“Many and Dreadful Disasters”

Our recent experiences of quarantine during the COVID-19 outbreak have exposed the vulnerability of poorer members of society and has highlighted their increased suffering during the period of restricted mobility. This article considers the way in which quarantine exacerbates inequalities from a historical perspective, looking at enforced periods of restricted travel and its impact on servants and lower-class British travelers of the eighteenth century in Europe. It examines both the history of representations of plague and contagion, and some of the human reactions to fears of disease, one of which was the imposition of quarantine measures. Three main sources are referred to: Patrick Brydone’s A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Letters to William Beckford, published in 1790; Elizabeth, Lady Craven’s “A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople in a series of Letters,” published in 1789; and the unpublished letters of William Fletcher, manservant to Lord Byron, from his journeys in 1811. The texts produced by these travelers from the eighteenth century offer rich material for the consideration of the impact of mobility and immobility both of and on the body and how these experiences were strikingly different depending on the social class of the traveler.

William Beckford (1760 - 1844)

Portait of the novelist, travel writer, and pederast William Beckford

Associationist Aesthetics and the Foundations of the Architectural Imagination

This chapter seeks to provide an account of how aestheticians and practising architects in the long eighteenth century variously accounted for the imaginative potential of Gothic architecture. Showing how architectural debates in the period were structured according to the classical/Gothic divide, it explores the empiricist discourse of architectural association as it runs from John Locke, through Joseph Addison, Mark Akenside, William Chambers, Alexander Gerard, Thomas Gray, William Gilpin, and others, into the work of John Soane. Situating the architectural writings of Horace Walpole within this tradition, it discusses Walpole’s engagement with the architectural theories of his day. Through a reading of the work of William Beckford, the chapter charts the shift from empiricism to idealism in the architectural imagination of the early nineteenth century.

Conclusion: From the Gothic to the Medieval

The concluding chapter to the book seeks to account for the changes that the architectural imagination underwent in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Guided by the concept of ‘purification’, it shows how the construct of the Gothic ‘Dark Ages’ was revised in contemporary historiography and replaced with the less injurious notion of the ‘medieval’; how first- and second-generation romanticism curtailed the excesses of the Gothic architectural imagination; and how nineteenth-century Gothic Revivalists such as A. C. Pugin, A. W. N. Pugin, and John Ruskin reacted against the amateur Gothic experiments of Horace Walpole and William Beckford. What emerges in the discussion is an architectural imagination that is very different from the one of the previous century, that rich, associative aesthetic that drove the production of Gothic literature and revivalist architecture from the start. In a brief coda, the discussion briefly charts the professionalization of architectural practice that took effect from 1834 onwards.

Lisboa nos anos de 1778 segundo o Diário de William Beckford

William Beckford (1760-1844) é uma personalidade fascinante da cultura inglesa na transição do século XVIII para o século XIX, celebrizado pelo modo como exibia a sua imensa riqueza, pelo escândalo provocado pela sua denunciada homossexualidade, mas também pelas obras literárias que escreveu, particularmente Vatheck, onde manifesta a atracção e o gosto pelo exotismo orientalista, característico da estética romântica. Este homem extraordinário - que, na infância, tocou piano com Mozart, foi aluno do arquitecto William Chambers e do pintor Alexandre Cozens – aportou a Lisboa, em 1787, interrompendo uma viagem apenas começada que o devia ter conduzido à Jamaica onde residia o essencial da riqueza da família. Durante esta primeira estadia, entre 1787 e 1788, Beckford manteve um diário que publicou parcialmente, com consideráveis alterações, quase no final da vida (Italy; with Sketches of Spain and Portugal, 1834). Em 1954, Boyd Alexander, o seu mais importante biógrafo, publicou The Journal of William Beckford in Portugal and Spain, 1787-88, divulgando, pela primeira vez a fonte de onde os Sketches foram retirados. Neste trabalho, utilizarei a tradução portuguesa do referido Journal (realizada por João Gaspar Simões e revista para a 2ª edição de 1983) para detectar a imagem de Lisboa que ele nos propõe. Surpreendentemente, Beckford parece não ter compreendido a reconstrução de Lisboa depois do Terramoto a que, aliás, nunca se refere. Para ele, a alma da cidade é arcaica, simultaneamente fradesca e mourisca, exprimindo-se no brilho cenográfico das igrejas, onde vai ouvir música, ou nos interiores dos palácios, onde os rituais de vida são marcados por uma proximidade chocante entre senhores e serviçais. A aproximação a Lisboa, através de um texto eminentemente literário tem os seus riscos. No entanto, dispõe de ampla bibliografia que usarei com liberdade. Cite-se, por exemplo, a obra clássica de Kevin Linch, A imagem da cidade de 1960, nomeadamente conceito de “imaginabilidade” como determinante da apreensão e fruição do espaço público. Outra obra fundamental, para a mesma questão, é a reflexão de Bruno Zevi, no artigo “L’Urbanisme” da Encyclopédie Universalis, 1968, que estruturou em conjunto com Françoise Choay. Nestes, e noutros textos fundadores, detecto uma coincidência desafiante entre a “alma” e a “imagem” das cidades históricas, como é o caso de Lisboa. Beckford captou-as com eficácia, utilizando para isso dois poderosos instrumentos: a vista e a escrita, articuladas com falante energia.

The Original is Unfaithful to the Translation: Towards Recognising Originality in Translation

In his “Sobre el Vathek de William Beckford [On William Beckford’s Vathek]” (1943), Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) paradoxically claims ‘[e]l original es infiel a la traducción [the original is unfaithful to the translation]’. With these seven words, Borges disrupts the very core of traditional Anglo-American translation studies: in a context where translations are generally regarded as secondary to their source texts (ST)—temporally, textually, and in status—Borges affirms that a translation can assume an independent existence. A further implication of Borges’s (seemingly illogical) declaration is that, in some ways, the translation may be truer to the fundamental “spirit” of the original than the original itself.This essay shall thus take Borges’s words as a starting point to investigate the possibility of a translation becoming an “original” against which the ST can be measured for “faithfulness”, with the ultimate aim of recognising the originality in translation.