Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel and the Art-Romance Tradition (review)

Goethe Yearbook 255 In the case of Hölderlin, Bernofsky's service is to focus attention not only on his translations of Pindar and the clear influence of his poetry on Hölderlin 's work, but also on Hölderlins lesser-known translations of Sophoclean chomses, themselves as opaque in Hölderlin's renderings as Pindar's odes. Hölderlins translations of these chomses, as Bemofsky notes, influence, above all, his "late hymns, particularly in the use of anticipatory adjectives and other means of creating hypotactic structures" (129-30). In her chapter on Goethe, Bemofsky moves away from close readings of particular sections of text; she instead focuses on Goethe's reworkings of Denis Diderot's Le neveu der Rameau and his "Essais sur la peinture." The changes Goethe made reflect his own differences with Diderot.Thus, Goethe's disagreement on the potential beauty of "physical disfigurement" leads to elisions and emendations of the original French text. On the whole, Foreign Words is a useful and innovative study.There are, however , a few unfortunate aspects to the book. Bernofsky's characterization of the meter of Voß's Homer translation as trochaic, rather than dactylic, hexameter is one such instance (11). Furthermore, the secondary literature could be augmented and updated. In the chapter on Kleist, for example, Bemofsky cites no works more recenüy published than 1992. A greater awareness of how her work fits in with current criticism of Kleist, Hölderlin and Goethe would have strengthened this book. The University of Tennessee Kamaal Haque Jonah Siegel, Haunted Museum: Longing, Travd and the Art-Romance Tradition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. 285 pp. Jonah Siegel describes his Haunted Museum as a book about literary form and the desire for the South. It is also an essay on the vexed relations among originality, convention, and passion.Though largely concentrating on the nineteenth century, my aim is to describe the links uniting a set of works running from the eighteenth century to our own day and constituting a tradition whose force and longevity are due in no small measure to the overdetermined nature of the desires shaping the form. The literary tradition that developed around the representation of the encounter with the South of genius is what I call the art romance. Despite its multifaceted title, despite its manifold stated purposes, this is primarily a good book about the challenge of Rome and Europe in general to Henry James. Had it been titled "Henry James: Longing, Travel and the Art-Romance Tradition" and structured accordingly, it would be even stronger. Goethe, de Staël, Byron, Letitia Landon, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Hawthorne , Freud, James, Forster, Proust, and Thomas Mann are all discussed as contributors to an admittedly amorphous narrative genre in which an artist of mixed origin travels or wants to travel to Italy or to Europe in search of objects of art. At play are fantasies of access to creative origin, of erotic fulfillment. Goethe's character Mignon serves as model for later characters with "her mysterious origins in a complex tale of incestuous family romance, her passion, her disappointment , and her death." Her dislocation from Italy is from a country "where longing is always alive and satisfaction and death are closely allied." Siegel begins his discussion of what he calls the "art-romance tradition" with a mistake and with an unfortunate choice. He states that the poem "Kennst du das 256 Book Reviews Land, wo die Citronen bluhn""opens book 4" of Wilhelm Meister (it is book 3)The problem arises when Siegel fails to distinguish carefully between Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung (in which, as Siegels source Nicholas Boyle points out, the poem indeed appears "at the opening of book 4 of the novel") and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (further, the note referring to Boyle confuses volume 1 of Goethe, the Poet and the Age with volume 2 and a later note fails to give a volume number at all).These are minor problems, of course (see also typographical errors on pages 103,119,141,142, and 169), but they undermine a reader's confidence. Siegel unfortunately chooses to cite Mignon's song in Eric Blackall's wooden translation:"Know you the land...