The Poetry of Geography: The Ansichten der Natur in English Translation

2018 ◽  
pp. 150-186
Author(s):  
Alison E. Martin
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
The Sublime

This chapter discusses the salient differences between the two different contemporaneous versions of Humboldt’s Ansichten der Natur: Elizabeth Sabine’s Aspects of Nature (Longman, 1849) and Otté and Henry Bohn’s Views of Nature (Bohn, 1850). Humboldt initially wrangled with Elizabeth Sabine and her husband Edward, President of the Royal Society, over the English title but did not interfere further in the translation of this hybrid essay collection that combined science and aesthetics. The descriptive landscape ‘tableaux’ posed various translational difficulties in the strong imaginative appeal they carried but also the philosophical concepts underpinning them, for which Humboldt had created his own terms. Bohn and Otté enhanced the visual interest of the landscape features in Humboldt’s narrative by appealing more directly to the categories of the sublime and picturesque playing up contrasts between fore- and background; Sabine was more explicit in strengthening the spiritual message conveyed through landscape description.

What the Climber Saw: Strauss's Alpensinfonie and the Romantic Tradition of Nature Representation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
David Larkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Tone Poem ◽  
Peak Response ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
Musical Compositions ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Relationship

Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion. Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.

scholarly journals The Sublime Qur'an and Orientalism

1991 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-168
Author(s):  
A. R. Kidwai
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Islamic Faith

The Qur'an, being central to both the Islamic faith and its practice, hasbeen studied in a plethora of orientalist writings-ranging from such a crudelypolemical one as Alexander Ross's English translation of the Qur'an entitledThe Alcoran of Mahomet . . . for the Satisfaction for all those who Desireto look into the Turkish Vanities (1649) to those with scholarly pretensionsand claiming to be "objective" studies, such as Noldeke's Geschichte des Qorans(1860), Goldziher's Die Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslesung (1920),Bell's The Quran translated with a Critical Rearrangement of the Surahs(1937-39), Wansbrough's Quranic Studies (1977), and Burton's The Collectionof the Quran (1977).The book under review, first published in 1983, recounts the full tockof the orientalists' misconceptions, down the ages, about the Qur'an-theiroutlandish theories about its authorship (pp. 7-18), their assaults on its textualhistory and its arrangement (pp. 52-63), their brazen attempts at twistingits meaning in their Qur'an translations (pp. 64-92), and their bizzare viewson abrogation in the Qur'an (pp. 93-104). Khalifa deserves every credit forassembling so much information. What is more remarkable is that it is followedby a stout refutation of these allegations about the form and contents of theQur'an and an extensive, authentic exposition of the Qur'anic teachings,concepts, and morals, all of which constitutes the second part of the book(pp. 111-205). In elucidating the Qur'anic worldview, Khalifa's discussion issubtle, in large part persuasive, tenaciously pursued, and well presented.Appended to the book are two highly informative appendices on the orderof the Qur'an's surahs.This well-intentioned and detailed scholarly study, however, does notreally succeed in delivering what its title promises. In discussing the orientalists'ventures into establishing the chronology of Qur'anic surahs, Khalifa sayslittle about Gustav Fli:lgel's Corani Textus Arabiscus (1834) and the theoriespropounded by Grimme and Hirschfield's New Researches in the Compositionand Exegesis of the Quran (1902). More serious is the lack of any referenceto a host of orientalists' writings on the philological and lexical aspects ofthe Qur'an, namely Baljon's Modern Muslim Quran Interpretation (1961),Torrey's The Commercial-Theological Terms in the Quran (1892), Watt's ...

Translation, Experimentation and the Spring of the Air: Richard Waller's Essayes of Natural Experiments

2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luciano Boschiero
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Experiments ◽  
The Social ◽  
Accademia Del Cimento ◽  
Royal Society Of London

In 1668, when the Royal Society of London received a copy of the book of experiments compiled by the Tuscan Accademia del Cimento, it was deemed by the Society to contain little that was new or innovative, and was seemingly soon forgotten. Yet 15 years later, Richard Waller's English translation of this book was licensed and published by the Society. The only reason offered by historians for this turnaround in the English attitude towards the book has been the social and political circumstances facing the Society in the early 1680s. However, a closer look at the reception of the translation and the intellectual interests of some of the Society's members at this time, especially the Society's temporary curator, Denis Papin, reveals that the Tuscans' work was re-evaluated for its significance to natural philosophical theories developed in the field of pneumatics.

Entomostraca of Aldabra, with special reference to the genus Heterocypris (Crustacea, Ostracoda)

1971 ◽  
Vol 260 (836) ◽  
pp. 257-297 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Phase I ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Personal Communication

The German geographer Voeltzkow, although he only spent something over a month on Aldabra during April to May 1895, made the first known collection of Entomostraca from the atoll. His lively account includes mention of four species of Ostracoda and also records the occurrence of daphnid cladocerans (Voeltzkow 1897, p. 67; English translation p. 21). Voeltzkow’s collection was described by G. W. Muller, who added another ostracode, a Centrocypris species which he did not describe because of scanty material, to Voeltzkow’s list (Muller 1898, pp. 275- 283). Ostracodes and cladocerans were also recorded by the Bristol University expeditions of 1964 and 1965 but not collected (R. Gaymer, personal communication 1967). The next additions to the known fauna were made by G. A. Wright of the British Museum (Natural History) who cultured ostracodes, an anostracan, Streptocephalus sp. and the conchostracan, Eulimnadia sp., from mud samples obtained during a September 1966 reconnaissance visit (Stoddart & Wright 1967, p. 1175). Further collections of dried mud from Aldabra were made by J. F. Peake of the British Museum (Natural History) during phase I (August to September 1967) of the Royal Society Expedition to Aldabra. One of these, from a pool between Croix Blanc and Anse Cèdres (the locality of sample 8, see appendix A) has been cultured since 5 December 1967 (see §8 ( d )).

The Sublime Quran: The misinterpretation of Chapter 4 Verse 34

2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laleh Bakhtiar
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Muslim Men

For over 14 centuries, Muslim men have misinterpreted a verse of the Quran (4:34) to allow themselves to beat their wives. The Sublime Quran, the first critical English translation of the Quran by a woman, corrects this error and shows how it has created a contradiction not inherent in the Quran itself.

Jerónimo Lobo SJ and his Discourse of palm-trees in the context of seventeenth-century botany

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
João Paulo Cabral ◽  
J. M. S. Martins
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Academic Training ◽  
Palm Trees ◽  
Royal Society Of London

Father Jerónimo Lobo SJ was on a mission to Ethiopia between 1624 and 1634, during which he travelled on foot through parts of Abyssinia and Eritrea. After a troubled period of life in India, he returned to Lisbon in 1657, where died in 1678. In Lisbon Lobo wrote one of his most important works, “Discurso das Palmeiras”, published in 1669 in an English translation by the Royal Society of London. In this work, Lobo described the morphology and uses of eight important palm trees. Two of these – “macomeira” (Hyphaene) and “trafolim” (Borassus) – were novelties to European botanists. An analysis of published works from this period, including lists of plants cultivated in botanical and private European gardens, indicates that when “Discurso” was published, printed descriptions of only some of the palms that Lobo described were available. At that period few palms were cultivated in British and Dutch gardens. The botanical novelties in Lobo's “Discurso” were most probably the reason for interest shown by the Royal Society. This remarkable seventeenth-century botanical account reflected Lobo's ability to observe nature (perhaps enhanced by academic training in Jesuit schools) during his walks through the Abyssinian empire.

II. Note on the wide-slit method of viewing the solar prominences

1873 ◽  
Vol 21 (139-147) ◽  
pp. 127-128
Keyword(s):  
Spectrum Analysis ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Short Note ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Short Account ◽  
Solar Prominences ◽  
Wide Slit

When editing the English translation of Schaliens ‘Spectrum Analysis,’ I discovered that the short account of the method of viewing the forms of the solar prominences by means of a wide slit, which I had the honour of presenting to the Royal Society on February 16, 1869, does not agree exactly in one respect with the account of the observation of February 13 as it was entered at the time in my observatory book. The short note was written at the suggestion of a friend during a Committee held in the Royal Society’s Apartments, and, as the concluding words show, was intended to be followed by a more detailed account of the method of observation. The point in question relates to the position of a second slit which was used to screen the eye from every part of the spectrum except that under observation.

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