Ben Crabstick in Translation and Literature

When thinking about the sublime, most people would spontaneously refer to an aesthetic experience -be it in nature, in art or in the self -that destabilises us, that evokes conflicting emotions of awe and fear, of horror and fascination, or that escapes our human understanding. codified by edmund burke and Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, the sublime often appears as the impressive and the awe-inspiring that is opposed to the orderly and balanced nature of the beautiful. In this (simplified) narrative, the sublime is then often historicised as a relatively late concept or, as Jean-françois Lyotard would have it, as a mode of sensibility that is specific to modernity itself. however, the sublime is a much older notion and cannot be confined to the birth of aesthetics in the eighteenth century. originally, the sublime is a rhetorical concept that finds its main source in the treatise Peri hypsous (On the Sub lime), probably written in the first century Ad by an anonymous author, who is generally referred to as Longinus. the importance of On the Sublime resides in the fact that it deals with the strong persuasive and emotional effect of speech or literature on the listener or reader. It addresses the question of how language can move us deeply, how it can transport, overwhelm, and astonish the reader or listener. It destabilises so to speak the fixed position between a reader, an author and a text or speech. 'for the true sublime', Longinus writes, 'naturally elevates us: uplifted with a sense of proud exaltation, we are filled with joy and pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we heard.' 1 So already from its very beginnings the sublime appears as a profoundly liminal concept that questions the boundaries between representation and the subject beholding it. As emma Gilby has argued elsewhere, the Longinian sublime is always about 'an encounter'. 2 It creates a close contact, or even a clash, with the object represented, while it also establishes a deep, indeed intimate, communication between an author and a reader or listener through a text or speech.

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2021

Despite its place in the history of Rhetoric, the treatise On the Sublime seems to move away from a school of rhetoric as an art of persuasion based on learningoriented rules and precepts. Although Longinus is part of the rhetorical tradition of his time, in his view, which has nothing to do with stylistics, the sublime is not definable through the formal language of rhetoric because it goes beyond the limits of that art. The treatise presents what we may call an aesthetics of the unlimited and the impossible, evident in the examples of sublime moments in literary texts given by the author .

Costelloe, Timothy M., ed. The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 13 + 304 pp ISBN 978-0-521-14367-7; Eck, Caroline van, Stijn Bussels,MaartenDelbeke, Ju¨ rgen Pieters, eds. Translations of the Sublime: The EarlyModern Recep- tion and Dissemination of Longinus’ Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre. Leiden: Brill, 2012. xix + 272 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-22955-6

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2023

Longinus introduced sublimity as a type of eminence or excellence of discourse, especially in literature and oratory. In ancient times, poetry was believed to be the finest product of art and this can be traced in the writings of great Greek thinkers like Aristotle, Plato and Longinus. Longinus advocates for the assimilation of certain qualities which, together, produces sublime feelings or expressions. It should be noted that there is distinction between grandeur and sublimity; grandeur produces amazement and wonder, but sublimity encompasses a combination of wonder and an ability to transport the mind with an irresistible power. Longinus declares that Sublimity, if produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator’s whole power as a single blow. This paper will try to investigate different stages of the ‘sublime’ as a style in poetry within the rhetorical tradition of the ancient Greco-Roman world, its core nature, and the way it operates to build the soul of a lofty art product. It will also try to re-understand Longinus’s theory of sublimity, its importance and relevance.

Aesthetics 16, 2012