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"Travel and Translation"

Posted On December 13, 2013 | 10:35 am | by lainw | Permalink
Garden and Landscape Studies Colloquium | November 1, 2013

On November 1, 2013, the Garden and Landscape Studies Program held a one-day colloquium on "Travel and Translation." Its aim was to explore the ways in which landscape design ideas are transmitted and exchanged—sometimes through literal travel and translation, and sometimes through study, absorption, and interpretation. 

This colloquium also marked the launching of Ex Horto: Dumbarton Oaks Texts in Garden and Landscape Studies, a new series comprising translations of classic and rare texts on garden history and on the philosophy, art, and techniques of landscape architecture.

The first two volumes were published in the fall of 2013. The first, an edition and translation of a manuscript owned by Dumbarton Oaks, is Travel Report: An Apprenticeship in the Earl of Derby's Kitchen Gardens and Greenhouses at Knowsley, England, written by the German court gardener Hans Jancke in 1874–75. The other is the translation of Die Gartenkultur des 20. Jahrhunderts (Garden Culture of the Twentieth Century) by the German designer Leberecht Migge, which appeared on the centenary of the book's original publication in 1913.

Given that the first two titles in the translation series are German, the focus of the colloquium was on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany and Central Europe, with comparative talks on Italy, England, Ireland, and the United States. Speakers included David Haney from the University of Kent, who translated Garden Culture and discussed Migge's response to English and American ideas about metropolitan park design; Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn from Leibniz University Hannover, who addressed Jancke’s travels in the context of the education of gardeners in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany; and Hubertus Fischer, also from Leibniz University Hannover, who focused on the travels and travel reports of German court gardeners in the early nineteenth century, especially Heinrich Ludolph Wendland. In addition, Finola O'Kane Crimmins from University College Dublin spoke on the travels of Irish revolutionaries in France and the impact of these experiences on the formation of their ideas; Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto from the University of Pennsylvania discussed the response to Palladian villa gardens in the context of the Grand Tour; and Kristof Fatsar from Corvinus University Budapest spoke about the history of adopting English landscape garden forms in Hungary in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.