Hofmannsthal and Greek Myth: Expression and Performance.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-APR-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association

Hofmannsthal and Greek Myth: Expression and Performance. By PHILIP WARD. (British and Irish Studies in German Language and Literature, 24) Oxford, Bern, and Brussels: Peter Lang. 2002. 295 pp. SwF 69; $29; 44.50 [euro]. ISBN 3-906766-44-6 (pbk).

This book, originally a Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation, differs from previous works 'by laying significant stress on the cultural context in which Hofmannsthal's work was produced and received' (p. 16). It shows how Hofmannsthal repeatedly turned readings of Greek myth into the praxis of performance. The chapter on myth defines what would become for Hofmannsthal the essential problem of a coincidentia oppositorum between Eastern and Western modes of thought and culture. The author understands myth as a combination of a 'corpus of received stories' and a '"life-renewing" (but never well-defined) agent' (p. 37). Greek myth offered Hofmannsthal 'polysemy and inexhaustibility over time' (p. 44). A sense of enduring values and of openness to life answered his need to make the best use of cultural heritage and to reform the present.

Philip Ward then examines the contrasting achievements of two translators of Greek works in the late nineteenth century, Adolf Wilbrandt and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf. He also shows how Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt drew critically on Wilamowitz's 'improved' translation of Euripides' Medea in 1904 and refashioned the use of the...

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