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Alexander von Humboldt im Netz
Forschung
A Working Conference for Humboldt Studies:
Alexander von Humboldt and the Hemisphere
Vera M. Kutzinski, English and Comparative Literature, Vanderbilt University, USA: Translating Alexander von Humboldt: 'The Island of Cuba'
What does it mean, both conceptually and practically, to translate Alexander von Humboldt’s writings into English for a 21st-century readership? And why do we need new translations of his work in the first place? Shouldn’t we be working with the original French texts and accept no substitutes? In addressing some of the challenges of carrying over Humboldt’s thinking and his language into another idiom and another time, I will focus on the formal aspects of the English translations of the Essai politique sur l’île de Cuba (1825; 1826): Helen Williams’ version from 1829 (Chapter of her Personal Narrative of a Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent), John Sidney Thrasher’s The Island of Cuba from 1856 (as well as the partially corrected reprint of Thrasher’s text from 2001), and the new translation of the freestanding 2-volume edition of the Cuba essay that has recently been completed by the Alexander von Humboldt in English (HiE) project as the first in a three-volume series of new translations that will be published by the University of Chicago Press between 2010 and 2013. (HiE is a collaboration between Vanderbilt and the University of Potsdam that began in 2007.) My argument that few of Humboldt’s recent translators seem to consult the original French text includes recent Spanish and German translations of the Essai. I will discuss some of the translational and editorial choices we made in the HiE translation from the theoretical and practical perspective of literary translation.
