Benedetto Croce in other languages

From a young age, Benedetto Croce was a widely translated author: in essence, in terms of the number of works translated, the standing and prestige of the publishing houses and translators, and the debates that the translations themselves sparked, his case is comparable, within that generation, only to that of Gabriele d’Annunzio.

Indeed, his book on Marx and historical materialism, published in 1900 and already the subject of much debate in Europe ever since the essays comprising it had first appeared in journals, was translated into French in 1901 and into Russian in 1902. However, it was the work that in 1902 propelled the thirty-six-year-old Croce into the limelight of the Italian cultural scene—Aesthetics as a Science of Expression and General Linguistics—that was rapidly translated, even before the Great War, into practically all the major languages of culture: into French in 1904, into German in 1905, into Czech in 1907, into English in 1909, into Spanish in 1912, and into Japanese and Hungarian in 1915. Other important translations followed in the immediate post-war period. This was the case for all of Croce’s major philosophical, historiographical and critical works, which continued to be translated as they were published in Italian, and with greater systematicity and scope into English and German. In the German-speaking world, between the 1920s and 1930s, the leading academic publishing house, Mohr Siebeck in Tübingen, launched a comprehensive multi-volume edition of Croce’s philosophical and historical works, employing scholars of particular renown as translators (from Karl Vossler and Julius von Schlosser to Erich Auerbach).

The period of translations that followed shortly after publication in Italian did not, in essence, come to an end until Croce’s death in 1952, when a phase of waning interest in his work began, first and foremost in his homeland and, consequently, at least to some extent, abroad as well. That said, a number of significant translations can still be noted from those years: Aesthetics in Chinese in 1958; the Breviary of Aesthetics in Danish in 1960; History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century in Hebrew in 1953, in Japanese in 1957, as well as in a French translation, reprinted several times, in 1959. Furthermore: the Breviary of Aesthetics in Polish in 1961, Aesthetics in Serbo-Croatian in 1960, and several translations into Spanish during the 1950s (the Correspondence between Croce and Vossler, Goethe, The Character of Modern Philosophy, and subsequently a new translation of Aesthetics).

As the 1980s approached, both in Italy and abroad, a different kind of interest began to emerge in Croce’s work compared to that which, with varying degrees of approval and rejection, had characterised it up to that point: in other words, there was a shift from interest in a much-discussed contemporary figure to the kind of interest reserved for an author who is increasingly perceived as a classic. Both a consequence and a cause of this shift were the launch in 1989 of a series of reprints edited by Giuseppe Galasso for the Adelphi publishing house, and the national edition—of a strictly philological nature—of Croce’s entire, vast body of work for the publisher Bibliopolis in Naples. This national edition was launched in 1981 and is now nearing completion. During the same period, important studies appeared that reshaped and deepened critical perspectives on Croce: one need only think, by way of example, of the monographs by Giuseppe Galasso and Gennaro Sasso in Italy, those of Charles Boulay in France and David Roberts in the United States, or those by Márton Kaposi in Hungary and Karl Egon Lönne in Germany.

His established status as a classic in philosophy, historiography and criticism, as well as a model of essayistic prose, naturally had consequences for the renewed impetus towards translations; these were sometimes mere reprints of old translations—perhaps revised and with new introductions—but more often involved translations redone from scratch, in accordance with standards of fidelity and rigour that could not have been met at the time of the first translations, which were produced almost simultaneously with the original. We can mention here only the major or most significant of these new translations published in book form, omitting the many individual essays that have been translated in journals and pamphlets. To provide an exhaustive account of the translations of Croce’s works, even limiting oneself to books alone, would in fact require a great deal of space.

We therefore highlight the new English translation of La poesia, published in 1981, edited by Giovanni Gullace for the University of Illinois Press; and Storia d’Europa nel secolo XIX, translated into Japanese by Naoyoshi Sakai in 1982 for Sobun-sha in Tokyo (two years later, the work was also translated into Korean by Bong Ho Kim). Then there is a new English translation of the Breviary of Aesthetics, edited by Patrick Romanell for the University Press of America in 1983; this work was also translated into Hebrew that very same year by Gaio Schiloni, published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad in Tel Aviv. Furthermore, selecting from among the most significant works, mention should be made of a German translation by Ferdinand Fellmann—extensively annotated and with an introduction—of History Reduced to the General Concept of Art, published by Meiner in Hamburg in 1984; and a new translation of Aesthetics into Serbo-Croatian by Sanja Roić, published in Zagreb in 1991. This same cornerstone of Croce’s philosophy was translated once again into English by Colin Lyas, published by Cambridge University Press in 1992, and into Portuguese by Omayr José de Moraes in São Paulo in 2016. The Breviary of Aesthetics was the subject of a new Portuguese translation by José Serra, published in Coimbra in 2008.

Of particular note is the interest that Croce has been attracting in the Far East for several decades. Notable translations include History as Thought and Action, translated into Japanese in 1988 by Tadao Uemura—who also compiled a two-volume anthology of Croce’s writings on political theory, published in 1986—and the 2011 translation of The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Also significant is the stream of new translations in China since the early years of this century (earlier translations were mostly based on English versions). In this regard, the prolific work of Tian Shigang is worth noting; he translated History of Europe and Theory and History of Historiography in 2005, and in 2007 Contribution to the Critique of Myself and Aesthetics (though of the latter work, only the theoretical section), again for China Social Sciences Press. Also published by the same Beijing-based publisher in 2005 were the History of the Kingdom of Naples and the History of Italy from 1871 to 1915, both translated by Wang Tianqing.

It remains to briefly mention the most significant anthologies of Croce’s essays in translation. Worth mentioning in French are the anthology of historical and political writings edited by Sergio Romano, published in 1983 by Éditions du Seuil, and the anthology of aesthetic writings edited by Gilles Tiberghien, published by Gallimard in 1991. An English-language anthology of essays on aesthetics and literary criticism, edited by Myra E. Moss, was published by the State University of New York Press in 1990, whilst Márton Kaposi is responsible for a wide-ranging selection of philosophical writings in Hungarian, published in Budapest by Gondolat in 1987; in 1990, another anthology of political writings, edited by Pál Biró and Imre Kinszki, was published in the same language by Kossuth.