The Poetry of Geography: The Ansichten der Natur in English Translation

This chapter discusses the salient differences between the two different contemporaneous versions of Humboldt’s Ansichten der Natur: Elizabeth Sabine’s Aspects of Nature (Longman, 1849) and Otté and Henry Bohn’s Views of Nature (Bohn, 1850). Humboldt initially wrangled with Elizabeth Sabine and her husband Edward, President of the Royal Society, over the English title but did not interfere further in the translation of this hybrid essay collection that combined science and aesthetics. The descriptive landscape ‘tableaux’ posed various translational difficulties in the strong imaginative appeal they carried but also the philosophical concepts underpinning them, for which Humboldt had created his own terms. Bohn and Otté enhanced the visual interest of the landscape features in Humboldt’s narrative by appealing more directly to the categories of the sublime and picturesque playing up contrasts between fore- and background; Sabine was more explicit in strengthening the spiritual message conveyed through landscape description.