The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance (Texts & Documents)

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Summary: Warburg on Renaissance & Antiquity in English.
Review: Thanks to the Getty Research Institute, Kurt W. Forster, and David Britt for bringing this extremely important volume to us in English. The arrival of this book--a new edition of the 1932 work--has been much anticipated. Finally the bulk of Warburg's essays on the relationships between antique and Renaissance imagery are now readily available. The original book is not widely available even to those who can read the German or Italian texts of these early essays. This book will now allow much greater possibilites for research into Warburg, the Warburg Tradition, and his important contributions to the history of art and its intellectual history. A generation of scholars will be thankful to the editors of the Getty Texts & Documents series: Julia Bloomfield, Kurt Forster, Harry Mallgrave, Michael Roth, and Salvatore Settis.

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Summary: Translators who love too much
Review: Translating is always, as they say, a labor of love, and yet the eyes of lovers are famous for falsifying their beloved. While we cannot accuse Britt's long awaited and long needed translation of Warburg into English of neglect, unfortunately the very care and attentiveness that he lavishes on the text, and his often overwrought attempt to get at its original meaning, results in almost grotesque distortions, as if, worried about how his beloved might appear under the gaze of his contemporaries, he feels the need to mask his beloved's true virtues with invented conceits. Two examples will suffice: the translation of "ideal" as "ideological," --- as if he were ashamed of Warburg's somewhat naive reference to the transcendental tendencies of the Italian renaissance --- and of "pathos" as "pagan histrionics," as if an American readership would necessarily stumble over this technical term from Aristotle's Poetics.

Rating:
Summary: Translators who love too much
Review: Translating is always, as they say, a labor of love, and yet the eyes of lovers are famous for falsifying their beloved. While we cannot accuse Britt's long awaited and long needed translation of Warburg into English of neglect, unfortunately the very care and attentiveness that he lavishes on the text, and his often overwrought attempt to get at its original meaning, results in almost grotesque distortions, as if, worried about how his beloved might appear under the gaze of his contemporaries, he feels the need to mask his beloved's true virtues with invented conceits. Two examples will suffice: the translation of "ideal" as "ideological," --- as if he were ashamed of Warburg's somewhat naive reference to the transcendental tendencies of the Italian renaissance --- and of "pathos" as "pagan histrionics," as if an American readership would necessarily stumble over this technical term from Aristotle's Poetics.