The fate of translation

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With two essays focused on Wordsworth, this work reframes the discussion of Hesperian aesthetics initiated by Robert Eisenhauer, highlighting the complexities of translation at the intersection of high and low textual roads. It explores the relevance of Goethe's "Der Wandrer" in the context of autobiography and reexamines supernatural agency within the Literature of Power. Wordsworth's self-assertive reinterpretation of antiquity and modernity is invigorated through satire, pastoral themes, and sonnets. The third essay transitions from Pindarizing texts by Cowley, Goethe, and Hölderlin to Matthew Barney's films, emphasizing the mimetic enthusiasm of translators and replicators in creating a "full fan-experience." John Barth's analogy between metafiction and fractal geometry sparks a discussion of works by Thomas Browne, Friedrich Schlegel, a significant painting by Philipp Otto Runge, and Poe's interpretation of The Arabian Nights. The arabesque and grotesque are framed within a passionate exploration of art's utopian aspects, resonating with Nietzsche and contemporary novelists. Eisenhauer also analyzes Padgett Powell's Edisto, presenting it as a divergent mini-epic that reinvents the South and revisits the Literature of Power as a privileged, emancipative counterfacticity, paralleling the fictive worlds of Cable, Faulkner, and Günther Grass.