- Writings on Art: German and English/Schriften zur Kunst: Deutsch und Englisch by Hugo von Hofmannsthal
It would have been a plus if the only result of encountering this volume had been to gain closer familiarity with Iudicium Verlag. This reviewer marvels at the treasures available from this publisher, whose offerings can only be judged indispensable to Germanists, especially if they have comparative interests. The volume honoring Michael Hamburger was edited by a group including none other than Martin Liebscher and Martin Swales; the collection in English honoring Franz Baerman Steiner was overseen by Jeremy Adler. [End Page 90]
Iudicium's online catalogue lists studies and translations bound to interest anyone concerned with literature and literary translation. In one series called "Iaponia Insula" there has just appeared a play (Das zweite Gesicht/The Face of Pearl Harbor) by a forgotten Viennese writer, Mark Siegelberg, who emigrated to Shanghai. This publication was notable enough to merit a report in the Wiener Zeitung of December 16–17, 2017 (36).
It's tempting to expand on the whole range of Iudicium's list, but to focus: the particular series presenting German texts in English translation contains the Hofmannsthal volume as its second listing; considered along with the first, J.M.R. Lenz's Remarks concerning the Theatre/Anmerkungen übers Theater (edited by Norman R. Diffey and Hans-Günther Schwarz), the series indicates an orientation toward creative writers' theoretical and critical writings on the arts.
Two caveats: Germanists, who can read these works in the original, should not underestimate Iudicium's dedication to cultural transfer; imagine how hampered directors and actors who don't know Russian or German might be, for example, if the writings of Stanislavski or Brecht on theater had never been translated. There is no predicting what practical effect Lenz's comments might have on dramaturgy and production.
The second caveat asks for avoiding the divisive spirit of social media in pasting grossly oversimplifying labels onto the work of nuanced authors. One critical generation scornfully relegated Hofmannsthal to the role of world-weary aesthete; the next quoted selectively to prove him a reactionary, a monarchist, a deliberate retrogressive. Those glib, crass estimates, easily demolished by Hofmannsthal's own writing, block in advance any honest understanding of this exceptionally sophisticated artist. (For a lucid corrective, see Charles Rosen's article "Radical, Modern Hofmannsthal" in The New York Review of Books, April 8, 2010.)
It is to the good, then, that Schwarz follows the original texts, bilingual on facing pages—the English renderings fluently lucid—with a sensitive contextualizing afterword. These writings on art are far from the first works of Hofmannsthal in English; over the decades, he has been represented in carefully edited collections from Princeton University Press, the Bollingen Series, and New York Review Books. Those samplings have been accompanied by solid critical remarks, but Schwarz goes deeper to the core of Hofmannsthal's art, to the root of his concern at every point to uphold or recover a precarious unity of soul, a totality of perception that can overcome shattering fragmentation [End Page 91] by registering every fleeting nuance while simultaneously apprehending overall coherent form. The very fact of Hofmannsthal's preoccupation with unity among separate impressions (a touchstone was Baudelaire's "Correspondances") shows "not only in the essays […] in this volume but also in his congenial cooperation with the composer Richard Strauss"; Hofmannsthal's "enthusiasm for the arts […] breaks down the borders between the various manifestations of the European artistic spirit" (109), revealing an artist as preoccupied with musical sounds and colors as he was with words in their unifying function.
"What is normally compartmentalized in separate activities […] is connected in the production of art" (111), Schwarz plausibly advances as Hofmannsthal's fundamental dictum. Accordingly, he and his co-editor dedicate the major part of this collection to the Briefe des Zurückgekehrten/Letters of the Man Who Returned (58–106). The last two...