Global translatio: The "invention" of comparative literature, Istanbul, 1933

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 29, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 253-281

  Apter, Emily ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 2942546026     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/374027     Document Type: Review

References (67)

1. Franco Moretti, "Conjectures on World Literature," New Left Review, n.s., 1 (Jan.-Feb. 2000): 68; hereafter abbreviated "CWL."
2. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J., 1953), p. 557.
3. Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p.8.
4. Said, "Humanism?" MLA Newsletter 31 (Fall 1999): 4.
5. Aamir Mufti, "Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture," Critical Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998): 103; hereafter abbreviated "AL"
6. The most complete account of Spitzer and Auerbach's Istanbul careers may be Geoffrey Green's Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer (Lincoln, Nebr., 1982). Green maintains that Istanbul was not a place of hardship for Spitzer. While there, he maintains, Spitzer "concentrated upon 'the inner form': with the 'brazen confidence' that comes from placing one's faith in Providence, he viewed his surroundings - despite their shortcomings - as being vitalized by a divine spirit" (p. 105).
7. Thomas R. Hart is one of the few to credit the influence of Istanbul and Turkish alphabetization on Auerbach's oeuvre. See Thomas R. Hart, "Literature as Language: Auerbach, Spitzer, Jakobson," in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford, Calif., 1996), esp. pp. 227-30. Azadé Seyhan is currently completing her essay "German Academic Exiles in Istanbul." It contains many points of intersection with my own critical account of Istanbul's forgotten place in literary history and theory. Seyhan is especially strong on links between the work of Istanbul exiles and the Frankfurt school emigres. She also elucidates Turkish language politics as they pertain to the politics of translation.
8. René Etiemble, The Crisis in Comparative Literature, trans. Herbert Weisinger and Georges Joyaux (East Lansing, Mich., 1966), p. 56.
9. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis, 1971), p. 171. Several recent publications attest to renewed interest in the Romance philological tradition prior to and during World War II.
10. See also Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Vom Leben und Sterben der grossen Romanisten: Karl Vossler, Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Werner Krauss (Munich, 2002),
11. and Peter Jehle, Werner Krauss und die Romanistik im NS-Staat (Hamburg, 1996).
12. For a fine review of Jehle's book, emphasizing the timeliness of reexamining the career of Werner Krauss, the "militant humanist" and Enlightenment scholar who joined the party in 1945 and emigrated east to become chair of the Romance Institute at Leipzig, see Darko Suvin, "Auerbach's Assistant," review of Werner Krauss und die Romanistik im NS-Staat, by Jehle, New Left Review15 (May-June 2002): 157-64.
13. See John Freccero, foreword to Leo Spitzer, Leo Spitzer: Representative Essays (Stanford, Calif., 1988), pp. xvi-xvii.
14. See Spitzer, Die Umschreibungen des Begriffes "Hunger" im Italienischen (Halle, 1921).
15. See Earl Jeffrey Richards, "La Conscience européenne chez Curtius et chez ses détracteurs," in Ernst Robert Curtius et l'idée d'Europe, ed. Jeanne Bem and André Guyaux (Paris, 1995), esp. pp. 260-61.
16. See Harry Levin, "Two Romanisten in America: Spitzer and Auerbach," Grounds for Comparison (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), pp. 112-13. Levin argues that Spitzer and Auerbach reacted in contrasting ways to "the lack of scholarly paraphernalia" in Istanbul. He casts the former's Wortbildungslehre or word-formation approach as "infra-scholarship" and the latter's "sociohistorical rather than strictly stylistic" approach as "para-scholarship" (p. 118).
17. Quoted in Karlheinz Barck, "Walter Benjamin and Erich Auerbach: Fragments of a Correspondence," trans. Anthony Reynolds, Diacritics 22 (Fall-Winter 1992):82.
18. Gumbrecht suggests that the Istanbul period was the culmination of a sense of intellectual melancholia already fully fledged in Auerbach's pre-exile professional life. Gumbrecht wagers "that his passionate and distanced view of European culture emerged during his exile in Istanbul or even after his emigration to the United States in 1947. At most, the experience of expatriation that the National Socialist regime had inflicted upon him gave Auerbach the opportunity to become fully aware of his distanced and sometimes melancholic perspective on western culture as a culture that had entered its final stage" (Gumbrecht, "'Pathos of the Earthly Progress': Eric Auerbach's Everydays," in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, p. 31).
19. See Anne Dietrich, Deutschsein in Istanbul: Nationalisierung und Orientierung in der deutschsprachigen Community von 1843 bis 1956 (Opladen, 1998).
20. See Steven Runciman, "Muslim Influences on the Development of European Civilization," Şarkiyat Mecmuasi [Oriental Magazine] 3 (1959): 1-12. Runciman argues that the medieval French romance, Floire et Blanchefleur, is an eastern story; while one of the most famous and lovely of all European romances, Aucassin et Nicolète, betrays its Muslim origin. The hero's name is really al-Qāsim, while the heroine is stated to be a Muslim princess of Tunis. It seems, also, that the use of rhyme in medieval European verse was inspired by Arabic models.... Long before Europe knew of the collection of stories which we call the Arabian Nights, Muslim romance and poetry were making a mark on European literature. [P. 22]
21. Despite Turkey's neutrality, the Nazis also maintained a significant foothold in the city, taking over the banking and administrative structure of the "Deutschen Kolonie" once they assumed power. There were branches of the Hitler Youth, German press outlets for propaganda, and a program of Nazification in the German schools in Istanbul. The tensions between these two German-speaking communities - proximate yet offshore - were needless to say rife. For an account, based in part on the documentation of Liselotte Dieckmann (who worked with Spitzer as a lecturer), see Dietrich, Deutschsein in Istanbul, chap. 4. Dieckmann also echoes the fears expressed by Auerbach that modern Turkish nationalism would come to resemble National Socialism.
22. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, trans. Martin Chalmers, 2 vols. (New York, 1999), 1:175, 178.
23. Harry Dember, letter to Klemperer, 12 Aug. 1935, in Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii, a Philologist's Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (London, 2000), p. 159; hereafter abbreviated LTI.
24. For an account of Malche's role in the reform, see Widmann, Exil und Bildungshilfe, pp. 45-48.
25. Green, Literary Criticism and the Structures of History, p. 105. Green bases these assertions on a 1952 interview published by Spitzer in The Johns Hopkins Magazine.
26. It is strange that Paul Bové does so little with the impact of Istanbul on Auerbach's work given his criticism of the inattention paid to "the cultural and political roots" of Auerbach's work and his argument that "Auerbach's project of writing 'a synthetic history-from-within' owes much to its own academic cultural context" (Paul Bové, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism [New York, 1986], p. 79). Ideally one would match Bové's useful reappraisal of the impact of Weimar culture and German modernism on Auerbach's thought with a discussion of the influence of Turkish alphabetization on Auerbach's analysis of literary language and its public.
27. Auerbach, Introduction to Romance Languages and Literatures, trans. Guy Daniels (New York, 1961). The Turkish edition, translated by Bayrav, appeared in 1944.
28. Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (Bern, 1958);
29. trans. Ralph Mannheim under the title Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1965), p. 6. Adopting the same gloomy tone that one finds in the afterword to Mimesis, Auerbach articulates his profoundly pessimistic fear that Western civilization would be subsumed by modern global culture: European civilization is approaching the term of its existence; its history as a distinct entity would seem to be at an end, for already it is beginning to be engulfed in another, more comprehensive unity. Today, however, European civilization is still a living reality within the range of our perception. Consequently - so it seemed to me when I wrote these articles and so I still believe - we must today attempt to form a lucid and coherent picture of this civilization and its unity. [Ibid.]
30. Thomas Hart has surmised that the break with tradition induced by the banning of Arabic script "may have reminded Auerbach of the loss entailed by the decline of classical studies in the West" (Hart, "Literature as Language: Auerbach, Spitzer, Jakobson," p. 230), and in support of this claim he cites a letter sent by Auerbach to Benjamin shortly after his arrival in Istanbul in December 1936: Here all traditions have been thrown overboard in an attempt to build a thoroughly rationalized state that will be both European and extremely Turco-nationalistic. The whole process is being carried out with a fantastic and unearthly speed [es geht phantastisch und gespenstisch schnell]; already it is hard to find anyone who can read Arabic or Persian or even Turkish texts written in the last century, since the language has been modernized and reoriented along purely Turkish lines and is now written in roman letters. [Ibid., pp. 230-31]
31. Quoted in Barck, "Walter Benjamin and Erich Auerbach," p. 82.
32. See Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Auerbach argues that the stability of Latin as a literary language was crucial to the formation of a literary public during the Empire. After imperial decline, written Latin endured as a language of law and religion because "there was no other written language and because it had long served, with the same homogeneity and the same conservatism.... as the specialized language of the various branches of public life" (p. 252).
33. For a fascinating discussion of how the theme of intergenerational language loss, acquisition, and recovery informs the work of a modern Turkish writer living in Germany, see Azade Seyhan's examination of Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Mutterzunge (1994) in Writing outside the Nation (Princeton, N.J., 2001), pp. 118-19.
34. The translated essay titles are: Azra Erhat, "A New Method in Studies of Style" (a study of Spitzer's word art);
35. Eva Buck, "Color in Dorothy Richardson's 'Pointed Roofs'";
36. Rosemarie Burkart, "Go-Between";
37. Herbert Dieckmann, "Diderot's Nature-Empathy and Life Feeling";
38. Traugott Fuchs, "The Early Poetry of Rimbaud";
39. Sabahattin Eyüboǧlu, "Turkish Anonymous Riddles";
40. Leo Spitzer, "Remarks on Dante's 'Vita Nuova'";
41. Süheyla Sabri, "A Passage from 'Barlaan and Josaiat'";
42. and Erich Auerbach, "On the Serious Imitation of the Everyday."
43. When comp lit took root as a postwar discipline in the U.S., the European traditions were dominant, the Turkish chapter of its life was effaced. What attracted the American academics was European erudition. As Carl Landauer notes, in his consideration of "Auerbach's Performance and the American Academy, or How New Haven Stole the Idea of Mimesis," the idea of the "virtuoso performer created by the author of Mimesis in Istanbul in the 1940's played perfectly to American audiences of the 1950 's." "But Auerbach was not alone," Landauer writes, for a number of émigré scholars with their obvious erudition and their mastery of an enormous range of cultural artifacts became prized possessions of their adopted culture, so that reviews of books by Kantorowicz, Panofsky, Cassirer, Jaeger, Spitzer, Kristeller, and Auerbach seem to blend into one another. It was not just an encyclopedic range that marked these scholars but a sense that they brought a certain "depth" to theoo study of culture and history from which Americans could learn. It was, then, as a masterful scholar and a translator of European "depth" that the author of Mimesis made his name in an American academy looking for exactly such exemplars. [Carl Landauer, "Auerbach's Performance and the American Academy, or How New Haven Stole the Idea of Mimesis," in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, p. 180]
44. This appropriation of Greek culture in Lurkey must be considered against the backdrop of the history of Greek minorities in the region. For a lucid account of historic religious and ethnic tensions, see Neal Ascherson's lucid book, Black Sea (New York, 1995): Greece, in a wild imperial venture supported by Britain, had invaded western Anatolia, hoping to make itself an Aegean 'great power' and to construct a 'greater Greece' out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. But the invasion ended not simply in Greece's defeat at the battle of Dumlupinar in 1922, but in a calamitous rout and slaughter which drove not only the Greek armies but much of the Greek population of Anatolia into the sea. The Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923, settled the frontiers of the new Lurkey under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The universal caliphate-a sprawling, multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire-now imploded like a dead star, metamorphosing itself into a compact, homogenous modern state of Moslem religion and Turkish speech. At the same time, Greece and Turkey agreed to exchange minorities. Nearly half a million Moslems (many of whom were Greeks in all but religion) were forced to leave Greece, while more than a million Christians (some of whom were culturally Turks) were expelled from Turkey. Most of the Christians were Pontic Greeks, who abandoned their monasteries and farms, their town houses and banks and schools, and fled with what they could carry down to the docks. [P. 177]
45. Bové, Intellectuals in Power, p. xiii.
46. Timothy Brennan makes a similar argument in his essay "Places of Mind, Occupied Lands: Edward Said and Philology," in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Oxford, 1992).
47. On the problem of philology and genetics see my essay, "The Human in the Humanities," October, no. 96 (Spring 2001): 71-85.
48. Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, trans. Betsy Wing (Baltimore, 1999), p. xiv.
49. Michael Holquist, Association of Departments of Foreign Languages Bulletin 33 (Winter 2002): 18.
50. Klemperer treated LTI almost as if it were a linguistic totem warding off the evil effects that Nazism wrought upon language. In his posthumously published book he wrote: The label LTI first appears in my diary as a playful little piece of parody, almost immediately afterwards as a laconic aide-mémoire, like a knot in a handkerchief, and then very soon, and for the duration of those terrible years, as an act of self-defence, an SOS sent to myself. A tag with a nice erudite ring - the Third Reich itself after all delighted from time to time in the rich sonority of a foreign expression. [LTI, p. 9]
51. Hugo Friedrich, "On the Art of Translation," trans. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Schulte and Biguenet (Chicago, 1992), pp. 12-13.
52. Roman Jakobson, "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," in Theories of Translation, p. 145.
53. For more background on the disciplinary schisms within comparative literature induced by the advent of postcolonial theory, see my essay "Comparative Exile: Competing Margins in the History of Comparative Literature," in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore, 1995), pp. 86-96.
54. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993), p. 51.
55. See Herbert Lindenberger, "On the Reception of Mimesis," in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, p. 209. My thanks to Howard Bloch for bringing this article to my attention.
56. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 1999).
57. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York, 1994), p. 23.
58. Spitzer, review of Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittlelalter, by Ernst Robert Curtius, American Journal of Philology 70, no. 4 (1949): 426, 425;
59. cited by Gumbrecht, "'Zeitlosigkeit, die durchscheint in der Zeit:' Über E. R. Curtius' unhistorisches Verhältnis zur Geschichte," in Ernst Robert Curtius: Werk, Wirkung, Zukunftperspektiven, ed. Walter Berschin and Arnold Rothe (Heidelberg, 1989), pp. 233-34.
60. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York, 1999), p. 205; hereafter abbreviated OP.
61. Spitzer, "Linguistics and Literary History," Leo Spitzer, p. 35.
62. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1969), p. 82.
63. Theodor Adorno, "Words from Abroad," Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (New York, 1991), 2:187-88.
64. De Man, "Conclusions: Walter Benjamin's 'The Task of the Translator,'" The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, 1986), p. 84; hearafter abbreviated RT.
65. See Geoffrey Hartman, "The Fate of Reading" and Other Essays (Chicago, 1975), p. 121.
66. See also Hartman, The Fateful Question of Culture (New York, 1997) for a discussion of the contrast between the idea of culture that arose from emigre cosmopolitanism and culture as it is being defined within a globalized literary studies today.
67. David Damrosch, "Auerbach in Exile," Comparative Literature 47 (Spring 1995):109.