The Story of Art by Elie Faure: A Translation Experiment.
✧ First Planted: June 2025 ✧ Last Tended: June 2025 ✧ L'Histoire de l'Art by Elie Faure ✧
This summer I will attempt to develop my mastery of prose by translating of my favourite works of all time, L'Histoire de l'Art by Elie Faure. This is an experiment to see if the study of his work will improve my own writing style.
Art, mysterious as life, speaks it. Art, like life, eludes every formulation. Yet the need to define it chases us, because it meddles with every hour of our everyday life, magnifying it with its highest forms and dishonouring it with most sinful forms. No matter our aversion to bothering to look and listen, it is impossible not to hear and see, it is impossible to relinquish the making of opinions on the realm of appearance of which art is to unveil the meaning. Historians, moralists, biologists, metaphysicians, all who question life on the secrets of its origins and its ends are in their time led to researching why we find ourselves in the works which it expresses. But they all force us to narrow our vision when we dive in the moving endlessness of the poem which humanity has sung, forgotten, sung and forgotten again since it became human, within the narrow frames of biology, of metaphysics, of morality, of history. Yet the