The The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance

Review by Anthony Adler for The The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance
Rating:
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.