An examination of Johan Huizinga’s lost battle with an obdurate English translator.
It’s hardly a secret that academics, just like the rest of us (or perhaps even more so), can sometimes exhibit shocking levels of arrogance and stubbornness when encountering a new perspective that doesn’t fit in with their established worldview, even when such innovative ideas are coming from world-leading thinkers with an established reputation for pioneering insights, like the profoundly erudite cultural historian Johan Huizinga.
And so we find that, in the preface to his groundbreaking work Homo Ludens, Huizinga goes to a considerable effort to explicitly detail both his intellectual motivations for the work and the knee-jerk obstinacy he had repeatedly experienced when presenting the series of lectures that it was based on.
For many years the conviction has grown upon me that civilization arises and unfolds in and as play. I took it as the theme from my annual address as Rector of Leyden University in 1933, and afterwards for lectures in Zürich, Vienna and London, in the last instance under the title: ‘The Play Element of Culture’.
Each time my hosts wanted to correct it to ‘in’ Culture, and each time I protested and clung to the genitive, because it was not my object to define the place of play among all the other manifestations of culture, but rather to ascertain how far culture itself bears the character of play.”
Well, that must have been pretty exasperating. But imagine what Huizinga’s reaction might have been to the English translation of his book, where the translator explicitly inserted the following footnote to justify his decision to subtitle it in precisely the way the great cultural historian was adamant to avoid:
Logically, of course, Huizinga is correct; but as English prepositions are not governed by logic I have retained the more euphonious ablative in this sub-title.”
I don’t know if Johan Huizinga ever lived to see the English version of Homo Ludens—he died in 1945, a few weeks before the liberation of the Netherlands, after having been held in detention by the Nazis and banned from returning to Leiden University, where he held the position of Professor of General History.
It seems safe to say that, directly confronted as he was with the wholesale destruction of virtually everything he’d believed in and worked for throughout his remarkably productive life, the thought of an English translator tenaciously clinging to a mistranslated subtitle would hardly have provoked torrents of anguish.
But it certainly wouldn’t have helped.
Howard Burton, July 19, 2024
Howard is the creator of the 4-part docuseries Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), a comprehensive examination of the historical and socio-cultural importance of games with a focus on the remarkable impact of chess on culture, art, science, social empowerment and more. The film is dedicated to the memory of Johan Huizinga. Visit the film page HERE for more details. He has also written an accompanying book, Chessays: Travels Through the World of Chess.
