80 years ago today, on 18 July 1936, Spanish generals, later led by Francisco Franco, staged an uprising . By 1 April 1939 what became the Spanish Civil War was over and Franco made a triumphal entry into Madrid. Three years of war and 40 years of dictatorship (the Generalísimo finally died on 20 November 1975) turned Spain from what had been a progressive republic with a programme of mass literacy and the most liberal divorce laws in Europe to a pseudo-medieval dictatorship, priest-ridden, vindictive and subject to famine.

Regressive regimes often look back into history to legitimise themselves, and Franco’s was no exception. The regime’s appropriation of three historical symbols is described below:

1. Yugo y flechas

Francoism – motto [España] ‘Una, grande, libre’ – looked back with nostalgia to the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs, who united Castile and Aragon by marriage in 1469 and won Granada from the Moors in 1492. What better emblem for the new-old Spain than the Yugo y flechas, Yoke and arrows?

 Coat of arms with the yoke and arrows motif from a 16th-century Rationale divinorum officiorum (Granada, 1504) 1474.dd.9.

The Gordian knot, attached to a broken cord, signifying that the end justified the means, was juxtaposed with the arrows bound together, a version of the Roman fasces (unity is strength).

It also represented the initials Y (Yoke-Yugo-Ysabel) and F (Arrows-Flechas-Fernando).

Inscribed half-title page of Candido G.Ortiz de Villajos, De Sevilla a Madrid: ruta libertadora de la columna Castejón (Granada, 1937) 9043.ff.30, showing the yoke and arrows.

The appeal to the political strongman of the 20th century is obvious.

After the Civil War, and when I first saw Madrid in 1975, it was everywhere – banknotes, public buildings, etc. It was added to the flag.

Spanish postcard from the 1970s showing the arms of different cities surrounding the national arms with yoke and arrows

A law of 2007  called for the removal of Francoist insignia.

2. El Cid

There’s the Cid of history, the Cid of literature and the Cid of Franco.

The historical Cid, Rodrigo [Ruy] Díaz de Vivar (ca. 1043-1099),won Valencia from the Moors. He was probably neither more or less cruel than any other medieval knight.

His deeds are sung in the Cantar de Mio Cid (circa 1207). Here he’s praised for his moderation. His motivation is political rather than ideological: he’s no culture hero fighting for Spanish Christian values against the Moor: Moors and Christians are both his allies and his enemies.

Title-page of Cronica del muy esforçado cauallero el Cid ruy diaz campeador ([Seville], 1541). C.39.g.5

The domestic element is strong in the Cantar: The Cid takes revenge on his son-in-law princes who batter his daughters, and this was extended by Guillén de Castro (and hence Corneille in Le Cid, who focus on his marriage.

 Statue of The Cid by Cristóbal González Quesada in Burgos, unveiled by Franco in 1955. (Picture by ElCaminodeSantiago09 2006 via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0)

Quite a benevolent figure. But by 1939 he has regressed and has become as primitive as Franco himself, a symbol of a unified Christian Spain fighting the Crusade, which was what the Francoists called the Civil War.

 

 
Title page, with the date 1939 designated ‘year of victory’ and dedication to Franco – ‘il Caudillo – in Darío Fernández Flórez, Dos claves históricas: Mío Cid y Roldán (Madrid, 1939) 11864.b.35.

3. Isabel the Catholic

She and Fernando of Aragon married in 1469: Castile and Aragon were united in person but were separate kingdoms with their own laws until 1715.

Theirs was a magnificent court, full of latter-day troubadours and Latin humanists and decorated with Flemish primitives. And obviously their reign founded various institutions of the modern state: they patronised the introduction of printing, exempting imported books from tax in 1477 ‘Because foreign and Spanish merchants have recently brought in many good books, which redound to universal benefit and the ennobling of our kingdom ...’.

And Nebrija dedicated the first Spanish grammar to Isabella.

 Dedication to Isabella on the first page of Antonio de Nebrija, Gramatica Castellana (Salamanca, 1492) IA.52814.

It’s only fair to point out that the Catholic Monarchs were not wholly benevolent or modern in outlook: they also ordered the expulsion of the Jews  in 1492.

By 1939 the Queen had regressed. Franco made her the model of the 20th-century Catholic wife and mother, ready to make every sacrifice for church and state: she was said to have sold or pawned her jewels to finance the voyages of Columbus, and swore not to change her chemise until Granada was delivered from the Moor. In 1958 he tried to have her canonised.

César Silió Cortés, Isabel la Católica, fundadora de España (Valladolid, 1938) 10635.e.16

This life of the Queen draws parallels between the contemporary situation in Spain and her reign. For César Silió Cortés, Isabel’s reign saw 

the transformation worked in Spain as an already decadent age was being replaced by a new one, with its roots in the past [...] made gay with plumes of youthful growth, swelling with plans of growth and expansion. [...]

His book had been begun with the intention of studying these great changes – a revolution from above – in tranquility, but

the fates have wished it to be written amid the clamour and horrors of another revolution undertaken by the canaille of the river beds, in which Spain continues to be bled dry as the author writes these lines and whose significance will be given to us by the future [...]

Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic Studies

On 14 July 1816, the 17th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, a son was born to Anne-Louise Madeleine de Gercy, the wife of Count Louis de Gobineau, an officer of the Royal Guard who had followed Louis XVIII into exile during the Hundred Days of Napoleon’s return the previous year. When young Arthur was 11, his mother decamped with her three children and a lover to Germany and then to Switzerland, which gave the boy the advantage of 18 months at the Collège de Bienne. His prospects were compromised by the family’s Legitimist sympathies and the lack of mathematical knowledge which barred him from a military career, but his Germanic education was to lay the foundations for a life’s work based on orientalism and organicism.

Portrait of Gobineau from his The Golden Flower (New York and London, 1924) 10633.d.36.

In October 1835, having failed the entrance examination for Saint-Cyr, Gobineau landed with 50 francs in his pocket on the Paris doorstep of his wealthy and eccentric uncle Thibault-Joseph, who was obsessed with the restoration of the legitimate kings of France. After three weeks of complete neglect, his nephew threatened to commit suicide on the spot, at which the elderly adventurer deigned to pay him some attention. However, he provided little practical help, and Gobineau had to rely on letters of introduction to Sainte-Beuve and other literati while he rented a garret and attempted to launch his literary career. By 1846 he had succeeded enough to marry, but it was not until 1849 that he secured a post as first secretary of the French Legation in Berne through the good offices of his mentor Alexis de Tocqueville, now minister of foreign affairs.

Although Gobineau’s 30-year diplomatic career took him all over the world, with postings to Greece, Switzerland, Germany, Newfoundland, Sweden and Brazil, he was temperamentally unsuited to the profession. It did, however, allow him to travel twice to Persia, where he camped among Bedouins and enjoyed the splendours of life as the head of the French Legation in Teheran in 1855-58. A second appointment as plenipotentiary (1862-63) enabled him to develop his knowledge of Persian and Arabic, peruse rare manuscripts, and compose his Traité des écritures cuneiforms (Paris, 1864; 7702.f.13) as well as Les Religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale (Paris, 1865; 2217.d.3). Aghast at the prospect of being posted to the United States, which he abhorred because of its cruel treatment of Native Americans and black people, and its uniform mass culture based on the uncritical worship of technology and democracy, he was relieved to be appointed to Athens instead in 1865. After bitter disillusionment at the conduct of Germany in 1870-71, he was delighted to become plenipotentiary in Stockholm in 1872, feeling a profound affinity with the lands from which he believed his Norman forebears had originated.

Title-page of Histoire d’Ottar Jarl, pirate norvégien (Paris, 1879; 10761.e.27), in which Gobineau describes a (fanciful) Viking-Norman descent for his family.

Not surprisingly, his nomadic existence took its toll on family life, and by 1876 resulted in a complete break with his wife and two daughters. His declining years, in which his health suffered as a result of recurrent fevers contracted in Brazil, were mitigated by his relationship with Mathilde de La Tour, an Italian diplomat’s wife, and literary and intellectual friendships such as that with Richard Wagner, whom he first met in Rome in 1876 and who invited him to stay at Bayreuth.

Had Gobineau confined himself to writing fiction, travel memoirs and works of scholarship, he would probably be remembered nowadays as little more than a minor literary figure. However, a book which he published in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution, Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (‘Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races’), secured him a far more notorious reputation.

 Title-page of the first volume of Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Paris, 1853). 10006.dd.14 (and available online)

Although the Essai caused Gobineau’s contemporaries to prevent his election to the Académie française, this was not on the grounds of racism but of scientifically unconvincing theories and anti-Christian determinism. Ironically, in view of the author’s detestation of the United States, it was first published in English in Philadelphia in 1856 (10006.d.30). A German translation (12901.cc.9) appeared in the same year, and Wagner  was sufficiently interested in Gobineau’s ideas to collaborate with him on an article which appeared in the Bayreuther Blätter (P.P.1943.b.) for May-June 1881.

Gobineau’s division of the human species into three major groupings, white, yellow and black, claiming to demonstrate that ‘history springs only from contact with the white races’ and distinguishing the ‘Aryan’ race as the pinnacle of human development and the basis of all European aristocracies, certainly exerted a sinister influence on the pernicious racial ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet a close reading suggests that the Nazi thinkers who espoused his theories had not  read them in depth: Gobineau had a high regard for the cultural and intellectual achievements of Judaism, and nothing but condemnation for discrimination and inhumanity proceeding from racism. Indeed, Wagner’s son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a far more direct precursor of National Socialist theories, was dismissive of Gobineau as a paranoid unrealistic dreamer, whose writings were irrelevant to Chamberlain’s own vision of the future. Moreover, the unwieldy treatise was little read in Germany until the 1890s, when Gobineau, who had died in Turin in 1882, was unable to defend his ‘divination’ of the distant future against those who seized upon and distorted his ideas. He emphasized the dangers of expansionism which could only lead to its own destruction, and in this, at least, he was a true prophet of the disasters to come.

It is a final irony that a man with a lifelong distrust of bourgeois monarchy, indiscriminate democracy and the forces of revolution should have been born on the day still celebrated as that on which the French Revolution and the cause of national democracy in France burst upon the world.

Susan Halstead Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement

The south-eastern countries of the Balkans were in focus of Balkan Day II: A Rich Heritage of Stories, a public event held at the British Library on 24 June 2016.

The Balkans is home to a great number of fascinating stories and traditions, many of which remain untold in English. This event brought together some of the leading contemporary academics, writers and translators who talked about writing and creating in this fertile cultural space.

The event featured a range of authors, translators, publishers and others speaking on various topics.  Artist Ian Long captured the speakers in the course of the day, and some of his portraits are reproduced below. You can also hear some of the talks from the event here.

In the first two keynote speeches, Kapka Kassabova's website (below) spoke on the theme Borderland: Notes from a Journey to Europes Last Frontier, where Bulgaria and Turkey Meet, and Robert Elsie described The Chaotic Course of Albanian Literature.

 In a session chaired by poet and editor Fiona Sampson, Ioana Parvulescu and Alek Popov spoke on the theme of Authors as Cultural Ambassadors: How does the history and mythology of the homeland influence the stories we tell today?

Ioana Parvulescu

A panel of translators - John Hodgson, Christopher Buxton, Stephen Watts and Mevlut Ceylan, with Christina Pribichevich Zoric in the chair - reflected on the question ‘Should translators of ‘small languages’ aim to be invisible or consider themselves a second author?’ in a session entitled Bringing the Balkans Westward. 

John Hodgson 

Christopher Buxton

Christina Pribichevich Zoric

The event ended with a screening of the film Balkan Spirit, followed by a discussion with its director Hermann Vaske.

Ian Long

Ian Long is a writer and graphic artist. He is keen to take drawing out into the world and see what it can do, in the widest possible variety of situations.

 

Many people will have seen the sadly familiar images of some English football fans engaging in antisocial behaviour in the streets of French towns during Euro 2016. The reputation of the English for violent pastimes and delight in disorder has a long pedigree. Here’s a Swiss view from the last decade of the 17th century.

Béat Louis de Muralt (1665-1749), the scion of a patrician family from Berne, visited England in 1694. His Lettres sur les Anglois (translated into English in 1726 as Letters describing the character and customs of the English… nation, 10106.ee.6 ), consisting of six letters to an unnamed Swiss correspondent, were written during this visit, but not published until 1725.

Titlepage of Béat Louis de Muralt, Lettres sur les Anglois et les François et sur les voiages … (Cologne, 1725). 792.c.3 (also available online)

A friendly, though not uncritical observer, Muralt, in common with other foreign visitors, comments adversely on the ferocious pastimes of the common people such as throwing at cocks, watching men or animals fight, and playing football in the streets:

Quelquefois il [le Peuple] se divertit de maniere incommode, & où il y a de l’insolence mêlée; comme lors qu’il pousse le Balon à coup de pieds par les ruës; & se plait à casser les Vitres des Maisons  & les Glaces des Carrosses qu’il rencontre sur son chemin… (Lettres sur les Anglois, pp. 44-5)

There’s another [diversion], very troublesome and insolent; this is Foot-ball, where they take a great deal of Pleasure in breaking Windows, and Coach Glasses if they meet any… (Letters describing the character and customs..., p. 38)

 

A small, but seemingly aggressive, 18th-century football game in the market place at Barnet. Reproduced in Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700-1850 (Cambridge, 1973) X.529/44470.

Teresa Vernon, Lead Curator, Romance Collections

When Zayn Malik dyed his hair grey, I’m reliably informed, sales of grey hair dye rocketed.

Of course, it was all the rage in the 18th century to have grey hair or wigs, as we see in this portrait of Marie Antoinette:

Portrait of Marie Antoniette by François-Hubert Drouais (1781). Image from Wikimedia Commons 

In order to cool down this fashion fervour, let us turn to Rabbi Santob de Carrión (more properly Shem Tov), active in Castile in the reigns of Alfonso XI and Pedro the Cruel. His most famous work in Spanish (he also wrote in Hebrew) is the Proverbios morales, which typically takes an idiosyncratic view of the world.

 
One curiosity of the transmission history of Santob’s work is that it is preserved in Latin script and in Hebrew script. Image from Santob de Carrión, Proverbios Morales. Edited with an introduction by Ig. González Llubera. (Cambridge, 1947). 11453.d.11.

Santob’s contribution to the grey debate runs:

Las mis cañas teñilas,
Non por las aborresçer,
Nin por desdesyrlas,
Nin mancebo paresçer,
Mas con miedo sobejo
De omnes, que buscarian
En my seso de viejo,
E non lo fallarian

[I dyed my hair black
Not to hide my age,
But to stop men thinking
My hair made me a sage.]

Barry Taylor, Curator Romance studies

Reference:

Barry Taylor, ‘Sem Tob de Carrión, Proverbios morales’, in Diccionario filológico de la literatura medieval española: textos y transmisión, ed. Carlos Alvar and José Manuel Lucía Megías, Nueva Biblioteca de Erudición y Crítica, 21 (Madrid, 2002), pp. 941-44. YA.2003.b.1351

 

For an artist to attract the attention of a contemporary novelist may not always be an advantage. When, for example, Paul Cézanne opened his friend Emile Zola’s new novel L’Oeuvre and found himself portrayed as the unsuccessful painter Claude Lantier, he politely returned the package to its author and never spoke to him again.

Odilon Redon in 1914, from André Mellerio, Odilon Redon: peintre dessinateur et graveur (Paris, 1923) 7860.c.22

Odilon Redon was more fortunate. In a sense, he began his artistic career as a failure; despite the early promise which he showed in drawing, his father decreed that he should train as an architect at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He showed little enthusiasm for this and, having failed the entrance examination, turned to sculpture, lithography and etching until, in the summer of 1870, he joined up on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. As with Goya, the horrors which he witnessed made a lasting impact on his work, and over the next few years he produced a series of visionary charcoal drawings and lithographs in unrelieved black, which he described as his noirs. Not surprisingly, he was slow to win critical acclaim, and might have remained as obscure as his works until, in 1884, a novel appeared which brought them to a wider public.

‘Hommage à Goya’, images by Redon, from André Mellerio, Odilon Redon (Paris, 1913) Ac.4554/3

In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, the decadent aristocrat Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes possesses a collection of Redon’s works, ‘covering nearly every panel in the vestibule’, framed in unpainted pearwood rimmed with gold and featuring ‘the most fantastic of visions…studies of bleak and arid landscapes…creating a new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium’. In the midst of these horrors, suggesting the ‘terrifying or hallucinating effects’ of Edgar Allan Poe, there hangs an image of Melancholy before which he meditates for hours to dissipate his gloom as he admires the contrast between its ‘liquid green and pale gold’ and ‘the unbroken black of all these charcoal drawings and etchings’ (translation by Robert Baldick; Harmondsworth, 1959; W.P.513/86a).

The grotesque figures with their wild eyes and distorted bodies recall the ‘feverish nights and frightful nightmares’ which he had experienced during a childhood attack of typhoid fever, and would be readily identifiable to anyone who had seen Redon’s noirs. The spread of his reputation in literary circles as a result of Huysmans’s novel led to commissions and collaborations with other authors, including the Belgian Symbolist poet Iwan Gilkin. The British Library possesses a copy of the limited first edition of La Damnation de l’artiste, with a frontispiece featuring just such a skeletal creature, and also one of his Ténèbres, also published in a limited edition of 150 copies. Here, the frontispiece shows a mysterious winged being carrying a vessel in her hands; despite her beauty, the leathery bat-like nature of her wings has a devilish rather than an angelic quality.

Frontispiece from the first edition of Iwan Gilkin La Damnation de l’artiste (Brussels, 1890) 11482.1.25

Frontispiece from Iwan Gilkin, Ténèbres (Brussels, 1893) 11482.k.22.

Redon also provided seven illustrations for Edmond Picard’s monodrama Le juré and an equally sinister frontispiece for André Mellerio’s study Le Mouvement idéaliste en peinture, which contains a section on Redon himself as well as others on Gauguin, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec and lesser-known figures such as Louis Anquetin and Paul Sérusier. Mellerio was an author and art critic who became a close friend of Redon after their meeting in 1889, as well as an advocate of Symbolism, and wrote a biography of him as well as the preface to the catalogue to an exhibition of his work in 1894 at the Galeries Durand-Ruel.

Frontispiece from Edmond Picard, Le juré (Brussels, 1887) 1871.c.9.

Frontispiece from  André Mellerio’ Le Mouvement idéaliste en peinture (Paris, 1896) 7585.n.3.

As he moved towards pastels and oils, abandoning noirs at the turn of the century, Redon’s interest in Hinduism and Buddhism and his absorption of Japanese influences eased his transition to abstract painting and led to growing acclaim and popularity, including the Légion d’Honneur (1903) and commissions from Baron Robert de Domecy for portraits of his wife and daughter and 17 panels for the family’s Château de Domecy-sur-Vault  in Burgundy. By the time of the artist’s death in 1916 his international reputation was secure, as was proved by the New York Armory Show of 1913, where he was accorded the largest single representation.

Cover of Mellerio’s Odilon Redon: peintre dessinateur et graveur

Mellerio’s final tribute to his friend was Odilon Redon: peintre dessinateur et graveur, a masterly survey of his entire work which pays special tribute to his revival of the technique of lithography at a time when it had fallen into a state of stagnation, and notes the psychological complexity which he achieves through the interplay of black and white, arrangements of lines and the play of light. Suffering and sublimity, the uncanny and the luminous, all blended to create what Mellerio termed the ‘suggestive art’ of a man who, at the start of his career, described himself as a ‘peintre symphoniste’, subtly exploring the deepest layers of the subconscious. It is tempting to see, in his darkest visions of the human condition, a presentiment of the carnage which was unleashed just a few days before his death on 6 July 1916.

Susan Halstead, Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement

2016 marks the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia, a book which gave a new word to the English language. But it was not until 35 years after that first publication that an English-language edition of the book actually appeared, also the first edition to be published in England. The early printing and publishing (and linguistic) history of Utopia is very much a continental one.

The Island of Utopia, from the first edition of the book (Louvain, 1516) British Library C.27.b.30.

More started writing Utopia in 1515 while in Antwerp as part of a diplomatic mission to Flanders to negotiate commercial treaties. When the negotiations stalled, he used his time there to renew his acquaintance with the Dutch humanist Erasmus and make contact with other scholars in his circle, including Pieter Gillis, who appears as a character in Utopia and to whom the book is dedicated. The work grew in part from their discussions, and More wrote it not in English but in Latin, the international language of scholarship. After finishing the manuscript back in London, he sent it to Erasmus, asking him to find a printer. Erasmus sent it to Dirk Martens, then working in Louvain, who printed the first edition. 

Title page of the first edition of Utopia, with the Louvain imprint and Martens’ Latinised name (‘Theodoricus Martinus’).

A small flurry of editions followed the first one, all in Latin, and all from continental printers: Gilles de Gourmont (Paris, 1517; C.65.e.1.), Johannes Froben (Basel, March 1518; G.2398.(1.), and November 1518; C.67.d.8.; both in editions with More’s Epigrams), and Paolo Giunta (Florence, 1519; in an edition of Lucian’s works).

 

Johannes Froben’s March 1518 printing of Utopia, with woodcuts by Ambrosius Holbein (G.2398.(1.)). The image here shows More and Pieter Gillis (‘Petrus Aegidius’) with the fictional Raphael Hythlodaeus who describes the Island of Utopia

The first vernacular edition of Utopia was in German, printed again in Basel, by Johann Bebel, in 1524. After this the work apparently went out of fashion for over two decades, with no new editions in any language appearing until an Italian translation was printed in Venice in 1548. In the same year the first Latin edition since 1519 appeared in Louvain (522.b.22).

Above: The first German edition of Utopia (Basel, 1524). 714.b.38.

Below: The first Italian edition (Venice, 1548) 714.b.16.(1.)

 

Interest in More’s work was clearly growing again: in 1550 a French translation appeared from the press of Charles L’Anglier in Paris, and in 1551 Utopia at last appeared its author’s native land and language, in an English translation by Ralph Robinson published by Abraham Vele. These translations and other early editions of Utopia can all be seen in the current display ‘Visions of Utopia’ in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures of the British Library Gallery.

The early printing history of Utopia reminds us that an international book trade is nothing new (and of course that English printing goes back to William Caxton’s first partnerships in Flanders: the first book printed in the English language came out of Bruges). It is also a reminder that international networks of scholars and writers were as alive and fruitful in the 16th century as they are today.

Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Studies

‘Her subject was Adolphe, a short novel about failure’. These words occur in Providence (London, 1982; British Library H.84/692), a novel which might possibly be described in the same terms, by the British novelist Anita Brookner, who died in March 2016, shortly before the bicentenary of the publication of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe in June 1816.

One of our recent posts noted the Russian dramatist Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s struggle to convince the censor that the figure of a tyrannical mother-in-law in his play The Storm did not represent Nicholas I. When Adolphe first appeared, Constant found himself embroiled in similar efforts to persuade his readers that he had not written a roman à clef based on his own turbulent affair with Germaine de Staël. The parallels were so close that his protestations in the press went largely disregarded.

  Constant’s letter about the interpretation of Adolphe, sent to various newspapers (here as printed in the London Courier of 25 June 1816)

The figure of Adolphe himself – the cultured, privileged and melancholy son of a government minister – resembles Constant both in personality and in his troubled relationship with his father, also a government minister. His mother had died within days of his birth, and at the age of four the young Benjamin was removed from his grandmother’s care and placed in that of a hated governess, whom his father secretly married, and a succession of singularly unpleasant tutors. His studies continued at the universities of Erlangen and Edinburgh, and were followed by an appointment in 1788 as Kammerjunker (Gentleman of the Chamber) to the Duke of Brunswick.

Infuriated by the stultifying pettiness of court life and his wife Minna’s equally unsympathetic attitude to his intellectual pursuits, Constant separated from her in 1793 and left Brunswick the following year, when he also met Madame de Staël. By 1795, having overcome her initial resistance, he established one of Paris’s most brilliant salons with her. Its members sought to establish a government based on the moderate and rational principles which represented the approach of the Revolution’s most able thinkers, but with Napoleon’s coup d’état of November 1799 and Constant’s election to the Tribunal he had little emotional energy left to deal with Germaine’s increasingly possessive and unbalanced behaviour and the melodramatic scenes which ensued when he hinted that the relationship had run its course. After a visit with her to Germany in 1803 where they met Goethe, Schiller and Wieland, he renewed his relationship with Charlotte von Hardenberg, whom he later married after some years of tacking back and forth between ‘l’homme-femme’ Germaine and the calm and gentle Charlotte.

Portrait of Constant, reproduced in Goethe und seine Welt ... herausgegeben von Hans Wahl und Anton Kippenberg (Leipzig, 1932) X.981/11934.

It was in 1806, the year when he and Charlotte began their affair, that Constant started work on Adolphe. His marriage in 1809 was followed by a final break with Madame de Staël in 1811, and in 1815, during Napoleon’s ‘hundred days’ before the final defeat at Waterloo, Constant accepted a post as his adviser. Following the fall of the Emperor, Constant spent several months in England (January to July 1816), where he gave readings of Adolphe at London salons. He was probably impelled by his lack of funds to publish the novel, which came out in London and Paris in June, with a framing correspondence between the ‘finder’ of the manuscript and its publisher to diminish the danger of readers identifying the author with Adolphe and Madame de Staël with the heroine, Ellénore. On his return to Paris, he was elected to the French parliament in 1819 and, until his death in 1830, enjoyed a brilliant political career supporting liberal causes such as Greek independence and the abolition of slavery.

Title-page of the first edition of Adolphe (London; Paris, 1816) C.57.a.47.]

For a comparatively short text (228 pages in the first edition ), the novel has inspired considerable critical discussion. Adolphe, aged 22 and having recently graduated from Göttingen, joins the court of an enlightened German prince and becomes involved with the Polish refugee Ellénore, ten years his senior and the mistress of the Comte de P***. Originally begun as an exercise in seduction, the relationship becomes a folie à deux which isolates them from society and threatens to ruin Adolphe’s career. Even after her break with the Comte and abandonment of her two children, the emotional pressure is only increased by Adolphe’s awareness of the sacrifices which Ellénore has made for him and the intransigence of his father, who drives her from his home town. Although they find a refuge on Ellénore’s restored Polish estate, a friend of Adolphe’s father coerces him into abandoning her in the interests of his career, and the shock of discovering Adolphe’s letter promising to do so causes a shock which leads to her fatal illness. In the aftermath of Ellénore’s death Adolphe remains in a state of almost Existentialist despair: ‘j’étais libre en effet; je n’étais plus aimé: j’étais étranger pour tout le monde’, an ‘outsider ‘ as isolated and alienated as Camus’s Meursault. Having longed for his lost freedom, he now regrets the claims and ties (liens) which had previously seemed so irksome to him.

The critic Dennis Wood in his study of Adolphe (Cambridge, 1987; YC.1988.a.7619) describes the novel as ‘the paradox of a German Novelle written in French’, with strong links to the 17th-century French moraliste tradition of La Rochefoucauld and the roman d’analyse represented by Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves. Poised on the shift of consciousness between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it recalls the perceptive comment which Anita Brookner, herself an expert on Romantic art, offers in her character Kitty Maule’s tutorial on Adolphe: ‘for the Romantic, the power of reason no longer operates. Or rather, it operates, but it cannot bring about change’.

Susan Halstead, Content Specialist (Humanities & Social Sciences), Research Engagement

On Friday 10 June, the British Library welcomed a host of expert speakers to discuss the global understanding of our ‘national’ poet. And it turns out Shakespeare is the poet of many nations. It would be impossible to do justice to the richness of the presentations in a blog post, yet all of our panels shared the fundamental idea that Shakespeare’s writing is at the heart of every culture. Adaptations and translations are not so much secondary to the original but offer a radically different entry into, and a potentially much more direct access to, a Shakespeare play that will always signify something particular to different nations in different social and temporal contexts.

Prof. Jerzy Limon (photo below) opened proceedings with a view into the establishment of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre, designed by Renato Rizzi, at once a huge black modernist edifice in stark contrast to the red brick Northern European architecture (its 90 tonne retractable roof opens fully in 3 minutes), and a gothic castle-like structure, alluding to the city’s mediaeval Bazylika Mariacka.  We saw videos of the theatre’s opening ceremony and of varied productions, showing how the space can be adapted to both traditional Elizabethan stage design and experimental avant-garde interpretations.

Stuart Gillespie and Graham Holderness offered us insights into the sources and settings of Shakespeare’s plays. Dr Gillespie explained how French and Italian were the languages of culture and how European (mainly Italian) sources – epics, essays (Montaigne’s predominantly), romances and novellas – were in the atmosphere around Shakespeare’s time and were inevitably absorbed and adapted in his works. Professor Holderness spoke of the ‘reciprocal relationship’ between Shakespeare and Venice and how the playwright had already created much of the myth around the city before it was (re-)created in 19th and 20th century literature.

The British Library’s Julian Harrison gave us a glimpse of the ‘Our Shakespeare’ exhibition currently at the Library of Birmingham, home to the second largest Shakespeare collection in the world. The collection was resurrected after a fire destroyed the old library building in 1879 and the collection was soon expanded thanks to donations from around the world. Julian highlighted the beautifully produced photo album of German Shakespeare scholars (1878), the photo album donated by Laurence Olivier, and a Russian edition of Romeo and Juliet presented by a Soviet delegation at the height of the Cold War. Julian also managed to show the importance of Warwickshire to the bard, just before the study day moved to more tropical climes.

Philip Crispin opened the afternoon’s proceedings with a rousing presentation on Une tempête (‘A Tempest’). In this ‘adaptation for a black theatre’, Aimé Césaire, one of the founders of négritude, recasts Ariel as a mulatto slave and Caliban as an articulate black slave in revolt, reflecting the racial politics of his native Martinique. Michael Walling, Artistic Director of intercultural, multimedia theatre company Border Crossings, presented an insider perspective of staging Shakespeare in India, and translating and staging Dev Virahsawmy’s Toufann, a Mauritian adaptation of The Tempest, in London. The linguistic choices made by both writer and translator in the case of Toufann were fascinating: the play is written in Mauritian creole, but the title is in Hindi – Prospero is from the dominant Indian diaspora community in Mauritius, and seeks to impose this new word into the play. Philip and Michael showed how these two postcolonial adaptations of The Tempest epitomise translation as creative interpretation.

Charles  Forsdick introducing Philip Crispin and Michael Walling (Photo by Ben  Schofield)

From considering just three performances, Paul Prescott encouraged us to look at hundreds in his whirlwind road trip presentation across the United States. The phenomenon of the Shakespeare festival was plain to see in the sheer spread and eclectic formats of these festivals. The bard’s work is not just made for the Globe Theatre but is at home anywhere and perhaps more at home in the small and distant communities of the American West. The day’s underlying theme again: Shakespeare is accessible universally. The idea was explored further by Mark Burnett, who showed how a constant industry of Shakespeare adaptation in film across Europe and South America sees in the plays stories that apply to a vast array of national settings, from gypsy versions of Hamlet (Aleksandar Rajkovic, Serbia, 2007) and King Lear (Romani Kris – Cigánytörvény, Bence Gyöngyössy, Hungary, 1997), to a Brazilian Romeo and Juliet set in the favelas of Rio (Maré, Nosse Historia de Amor, Lucia Murat, Brazil, 1997).

The day concluded with a round table on the ‘cultural politics of European Shakespeare’. Aleksandra Sakowska talked about the long history of interaction between Poland and Shakespeare, a presentation which touched on the first black actor to play Othello in Britain, Ira Aldridge. Nicole Fayard drew our attention to Shakespeare’s relevance in modern French society from the Vichy regime to the Charlie Hebdo attacks, showing how even in the latter situation Shakespeare managed to force his way into public consciousness. Keith Gregor described how Shakespeare productions in Spain still far outnumber those of the Spanish Golden Age playwrights, and how, after Franco’s reign, Shakespeare began to be appropriated by Spain’s autonomous communities in overtly political avant-garde productions. Emily Oliver presented a view of Shakespeare around the time of German reunification, particularly through the challenging production of Hamlet/Machine in 1990, directed by Heiner Müller (photo above by Ben Schofield). Hamlet could be seen building and jumping over a wall on stage in a not-so-subtle allegory of the political context. Erica Sheen chaired the discussion that followed which situated Shakespeare as the most significant figure of international cultural exchange and at the heart of every nation’s self-expression. Shakespeare gives voice to political counter-currents and his work is continually adapted to inhabit alternative, minority, and simply ‘foreign’ positions.

 Final panel of the seminar. Photo by Ben Schofield

‘All the world is a stage’ begins Jacques’s monologue in As You Like It, and this study day left no doubt that will always be true for Shakespeare’s work.

This study day, organised by the European and Americas Collections department of the British Library, was supported by the AHRC ‘Translating Cultures’ Theme, the Polish Cultural Institute and the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library.

Pardaad Chamsaz, Collaborative Doctoral Student, British Library/University of Bristol

 

Speaking about the translator who introduced Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov to the English reading audience, Joseph Brodsky, once wrote: “The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.” On the other hand, there have been instances where a translation is said to be better than the original.

    Front cover of Ismail Kadare, The Wedding. Rendered into English by Ali Cungu. (Tirana, 1968). X.908/16616.

So, whose voice is the reader hearing when reading a novel, or a poem, in translation – the author’s or the translator’s? How faithful to the original should a translation be? To what degree should the translation be “adjusted” or “improved” to facilitate its reading by the target audience?

 Typescript. Front cover of  William B. Bland, The ghost at the wedding. Based on the novel “The wedding” by Ismail Kadare. (Ilford, 1969). X.950/13209.

These are questions that apply to literary translation from any language, of course, but they are especially relevant when translating from so-called smaller languages, where the context, references, and even style and rhythm may be alien to the foreign reading public.

Frontispiece. Arghezi’s self-portrait. From Tudor Arghezi, Flori de Mucigai. Cu un autoportret inedit. (Bucharest, 1931). RB.23.a.20598.

On 24 June, Balkan Day at the British Library, I will be chairing a panel of literary translators who have introduced the English-speaking world to some of the best writing that Southeastern Europe has to offer. We will be discussing their approaches to literary translation and whether they think of literary translation as craft or creation. And who better to tell us than Christopher Buxton, author of two novels and translator of numerous contemporary and classical Bulgarian novelists and poets; the Turkish poet Melvut Ceylan, who lives in London and has translated both Turkish poetry into English and English poetry into Turkish; John Hodgson, who has brought us, among others, the work of Ismail Kadare and is one of only a few translators to be working directly from Albanian into English; and the poet Stephen Watts, whose many translations of poetry include the work of the surrealist Romanian poet Gellu Naum and Tudor Arghezi.

 Frontispiece. Naum’s portrait by Victor Brauner. From Gellu Naum, Culoarul somnului. Cu un desen de Victor Brauner. (Bucharest, 1944). YA.2000.a.8782.

I know this is going to be a very lively discussion. How do I know? I’m a literary translator myself.

Christina Pribichevich Zorić, Former Chief of Conference and Language Services at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia