The manuscript now known as Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn ii.1, first came to public attention in the mid-nineteenth century. An initial list of the contents of ‘MS Porkington 10’ furnished by Thomas Phillipps was quickly extended by Frederic Madden, and both their descriptive efforts informed the report prepared by Alfred J. Horwood for the Historic Manuscripts Commission. All three scholars focussed on the identification of the small volume's multiple texts and made no mention of its copyists beyond noting the inscription ‘H. Hattun’, which Madden believed was the name of the scribe or compiler. The manuscript's scribal production received no investigation until the 1950s when Auvo Kurvinen posited a multiplicity of scribes to match its multiple textual contents. Kurvinen identified nineteen hands and provided a table of scribal stints labelled A–S, aligned to the manuscript's foliation and to a numbered catalogue of fifty-five texts; the latter helpfully extended the nineteenth-century descriptions by including transcriptions of many shorter texts and bibliographical references, but the account of the scribal hands lacked substantiating detail.

Such a large number of scribes seems inherently improbable for such a small volume, and Kurvinen noted that some hands looked very similar, yet her estimation has not been much questioned. Gisela Guddat-Figge accepted the total of nineteen while repeating the caveat about the similarity of some hands.

Onomatopoeia does not necessarily make for bad poetry, but it frequently elicits bad criticism. Indeed, on one occasion, over-analysis of onomatopoeia proved so bad that it helped foment an entire counter-critical movement in exasperated response: New Criticism, demanding higher standards of close-reading as its characteristic mode, was vitalised by one such exasperated encounter. In his merciless review of ‘woman critic’ Elizabeth Atkins’ ‘not distinguished’ critical biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay – an ‘unintellectual’ ‘woman poet’ suffering a ‘deficiency in masculinity’ who ‘fascinates the male reviewer but at the same time horrifies him a little too’ – New Criticism's founding father John Crowe Ransom offered an extended and acerbic evaluation of Atkins’ critical acumen (which was, admittedly, limited by her reactionary readerly-response to any modernising poetics from Hopkins to Eliot, rejected tout court as nihilist ‘crossword puzzle[s]’). Throughout his meticulously brutal review – ‘which I hope was not objectionable’ (it was) – Ransom repeatedly balks at what he describes as Atkins’ ‘absurd’ predilection for ‘acts of fancy’ when engaged in practical criticism, at which moments, he insists, she betrays a propensity for one particular ‘ill-advised’ scholarly ‘fallacy …

which is common, and … of a venerable lineage:’ the literary-critical tendency towards over-reading onomatopoeia (here understood both narrowly as the lexical mimicry of a sound – the imitative etymology of ‘murmur,’ for instance, in Tennyson's much-cited ‘the moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees’ – or more diffusely as the imitative quality of poetry's verbal texture generated, for instance, by ‘immemorial’ and ‘innumerable,’ neither of which are themselves etymologically echoic but which sustain an onomatopoeic hum).

How varied are the forms of human misery! How inexhaustible is this treasure trove for the poet, who feels urged, more by his conscience than vanity and self-interest, to stimulate the numbed nerves of pity in his fellow citizens for a hundred wretches whom our fashionable philosophy rejects with cruel smiles! We live in a century where compassion and sensitivity are no longer uncommon: so how is it that one finds so many unfortunate people among us? Are they always unworthy, those who appear as such to us, with our mental faculties enriched by brighter prospects in morality? Alas! I am afraid we too often neglect to take the time to consider this. Because the more beautifully we learn to cover up our injustices, the more our excessive human fellowship becomes inflexible misanthropy. Finally, we will no longer be able to discover the slightest moral beauty in anything but ourselves. Consequently, we will believe ourselves justified in only loving the human race for its species, not its individuals.

The following story, which was taken from the estate of a master of philosophy in Leipzig, will, I hope, reveal various new paths on the great map of human destinies that none of our travel writers have yet thought to warn about, although our hero was not the first to be shipwrecked on them.

Zerbin was a young man from Berlin with a bold, glowing imagination and a heart that promised to make something of itself.

It's cheering to find how excited Berlioz is to be able, for once, to offer almost unstinted praise to a singer, in this case Delphine Ugalde.

It's rather a good idea to set the opera in the capital of French Africa. From this bizarre mixture of manners and costumes emerge comical contrasts and situations likely to lend unexpectedness and variety to the musical style. But these contrasts, piquant though they may be, cannot exempt the librettist from attaching an interesting plot to them and inventing a theme that is piquant and original. Unfortunately, it seems as though he said to himself: ‘Here's a frame, the composer will add the picture’. So, here's this frame in two acts, a gilt frame, decorated with pearls, muslin, lovely Arab heads, and French moustaches, not to mention the heads of Negros, a eunuch, and a muezzin.

I’m afraid I may commit more than one mistake in this analysis. Despite all my concentration, I took a long time to understand what was happening; words reached me only indistinctly or didn't reach me at all. The dialogue, written in verse, unlike the general usage of the Opéra-Comique, added to my puzzlement.

Clearly, in its physiognomy and comic nature, the opera is close to two works that have brought popularity to M. Grisar: L’Eau merveilleuse and Gilles le ravisseur, not forgetting Le Tableau parlant which Grétry was not alone in painting, and whose libretto did not merely make a frame. Here's what I thought was the plot of Le Caïd:

The curtain goes up, it's a square in Algiers, it's still dark with no sun in the sky. A small troupe of Arabs, marching in step, utters this familiar cry: ‘Be quiet! Let's hide! No movement! Let's be silent!’ (in verse, naturally). We gather that they’re stalking somebody and that they don't want to be spotted.

Berlioz's article ‘De l’Imitation musicale’, published in the RGM (1 and 8 January 1837), has twice been published in English translation: by Jacques Barzun, but with cuts, and the same translation with cuts restored and translated by Edward T. Cone. But given that Cone's version dates from over fortyfive years ago, and Barzun's from over seventy, I feel it is worth bringing out a new version of this important essay. Why Berlioz should have chosen this subject in 1837 is uncertain: it would seem unlikely that anyone had complained, some six years after the first performance of Symphonie fantastique, about the noise of the guillotine. But the idea of imitation in music continued to exercise composers and critics for years, with many declaring the innate superiority of ‘pure’ music. Satie's quip on the first movement (‘From dawn to midday at sea’) in Debussy's La Mer, that ‘there was especially a little moment between half-past ten and a quarter to eleven that I found amazing’, took aim at the composer's chronological exactitude. Likewise, Ravel in 1922 refused to accept a widespread reaction that La Valse tapped into the violence of World War I, saying, ‘You should see in it only what comes from the music’.

I’m not talking here about imitation in the sense generally accepted in connection with the writing of fugues but about the reproduction of certain sounds, and also about the description or musical painting of things whose existence is revealed to us only by our eyes.

This chapter traces the historical developments of conservation practices in southern Africa in order to situate the chronic liminality witnessed around the cases. A picture is built that portrays the systematic dispossession of local people of their rights over forest resources across South Africa and Zimbabwe. In this chapter, the conundrums presented in the Introduction that facilitated the loss of rights and access are examined in relation to how they came about. As such, emphasis is placed on the separation of nature (forests) from people, the evolution of the modern African state and state agencies in managing protected areas, as well as the entrenchment of introduced property relations on local people around forests. Each of these conundrums is examined from the time of the first reservation of forests for conservation in the late 19th century. For each, the conundrum that has entrenched the loss of rights and access is situated and located within the political economy of each country, in order to set the context of the dimensions of the politics that will follow from each case in subsequent chapters. The period that this chapter covers is rather long and, as such, the focus is restricted to major developments around each of the conservation practices that I trace for the argument made in the book. The rest of the chapter is organised into two major sections for each of the different countries, covering specific periods and outlining significant developments under review. First, the period from 1870 to 1930 – constituting the early colonial dispossession, followed by the period between 1930 and 1980, the main colonial and apartheid period, and lastly, the period between 1980 and 1994. For South Africa, the last period marked the end of apartheid and the ushering in of a democratic dispensation, while for Zimbabwe, the period marked the post-independence era filled with many expectations for people within and around forests.

We are delighted to present this 32nd volume of the Goethe Yearbook, our second as editors and one in which we have reaped the rewards of the ongoing return to in-person conferences with the easing of the COVID-19 pandemic: fully six of our contributions this issue originated as conference panels, and as we write this, we have just returned from the Goethe Society of North America's Atkins Conference in San Antonio. This conference was a welcome reminder of the importance of openminded community and engaged scholarship in turbulent times nationally, globally, and for the planet, and we look forward to incorporating papers presented there into future volumes of the Goethe Yearbook.

In this volume, Joanna Raisbeck's “The Wisdom of Silenus, or Philosophical Pessimism in Günderrode” analyzes two recently discovered sonnets by Karoline von Günderrode to uncover an a priori pessimism that anticipates nineteenth-century thinkers. This is followed by Brian Donarski's scholarly introduction to his own translation of Lenz's Zerbin, or Recent Philosophy—the first time this text has appeared in English. Ethan Blass reads surprising similarities in staging and visual language between Goethe's Die natürliche Tochter and Hitchcock's film Marnie to argue that Goethe's theatrical innovations are protocinematic. The next four articles, by Claire Baldwin, Austen Hinkley, Jürgen Overhoff, and William H. Carter, offer a comprehensive exploration of the theme of “Gambling in the Age of Goethe.”

Why, twenty years after its acquisition, was a precious but barely legible archaeological fragment transformed by a restorer into a luminous ‘shiny object’ [Figs 11.1–11.2]? In seeking to attract more people to a new museum building than the old university museum, did a curator hope it would catch the eye of American visitors? In many contexts medieval art had been going out of favour, and most of the Harvard art museum's Romanesque sculptures, once renowned among art historians, were left out of the new installation. Conversely, the sudden public appearance of this small image in stained glass ended years in obscurity. A pronouncement that the main figure is Thomas Becket and that the panel is from the cathedral where everyone knows he was murdered represents new knowledge only to a general audience, emphasising for them the prestige status of an otherwise unfamiliar medieval object. Ironically, in the process of rendering the figures legible, and by the substitution of bright new glass for the older pieces supplied a hundred years ago in Canterbury, all material evidence for the panel's provenance has been eliminated. Have twenty-first-century practices of restoration reverted to the make-like-new ideal of the nineteenth century? Does the shabbiness of aging offend, or perhaps bore, present-day sensibilities?

This is the last section of a feuilleton which includes a long review of an opera by Maillard and an account of music performed at a prize-giving in the Sainte- Chapelle. Jean-François Sudre (1787–1862), French violinist, composer and pedagogue, trained two friends to play and interpret his musical code. A given note would represent a word or a letter of the alphabet. The trio toured France, answering questions from the audience using Sudre's violin. A military application was soon suggested: a bugler could transmit orders to a regiment by playing an appropriate tune. In the end this promising idea came to nothing because the system was too vulnerable to wind and weather.

M. Sudre is currently offering us a new and melancholy example of the fate suffered by all inventors in our inattentive, forgetful, and jealous society. For twenty years now he's been fighting, swimming against the current, talking, writing, experimenting, and proving that a discovery of the greatest importance for armies and navies, and even for the rapid propagation of peacemaking ideas is in his possession. He proved that this discovery is his, that he made it on his own, and that subsequently he has perfected and simplified it to the point of making it extremely easy to use; and for twenty years he has been ignored, made fun of, given promises that haven't been kept, had his confidences shockingly abused and, in the meantime, the poor man exists on his own resources and those of his friends.