Recent links of note:
“Kafka’s Trials”
Theodore Dalrymple, First Things
“When we say that something is Kafkaesque, do we refer to Kafka or to translations of Kafka?” asks Theodore Dalrymple in a book review for First Things of Ross Benjamin’s new translation of the diaries of Franz Kafka, published by the Schocken Kafka Library at Penguin. To answer this critical question regarding foreign-language literature, Dalrymple reassesses our understanding of Kafka, whose diaries give a glimpse of a writing style much more playful than nightmarish and absurd as other works by the Bohemian author would have you think. If we look to his diaries, for example, Kafka mentions the First World War with a high degree of nonchalance: “Germany has declared war on Russia.—Swimming school in the afternoon.” Dalrymple praises Benjamin for his Herculean translation (with over 1,400 endnotes in 564 pages of text) that returns ad fontes to the original German edition of Kafka’s diaries, free from the “distortion and censorship” of the editor Max Brod. Though these diaries are by no means easy to understand—Kafka is “the writer of neurosis” par excellence, writes Dalrymple—Benjamin’s translation provides an effective scholarly look into the writer’s mind. Kafka enthusiasts should be on the lookout for a book review by E. J. Hutchinson of Kafka’s Aphorisms in an upcoming fall issue of The New Criterion.
“Models of antiquity”
Francesca Langer, Aeon
Towards the beginning of his second term as president, Thomas Jefferson was approached by an old friend, the Venezuelan patriot Francisco de Miranda, with a request for material support for his forthcoming war of independence against the Spanish crown. In this meeting, which included Secretary of State James Madison, Miranda, who met the president when he fought alongside the American rebels twenty years earlier, employed neoclassical rhetoric in his plea, quoting Virgil’s Aeneid to describe his expedition to liberate Venezuela from Spanish tyranny and return the country to the glories of “Saturnian times.” In a recent column for Aeon, Francesca Langer explores the political aesthetics of neoclassicism during the Age of Revolution and its intellectual role in the emergence of modern democracy. Ancient republics and their “essentially secular parables” of virtue and vice provided both “models to emulate and cautionary tales to avoid,” writes Langer. Neoclassicism presented a vision of government that sought to balance the interests of society’s classes and factions to achieve a common good, and classical heroes of the Roman Republic appealed to wider public audiences in places seeking societal and political change, such as Cato in America, Brutus in France, and Spartacus in Haiti. Indeed, Jefferson, though bound by the Neutrality Act of 1794, proved responsive to Miranda’s rhetoric, unofficially supporting him by allowing the procurement of men and materiel from New York before his return south.
“Treasures from Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida and More at the Hispanic Society”
Mary Tompkins Lewis, The Wall Street Journal
After over five years of renovations, the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, whose rich collection of works by Spanish and Hispanic artists has delighted New Yorkers since 1904, has finally reopened. The scholar and collector Archer M. Huntington founded the Hispanic Society to celebrate both old and new Spanish culture, ranging from the Old Master works of El Greco and Velázquez to the modern art of Joaquín Sorolla and Jesús Rafael Soto. Though the renovations are complete, the museum won’t be displaying its more famous work until the fall, due to a recent traveling exhibition. Visitors, however, can still revel in the canvases and sculpture that often go overlooked, reports Mary Tompkins Lewis for The Wall Street Journal, such as the ornate late-Gothic alabaster funerary monuments of the Duke of Alburquerque’s family from the end of the fifteenth century. This summer, tourists and New Yorkers alike will surely flock to see the renovations to the Spanish Renaissance–style Main Court and the illustrious gallery dedicated to Sorolla’s Vision of Spain series, as well as a new exhibition on the work of Juan de Pareja (a sister show to the one ongoing at the Met), the Andalusian slave-assistant to Velázquez.