Blake and the Xenoglots
Strange-Speaking Critics and Scholars of Blake

By G. E. Bentley, Jr.

This essay is concerned with writing about William Blake in languages other than English. For the purposes of simplicity and charity, let us consider bureau-speak, computer-speak, crit-speak, newspaper-speak, politico-speak, and even advertising-speak as English.

Even during William Blake's obscure lifetime, there were articles on him in languages other than English. Some were earnest and important such as Crabb Robinson's German essay in Vaterländisches Museum (1811) [1] and some not long after his death assumed what may be called journalistic license such as one in French which invents a madhouse and visits Blake in it. [2]

I have trolled through Blake Books [3] (covering 1780-1975), Blake Books Supplement [4] (covering mostly 1975-94), and the lists in “William Blake and His Circle” in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (mostly 1994-2004). I have baited my hook with all the languages of Blake criticism and scholarship of which I could think–and with a number of languages in which critics might have written about Blake but do not appear to have done so. The catch is summarized in the table below.

Of course many Blake scholars whose native language is not English yet publish at least occasionally in English. These include Maung Ba Han of Burma, Denis Saurat of France, Detlef Dörrbecker of Germany, Bunsho Jugaku and Hikari Sato of Japan, and Gholen Raza Sabri-Tabrizi of Turkey. Notice that no work on Blake in Burmese or Turkish is recorded here.

Some journals in non-English countries are in English, such as Aligarh Critical Miscellany (India), AnaChronist (Hungary), Dutch Quarterly Review, Essays in French Literature, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Journal of English Language and Literature (Korea), Milton Studies (Korea), and of course these are overlooked here.

On the other hand, there are a number of translations of works originally in English into non-English languages, particularly with authors as distinguished or well-known as Northrop Frye, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Kathleen Raine, and these are included here.

Some of these languages are dead, such as Latin and Classical Greek, and the works about them included here mostly deal with Blake's use of these languages. The Gaelic, Hebrew, Latin, and Welsh works here are frequently about Blake's use of these languages rather than written in these languages.

The plausibility of the figures given here depends upon:
(1) The comprehensiveness of the coverage of Blake in Blake Books, Blake Books Supplement, and the lists in “William Blake and His Circle” in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (1994-2004), the foreign-language portions of which, particularly for Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish, were often compiled by generous friends who are far more linguistically dextrous than I am. The coverage of Blake here is certainly extensive but far from complete;
(2) The accuracy of the indices of Blake Books and Blake Books Supplement (fair); and
(3) The reliability of computer search mechanisms (uncertain).

The greatest gaps in these bibliographies are almost certainly in non-English languages and especially in reviews. For instance, Oe Kenzaburo's great Japanese novel called in English Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age is likely to have attracted reviews which commented on his heavy dependence upon the works of William Blake, but none is reported in these bibliographies. Many of these books and essays in foreign languages were not seen at all by GEB, and even when I did see them I could only cope, with diminishing reliability, with French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

Many of the entries here are the merest journalism, for example notices, puffs, and reviews of the great exhibitions in Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main (1975), Casa di Dante in Abruggio (1983), and Barcelona and Madrid (1996). (There is no review etc. listed here for the wonderful Blake exhibitions in Tokyo [1990].)

The representation here of the chief languages of European civilization is perhaps what one should expect: French (267 works), German (254), Italian (155), Spanish (180), and Russian (90), with a sprinkling of Czech (12), Danish (18), Dutch (8), Finnish (7), Greek (14), Norwegian (8), Polish (18), Portuguese (16), and Swedish (16).

Beyond Europe, there are some striking absences for major and influential languages spoken by many millions of persons–there is nothing in Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Panjabi, Tamil, or Turkish.

One might have expected to find more in Chinese; the paucity of Chinese works here is doubtless largely to be accounted for by the political isolation of China–most of the works here in Chinese originate in Taiwan.

The surprises are Korean and Japanese. There are more Blake essays in Korean than in all but the major European languages–French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish–but, oddly, there appears to be no translation of Blake into Korean. Doubtless the publications on Blake in Korean were significantly related to the U.S. presence there for the last half century.

Such a simplistic explanation will not do to account for the astonishing volume of publications on Blake in Japan, for the first of these long antedate the U.S. occupation of Japan. The first essay on Blake in Japan appeared in 1894, and the seminal book on Blake in Japanese Blake studies is Soetsu Yanagi's William Blake in 1914. Japanese represents about 8% of all essays about Blake for 1780-1975 recorded in Blake Books, and 58% of all the recorded xenoglot essays on Blake. For fifty years now, the majority of works on William Blake in languages other than English has been in Japanese–64% of the xenoglot works recorded for 1994-2004.

When I was an apprentice scholar, I believed that I should read everything which had been published in my field. Of course this was a council of perfection, but so should young scholars be taught. I was moderately successful with works in English, and I struggled gamely with French and German. Fortunately there was scarcely anything then on Blake in Italian and Spanish, at least no whole books about him, and I dipped into what I could find and dismissed them. I did not then know about the works in Russian and Norwegian, not to mention Esperanto and Yiddish.

Today the gap between the council of perfection and the practicalities of linguistic knowledge yawns ever wider. Even were the works all available in some great visionary electronic cumulation, who would have the knowledge to read them, not to mention who would have the time? Indeed, how many committees of linguistic prodigies would be needed to cope with works in Chinese, Farsi, Finnish, Latvian, Welsh, and Yiddish? Plainly, at the very least we shall be overlooking a very extensive proportion of what is available about Blake if we cannot read Japanese.

The gap between the practicalities of linguistic capacity and the council of perfection is formidable. But at least let us admit that we are all more extensively ignorant than we had thought.