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Alexander von Humboldt im Netz
Forschung
A Working Conference for Humboldt Studies:
Alexander von Humboldt and the Hemisphere
Anja Becker, Center for the Americas, Vanderbilt University, USA / Tobias Kraft, Romance Literatures, Potsdam University, Germany: Textual Differences and Scholarly-Scientific Sources in Alexander von Humboldt’s 'Essai politique sur l'île de Cuba' (1826)
In our talk, we discuss aspects of the collaborative Humboldt-in-English project (HiE) of Vanderbilt University’s Center for the Americas with the Romance Languages Department at the University of Potsdam. The project began in December 2007 with work on the first of three projected Humboldt-volumes, the Essai politique sur l’île de Cuba. Besides translating the text itself, two major objectives of our project have been text comparisons and annotations.
By text comparisons we mean compiling all the different existing versions of the original French text in order to compare and protocol any variations ranging from the typeset to significant changes in content. In addition, we catalogued the existing translations into English, German, and Spanish. This broad range of different editions and translations over a period of 180 years allows for multiple readings of this one text not only in its original gestalt but also in its history of reception in the global areas to which it refers: the Caribbean, Latin America, North America, and Europe.
Our edition—both the printed and the digital version—takes this rich reception history into account in providing venues for the reader of the twenty-first century better to access this early nineteenth century work. We are creating a supportive but separate text corpus of annotations that offers the reader historical, intellectual, and scholarly-scientific horizons necessary fully to embrace the complexity of meanings in Humboldt’s important essay on the island of Cuba. One important aspect of our annotating is to identify every source that Humboldt used in his essay as to reconstruct his scholarly-scientific cosmos, which simultaneously will then turn into a reflection of the state of learning in Europe and in the Americas in the year 1826.
