AK - Varia

1999

AK -- Varia

Les livres de l'Enfer: bibliographie critique des ouvrages érotiques dans leurs différentes éditions du XVIe siècle à nos jours [The Books of the "Enfer:" Critical Bibliography of Erotic Works in their Different Editions from the Sixteenth Century to the Present]. Ed. Pascal Pia. New and enlarged ed. Paris: Fayard, 1998. 887 p. ISBN 2-213-60189-5: FF 290.00 [99-1/4-028] The first, two-volume, edition (1978) of this work replaced the earlier "classic" catalog of books with predominantly erotic contents secreted away in the so-called "Enfer" of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (L'Enfer de la Bibliothèque Nationale, ed. Guillaume Apollinaire, Fernan Fleuret, Louis Perceau, 1913). This and the British Library's Private Case listing of erotica (The Private Case: An Annotated Bibliography of the Private Case Erotica Collection in the British (Museum) Library, ed. Patrick J. Kearney, 1981) have served as reliable catalogs with a bibliographic function, different from other relevant bibliographies in that these two have been compiled using works in hand. All the more welcome is the second, expanded (and more affordable) edition, which its compiler, the bohemian journalist and man of letters Pascal Pia (1913-1979), had conceived of before his death. The second edition, unfortunately, repeats unchanged the first edition's long essay about the history of the collection, although its theses have been corrected in an article by Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer, "L'Enfer vu d'ici" (Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale 14/1984, p. 22-41).

The catalog, arranged alphabetically by title, contains all the entries from the first edition, with revisions especially to some of the already extensive annotations, and with 200 new titles added. Both kinds of supplements are typographically marked, and are based in large part on the catalogs of two 1977 auctions: the Lyon auction of the Michel Simon collection and the Paris auction of novelist Roger Peyrefitte's important collection.

The appendix contains the updated location catalog of the "Enfer" in call-number order, including titles transferred from there to other collections. The 1913 catalog ended with number 930; the latest catalog ends with number 1,730. These additional 800 titles include older materials as well as more recent works of pornography. The index lists the names of authors and other persons, such as illustrators, publishers, and printers. [sh/ga]

Literaturen der Welt in deutscher ÜbersetzungLiteraturen der Welt in deutscher Übersetzung: eine chronologische Bibliographie [Literatures of the World in German Translation: A Chronological Bibliography]. Wolfgang Rössig. Stuttgart; Weimar: Metzler, 1997. 672 p. 30 cm. (Repertorien zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 19) ISBN 3-476-00961-0: DM 298.00 [99-1/4-042] This bibliography covers works from the past six centuries and offers, in manageable form and in one volume, "an overview of no fewer than 16,500 literary works translated into German since the invention of book-printing." Despite the large number of entries, this work is a "selective" bibliography, with unavoidable "preferences and disadvantages." This subjectivity is not as regrettable as is the fact that the titles were chosen secondarily from library catalogs and other bibliographic databases. Only seldom were the works personally examined. The main part of the bibliography is a "chronological index" in which the translated works are arranged by century, then subarranged by year of publication and then by author. Often the date of first publication is lacking, and titles similarly may contain inaccuracies, for example in no. 1872, Goethe's translation of Alessandro Manzoni's famous ode "Il cinque maggio" (not "Il giorno quinto di maggio").

This method of title selection results in "hidden" translations being missed. For example, one looks in vain for the translation of Dante by Johann Nikolaus Meinhard (in his Versuche über den Charakter und die Werke der besten italienischen Dichter, vol. 1, 1763) that Heinrich Wilhelm Gerstenberg used in his drama Ugolino (1768). Matthias Claudius was a fruitful translator, especially from French. His translation of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin's Des erreurs et de la verité (1782) is included, but three other translations that had an even more noticeable effect on later German works are not. There are numerous other similar omissions, which serve to indicate how close the bibliographer's rightfully subjective selection comes to pure arbitrariness.

The indexes, which comprise the second part of the work, consist of five sections: authors, authors by language, original titles (alphabetically arranged), translated titles (arranged by language and then alphabetically by title), and translators. A number of entries have been missorted by the computer and should have been corrected in the proofreading process. Although the introduction emphasizes the important and often underappreciated role of the translator as a key transmitter of world literature, forenames of translators, both in the main part and in the index, are ignominiously ignored, further contributing to what in the introduction was lamented as a "shadow existence." [gr/ga]

Übersetzte Literatur in deutschsprachigen Anthologien: eine Bibliographie [Translated Literature in German Anthologies: A Bibliography]. Ed. Helga Eßmann and Fritz Paul. Stuttgart: Hiersemann. 28 cm. (Hiersemanns bibliographische Handbücher, 13) ISBN 3-7772-9719-4 (complete set) [99-1/4-044]

Part 1. Anthologien mit Dichtungen aus aller Welt [Anthologies of Literature from Around the World]. Ed. Helga Eßmann and Heike Leupold. 1997. xix, 455 p. ISBN: 3-7772-9720-8: DM 195.00

A product of the University of Göttingen's "Special Research Project" on literary translation, this multivolume bibliography aims to convince readers that, even in the late twentieth century, anthologies of translations still play an essential role in the transmission of (particularly foreign) literature, but one that has been neglected in scholarly work and bibliography. The fruits of this work are reflected in the richness of the authors and texts represented, so that--as the editors state--"anthologies and series [can be] a paradigm of the history of literary translation in the German-speaking world."

The bibliography is intended to serve the study of the reception of individual foreign authors and works in the German-speaking regions. The anthologies of translations in volume 1 range from collections of nineteenth-century lyric poetry to more recent collections that compare original and translated texts from all literary areas, including journalism, biography, and philosophy, to the current multimedia CD-ROMs. Four types of anthologies are included (without, however, a claim to thoroughness): German-language anthologies, that may also be bi- or trilingual; anthologies of poetic verse; selections from at least three different literatures in translation; and anthologies with at least twenty percent of their content devoted to foreign literature in translation.

Published between 1732 and 1995, the 207 anthologies covered in the volume were selected mainly from the collections of libraries in the German-speaking countries and were personally examined. They are arranged alphabetically by the first-named editor or translator, or by the first substantial word in the name of the institution listed as corporate author. The bibliography contains indexes of authors (ca. 6,800 named, numerous anonymous), translators, languages, places and names of publishers, and subject headings for the topics covered in the anthologies. Foreign-language authors are listed with their birth- and death-dates and the names of their translators. German language authors who appear in the mixed anthologies are also included (without dates). Entries for translators include the original authors whose works they translated.

An extensive number of languages are represented, with French ranking first, followed by English and Italian. The subject index seems meager, with the thirty-six specific headings including twenty listing no more than two works. Despite some limitations, this bibliography seems to have been carefully compiled. It offers rich statistical material for the scholarship of literature in German translation and its reception in the German-speaking countries.

Part 2 of the work, Anthologien mit russischen Dichtungen [Anthologies of Russian Works], was unavailable for review. [gr/ga]

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