“Enamels and Cameos” by Theophile Gautier

3-Word Review:

• Dreamlike
• Untranslatable
• Curiosities

Frictional Posture:

• Find 2+ translations: Where might all fail to capture Gautier’s aesthetic?

Earlier Review:

I read this volume inside the larger collected works of Gautier, a 1903 edition, Vol 24, by FC de Sumichrast. Why? Because too few of Gautier’s works have been translated into English and made widely available. This was the only copy in Michigan!

And so, I was anxious to enjoy the works, especially “Albertus,” one of his first published poems. I was disheartened to see that Agnes Lee, who did so much translating of his Gautier, chose here to translate the verse into prosody. I am unsure what motivated her decision. Equally, I was intrigued and a bit enlightened to find early utterances of Gautier’s “Art for Art’s Sake” theme (as an overwhelming moral message here), it overlapping with no small amount of authorial intrusion (including the name of the titular character who–though meeting with a tragic end–shares Gautier’s code/nick-name in his circle of writers).

Finally, I should not have been surprised to find sections of Gautier’s gothic imagination falling too easily to cliché and hyperbole, amateurish asides, etc. –even while other sections hinted at his more lean and mature styling to come. And while I was not put off by the lasciviousness of his language (he was a sensualist, after all), his prejudices of the mid 19th-century now appear here as strongly anti-Semitic and racist, at times.

My rating then is for the experience of discovering Gautier rather than for the quality of all of his early writing.