Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Lafcadio Hearn’: A New Translation

Abstract

Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s short essay ‘Lafcadio Hearn’ (1904) provides a brief but powerful insight into the resonance of Hearn’s Japanese writing for European decadent and modernist writing in the early twentieth century. Writers and artists turning to Japan since the mid nineteenth century were building on a history of transnational engagements between East Asia and Central Europe, as well as long-established artistic and intellectual practices of European Orientalism.[i] Studies of japonisme have demonstrated the specific place that Japan held in German and Austrian imaginations by 1900, especially in Hofmannsthal’s Vienna.[ii] As European knowledge of Japanese art and culture developed over the nineteenth century, Hearn’s work fuelled fascination with both the ‘old Japan’ and contemporary Japanese life.[iii] Hofmannsthal’s essay shows this tension in his response to Hearn’s work: his elegiac tone in describing ancient Japanese spiritual practices is combined with stark images of the ongoing Russo-Japanese War, his condescending praise of Japanese intellectuals placed alongside weary dissatisfaction with the ‘burden’ of Western culture.

[i] See especially Joanne Miyang Cho, Lee M. Roberts, and Christian W. Spang, eds, Transnational Encounters between Germany and Japan: Perceptions of Partnership in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). On German and Austrian orientalism in this period more broadly, see Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms (University of Michigan Press, 2004); Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Katharina Herold-Zanker, Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880–1920: ‘The Indispensable East’ (Oxford University Press, 2024).

[ii] Mirjam Dénes, Györgyi Fajcsák, Piotr Spławski, and Toshio Watanabe, eds, Japonisme in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts, 2020), and Aglaja Kempf, ‘Oskar Kokoschka und der Japonismus: Wien um 1900 und die japanische Ästhetik’, in Oskar Kokoschka: Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven, ed. by Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold (de Gruyter, 2021), pp. 402–20.

[iii] See Kathleen M. Webb, Lafcadio Hearn and his German Critics: An Examination of His Appeal (Lang, 1984), and Gerhard Schepers, ‘Exoticism in Early Twentieth-Century German Literature on Japan’, in Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945, ed. by Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harald Wippich (Routledge, 2006), pp. 98–116.