Rêver d’Orient, connaître l’Orient: visions de l’Orient dans l’art et la littérature britanniques ed. by Isabelle Gadoin, Marie-Élise Palmier-Chatelain (review)

Abstract

504 Reviews Latin tradition of consolation could be turned to creative use, especially when fused with the tradition of vernacular poetry. Readers, however, would have welcomed more engagement with the amatory tradition and its roots,whether in the classical world ofOvid or in themedieyal world of the troubadours?particularly in regard to the depiction and remedy of lovesickness. It is surprising that a volume entitled theErotics ofConsolation does not address the topos of voluptas dolendi, although Kay abuts the concept in her piece. In this regard Petrarch would have been a central figure, as he made the transition from the sweet grief of the vernacular love poet to the more profound' aegritudo and accidia of the Latin Stoic and penitent?thus reflecting the flip side of the process described by many of these essays. Still, the volume offersmany insightful approaches for studying the inter section(s) between psychological experience, classical consolation, and literature in the latemedieval and earlymodern world. University of Alabama George McClure River d'Orient, connaitre VOrient: visions de VOrient dans Vart et la litterature bri tanniques. Ed. by Isabelle Gadoin and Marie-Elise Palmier-Chatelain. (Signes) Lyon: Ecole normale superieure: Lettres et sciences humaines. 2008. 366 pp. 34. ISBN 978-2-84788-137-0. This volume of eighteen thematic essays is the product of an interdisciplinary colloquium in 2003 that responded to a central problem raised but not resolved by Edward Said's Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995 [1978]), p. 8: what is the relationship at theheart of the orientalist project entre ledesir d'Orient et ce savoir colonial, entre reve et connaissance'? The volume brings together an exceptionally diverse collection of responses to this question on subjects ranging from the 'mar vels of theEast' tradition inOld andMiddle English literature to twentieth-century British colonial architecture and town planning. The editors have organized their disparate material into four parts. 'Merveilles, mythe, mysticisme' is a subtitlemore alliterative than accurate, uniting discussions of the marvellous in the real and Active accounts of medieval travellers (Anne Matheiu, 'De la realite au fantasme') with a biographical approach toHenry Wallis, connoisseur and collector of Islamic ceramics (Isabelle Gadoin, 'HenryWallis') and a discussion of the changing representation of Scheherazade innineteenth-century English editions of theArabian Nights from amartyr figure to a potential avenger (Margaret Sironval, 'LTmage de Sheherazade'). 'L'Autre Face du fantasme: l'orient partie du despotisme' is a coherent group of essays that explore the rhetorical and political use made of the trope of oriental tyranny and despotism fromElizabethan representations of Persian, Ottoman, and 'Tartar' rulership (Ladan Niayesh, '"Persians now, as of old'"; Corinne Lefevre, 'Entre despotisme et vertu') to the persistent myth of the unrestrained power of theOttoman Sultan in the Enlightenment (Ann Thompson, 'L'Empire ottoman'). As a group, these essays forcefully underline that the construction of a given MLR, 105.2, 2010 505 ruler as despotic or otherwise is closely linked both to contemporary diplomatic manoeuvres and to the politics of thewriter who produces it. 'Terres du desir: ecriture de soi, ecriture de l'autre' features three essays that focus on writers' engagements with Arabia. All three encounter at some point the problem of interchange between self and other. European travellers describing Mecca must, in a very literal sense, become other: theymust convert to Islam to see the holy sites (Marie-Elise Palmier-Chatelain, 'Rever, voir, savoir?'). Nineteenth and twentieth-century writers employ a range of literary and linguistic techniques to emphasize or overcome the alterity of their subject-matter, including inter textuality,meticulous mimesis, and estrangement through lexical archaism (Guy Barthelemy, Anthropologic et litterarie'; Catherine Delmas, 'Soif de deserts'). The task of lexical and cultural translation at the heart of the encounter between self and a temporal and cultural other is explored in Laurence Chamlou's excellent article on Gertrude Bell's mid-nineteenth-century translations of the fourteenth century Persian poet Hafez's ghazals ('De la connaissance de l'Orient aux reves d'une Occidentale'). Bell's attempts to translate Hafez faithfully into English verse prove Robert Frost's dictum that 'Poetry iswhat gets lost in translation'. Bell's efforts show her own extensive knowledge of medieval Persian culture, and yet sometimes result in comically inappropriate English...