Annotating Mimesis

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis is one of the great works of literary criticism of the twentieth century, and yet students are put off by the many untranslated quotations from Latin, Medieval Italian, Medieval French, Modern French, Spanish and German. I teach this book to first year students at UEA who are understandably daunted by the demands it seems to make on its readers.

This resource aims in the first instance simply to supply annotations containing literal English translations of all the untranslated material in Willard R. Trask's otherwise excellent text. The initial aim is to provide students and readers not conversant in Auerbach's many languages with the basic information they need to read the text.

If you would like to contribute to this project--for instance if you are teaching a chapter of Auerbach's book and would be interested in providing annotations to that chapter--I would love to hear from you. Please contact me.

Sharon Marcus, 'Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and the Value of Scale'

Sharon Marcus has written a very interesting article on Mimesis, here.

Alex Woloch, 'Form and Representation in Auerbach's Mimesis'

There's an excellent recent article by Alex Woloch about Mimesis -- a work which is both 'monumentalized and obscured' in subsequent literary criticism -- online here.

L'Humaine Condition

New annotations to Chapter 12, 'L'Humaine Condition', have now been kindly provided by my esteemed colleague Dr. James Wood. You can find them here. This is the chapter on Montaigne, which contains a great deal of untranslated French. It was never my intention to do all the work myself, so it was great when James volunteered to work on this chapter. If you would like to contribute, please contact me.

He opened his eyes, and was struck...

After a hiatus I am teaching Mimesis again and have resumed work on Mimesis Annotated. Draft annotations for chapter 3, 'The Arrest of Peter Valvomeres' are now up, here. This is an important chapter that is difficult for students to navigate because of the quantity of untranslated Latin. I hope this helps somewhat!

Style Guide

In many cases, quotations of untranslated text are made from the passage which heads the chapter, and a translation of that whole passage is supplied. Where this is the case, we will still provide an annotation, using the translation that appears in the Trask text unless there appears to be a good reason not to. Annotations that reproduce a translation previously given by Trask will be followed by '*'.

Annotations will take the following form:

[page number] [untranslated text]: '[translated text]' [* where translated text follows Trask]

e.g.

26 nummos modio metitur: ‘measures money by the bushel’ *