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Reviewed by:
  • The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt ed. by Janita R. Hall-Swadley
  • Anna Harwell Celenza
The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt. Edited by Janita R. Hall-Swadley. Volume 1: F. Chopin. pp. xv + 293. (Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md., 2011. ISBN 978-08108-8101-3, £44.95.) Volume 2: Essays and Letters of a Traveling Bachelor of Music. pp. xxv + 431. (Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md., 2012. ISBN 978-0-8108-8267-6, £44.95.)

The 200th anniversary of Franz Liszt’s birth was celebrated with the publication of numerous books connected with the composer’s life and works, among them the first volume of The Collected Writings of Franz Liszt, edited and translated by Janita R. Hall-Swadley. As Hall-Swadley explains in the introduction to this inaugural volume, ‘every attempt will be made to release a new volume at least once a year’, and so far she is on schedule. This review will discuss the first two volumes in the series: F. Chopin (2011) and Essays and Letters of a Traveling Bachelor of Music (2012).

Those familiar with Liszt’s writings no doubt recognize that the titles of these two volumes replicate those in Lina Ramann’s Gesammelte Schriften published by Breitkopf & Härtel (1880–3). This is no coincidence. Towards the end of Liszt’s life, Ramann collected and organized the composer’s writings, provided her own annotations and, with Liszt’s approval and under the occasional advisement of [End Page 611] Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, published the first complete edition. La Mara (Marie Lipsius) translated the first volume: F. Chopin; the other six were translated by Ramann herself. Hall-Swadley’s new English edition is not a direct translation of Liszt’s (mostly French) works as they originally appeared in print, but rather a translation of Ramann’s German edition. In her introduction to the series, Hall-Swadley acknowledges that some scholars might question whether ‘this current English edition is a translation of Liszt’s writings or Ramann’s work’, especially since ‘there were problems with Ramann’s German edition’ (i. 2). Still, her commitment to Ramann’s version of these texts is unwavering. Although Liszt does not appear to have been directly involved to any great extent in the creation of Ramann’s translation, he nonetheless gave his imprimatur to the project. This is why a ‘firm commitment to these writings [as Ramann published them] needs to be madè, states Hall-Swadley. ‘Even if the edition does not fit comfortably into the research mold that everyone has been trained to accept, it exists’ (i. 3).

The English word ‘translation’ derives from the Latin term translatio, which means ‘to carry, or bring across’, and since antiquity those who have chosen to transport texts from one linguistic realm to another have struggled to find the most effective and purposeful way to balance the original text’s meaning with its author’s linguistic style. In her translations of Liszt/Ramann, Hall-Swadley places more emphasis on the former. She is not interested in replicating the stylistic qualities of what she calls ‘Liszt’s florid prosè; nor does she distinguish in her translations between what she describes as La Mara’s ‘Frenchified’ German and Ramann’s more ‘intellectual’ tone. Instead, Hall-Swadley’s central goal is to produce an ‘understandable and accessible text’ that communicates the essential meaning of these essays as they were understood by late nineteenth-century readers (ii. 1). Most importantly, even though Hall-Swadley’s edition does not reflect the obvious stylistic differences between La Mara’s and Ramann’s German translations, her decision to use them as her primary source highlights a distinctive turning point in the history of translation theory. Jonathan Kregor has described how ‘the Enlightenment notion of universalism’ with regard to translations gave way in the nineteenth century ‘to a Romantic conception of difference between nations, their languages, and their artistic productions’ (Liszt as Transcriber (New York, 2010), 12). This change in approach often led to the translator’s conscious use of translation as a means of cultural appropriation. La Mara admitted as much in 1880 in her ‘Translator’s Note’ to F. Chopin:

Whoever is familiar with the original...

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