woven linen, 30.6 × 23.2 × 2.5 in / 77.7 × 58.9 × 6.4 cm. Courtesy bitforms gallery, New York. Photo: Emile Askey Cover design: Petra Florath Typesetting: Satzstudio Borngräber, Dessau-Roßlau Printing and binding: DZA Druckerei zu Altenburg GmbH, Altenburg www.degruyter.com