Talk:Michael Huber (writer)/GA1

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Reviewer: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 16:07, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I can have a look at this. Will do a first read through and post comments before starting on the template. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 16:07, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

• First pass done. In terms of the GA standards, there's a few image-related things, and a couple of points about clarity: in particular, the article sometimes gets difficult to follow where large numbers of characters and ideas are brought in but not introduced or contextualised. A couple of places where material seems to have been more-or-less translated from non-English secondary sources, and so needs some work for WP:CLOP. Most of the rest is more-or-less advisory. Please do get back to me if you think I've been unclear or unfair anywhere. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 18:22, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

  Thank you very much for the detailed review! I probably won't have time to deal with this until Friday evening or the weekend (we currently have family visiting), but I will go through all of your comments carefully as soon as I can. —Kusma (talk) 08:18, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

  We're basically there: anything to which I haven't replied below is almost certainly sorted. I'll try and find a minute later on to formally sort through it all. Thank you for being so amenable to my nit-picks and well done on the article so far. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 06:34, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  Thank you again for the very thorough review! Even if we don't agree on everything, your perspective and your detailed comments were very helpful in developing this further (it was a relatively quick job to fill a red link at Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, and perhaps I should have polished it more before nominating). —Kusma (talk) 09:40, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

Resolved comments

Resolved comments

Lead I'm a definite infobox fan for biographies (they help with the MOS:LEAD encouragement to make the article accessible to those who won't spend very long on it): is the absence of one here a conscious choice? I'm less of a fan (often infoboxes attract lots of irrelevant and uncited info just because there are fields that could be filled out) but I don't have a strong opinion either way for this one. I tend to use infoboxes for modern-day scholars and politicians but tend not to use them for people who lived before 1900 because those often don't fit so well into the categorisations used. That's reasonable: unless the article ends up so huge that the information that would be in the infobox is massively scattered, it's very much a matter of taste. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 09:46, 3 June 2023 (UTC) his successful translations of Salomon Gessner's works into French were instrumental in popularising his works outside German-speaking areas: I'd generally encourage that proper nouns are briefly introduced (so e.g. the Swiss poet Salomon Gessner's). There's some slight grammatical ambiguity (though no real chance of confusion) here as to whether his means Gessner's or Huber's. Improved, I hope. Very much so, though Gessner still isn't introduced: is that a conscious policy? He is now! UndercoverClassicist (talk) 09:46, 3 June 2023 (UTC) Huber also published a German literary history in French, which was partially translated into German.: I had to read this a few times to work it out. Is this Choix de poésies allemandes? If so, the characterisation in the lead seems slightly at odds with that in the body. Yes, expanded. Translator in Paris La Mort d'Abel: Le Mort, surely? No. While Death is male in German as it is in Greek, it is female in all Romance languages like in Latin (for an example saying, how about mors certa hora incerta?) Quite right; must have been Malory leading me astray. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 09:39, 3 June 2023 (UTC) As in the lead, I'd suggest introducing the Encyclopédistes collectively, and perhaps at least some of them individually. Not easy to do them justice! I'll have to think about this. Did a tiny bit, but I don't really know how much to say here. I think this is enough; we only need the briefest introduction so as to not be assuming prior knowledge of our readers. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 14:38, 3 June 2023 (UTC) Likewise Melchior: it would be good for the reader to have an idea of why this man has been picked out of all those who worked at the Journal. Because that's what Heiß does :) New introduction works great. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 14:38, 3 June 2023 (UTC) Hanns Heiß: probably would be "Heiss" as an English article (as happens for Carl Friedrich Gauss, for instance). You probably were not here for the famously WP:LAME edit war at Voßstraße. I wasn't: not a huge deal, but few English-language editors will be able to type the ß. Not a major problem as long as the -ss- spelling is a redirect, and this is all hypothetical anyway: but then I gather that ß is increasingly seen as archaic in German anyway? UndercoverClassicist (talk) 09:39, 3 June 2023 (UTC) The ß is here to stay; since 1996 the choice of ß or ss actually indicates whether a syllable is long or short. Recently, a capital version has been inroduced. However, there have always been places (Switzerland, mostly) that do not use it at all. For Hanns Heiss/Hanns Heiß, I would need to research a lot more to see what is the best way to write his name; the article I cite does not use the ß at all. —Kusma (talk) 14:36, 3 June 2023 (UTC) I think we're good here for GA! UndercoverClassicist (talk) 14:38, 3 June 2023 (UTC) romanist: is this a historian of Ancient Rome (a Romanist) or a writer of romans (a novelist)? I had no idea Romanist had so many meanings in English. I mean "scholar of Romance language and/or literature", which is what the corresponding German word means. Is Romance philologist better? It's almost always "someone who studies Ancient Rome": I just suggested romanist in case it was a (sensible) calque. Yes, I "Romance philologist" is a distinct improvement. Does Romance in this example mean "of the Romance languages" (that is, some French, some Italian, some Spanish...), or of "Romance" (the early medieval post-Latin language spoken throughout Europe)? If the former, you might even want to expand to something like "a philologist studying the Romance languages, or take the opposite approach and cut down to just "philologist". UndercoverClassicist (talk) 09:39, 3 June 2023 (UTC) It is now "scholar of French literature", as I don't want to lead the reader too much into believing he was a linguist. —Kusma (talk) 16:39, 3 June 2023 (UTC) French prejudices against an uncivilised German culture: this reads as if German culture objectively was uncivilised - suggest a rephrase to be clear that this was the prejudice in question. Did a bit. Lots of names and works introduced as part of Choix de poésies allemandes, some rather obscure: most readers will need a bit more hand-holding here as to exactly who and what all of these are, and how they might be imagined to form distinct and important literary periods. Difficult. I don't quite know how to deal with this, as modern readers probably don't know a lot of German literature older than 1780. Indeed. Essentially, I think it's going to need a bit more space to breathe, with a bit of expansion to contextualise the people and the periods. How about something like this - please do hack away: Huber gave a novel separation of German literary history into four distinct eras. The earliest began with the Iron Age bards mentioned in the Germania, an anthropological work by the Roman historian Tacitus. As none of these bards' work survives, the first poem Huber included was a work of the ninth-century monk Otfrid of Weissenburg. The second era was that of the medieval Minnesang ("love song"), a genre popular from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, and of the Meistersinger, a class of artisan poets active from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Huber included among many others Sebastian Brant, the author of the satire Ship of Fools, and the Protestant reformer Martin Luther. His third era started with the seventeenth-century Silesian-born poet Martin Opitz, while the fourth and most recent era began with the Swiss polymath Albrecht von Haller, whose 1729 poem Die Alpen has been termed "a landmark paradigm shift" for its proto-Romantic invocation of the sublime alongside the classicising pastoral genre.(for Die Alpen, you could cite this article, p57-58) Thank you very much for making such a detailed suggestion! I have done something along these lines, but have refrained from highlighting Die Alpen, as I don't think the focus on Haller is warranted here (instead, I have added more names and dropped the word "Enlightenment" again). —Kusma (talk) 10:09, 4 June 2023 (UTC) Huber's introduction was translated into German and is considered a precursor of theoretical scholarship into German literary history: I'm not sure exactly what this means in practice. Firstly, is it in German in the original text, or was it translated and published separately? Secondly, what do we mean by "precursor": is it considered a work of theoretical scholarship about German literary history: if not, does it anticipate some features of that work, or merely predate it? I think it just predates it; reformulated. Clear now. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 12:39, 4 June 2023 (UTC) Might be worth saying (roughly) where the Church of Saint-André des Arcs is. Not quite sure what you're after, "in Paris"? "in the 6th Arrondissement"? "In Paris" would be fine; the area was pretty fancy and fashionable at certain points in history: was that the case in Huber's time, and if so, is it worth gesturing to that fashionability to show his social rise? UndercoverClassicist (talk) 19:37, 3 June 2023 (UTC) Added "in Paris". —Kusma (talk) 10:09, 4 June 2023 (UTC) Teacher, translator and art expert in Leipzig supported by Duchess Maria Antonia of Bavaria, the dowager Electress, and the regent, Prince Francis Xavier of Saxony.: a little ambiguous as to whether we've got two people or three: is Maria Antonia the same person as the dowager Electress? Reworded. He was given the title of professor: how did this work? Did the court put pressure on the university to give him the title (without pay), or was he some kind of academic antipope? In Germany, the title of professor and the position of professor were two different things (and sometimes still are; people on a non-professorial position who have been a Privatdozent for a certain number of years still can get the title without the position). Tried to clarify. —Kusma (talk) 10:16, 4 June 2023 (UTC) Yup, this is much clearer now. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 12:39, 4 June 2023 (UTC) the private funds of the Elector: worth giving his name? The underage Elector is mentioned earlier by Heiss; I have now mentioned him here. The title of the Handbuch is massive: you might want to split part of it (perhaps the translation and/or the subtitle) into a footnote. Done. The long list of his friends could do with some contextualisation as to who these people were. Added one or two words each. It's always good if we can give some context to sums of money in currencies with which most readers won't be familiar: was 300 Reichsthaler a little or a lot? The simplest (though not always the most helpful) method is to find an equivalent amount in £/$/€, but another is to give some context, such as an average worker's wage or the price of an easily-reckoned good. That's why I say how much they paid for rent (of a fairly fancy city centre apartment). I could mention how expensive their lodgings were when they first arrived in Leipzig during trade fair season, but I haven't found sources that convince me for other things yet. OK, I understand the strategy: could we perhaps have some indication in the text that it was a fancy apartment? Would it be fair to have "the fashionable Haugk's house" or similar? UndercoverClassicist (talk) 12:39, 4 June 2023 (UTC) Not sure it was fashionable, but it was in a central place in a fancy city. Final years and legacy Is it worth highlighting in a footnote that Therese Huber gives Anna-Louise's death as 1798? One would have thought that she'd know... As far as I can see, she says something like "they lived together until 1798" without explicitly mentioning her death, and I don't wish to speculate on this. Fair enough; I've only got Heiss to hand, who seems less cautious. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 12:39, 4 June 2023 (UTC) Images File:Michael Huber.jpg: for PD-ART, we need to be able to say that the work was published, not merely made, before 1989 (and, strictu sensu, that this publication wasn't available in the US). I don't see any information on the page about the engraving's publication; do we have any? See my edit from March here; is there a better place for that information? I'd taken that as the date that the engraving was made. (How) do we know when it was made available to the public? UndercoverClassicist (talk) 10:47, 3 June 2023 (UTC) I have no idea when the engraving was made, just that it was published in 1776 in the book/journal I linked to. —Kusma (talk) 14:24, 3 June 2023 (UTC) Ah, I see now: that's all fine. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 14:32, 3 June 2023 (UTC) File:Michael Huber (Graff).jpg needs a US PD tag. I can't positively prove that the painting was "published" early enough to be PD before 1996, and the museum where it is located currently publishes it under a NC license. I think it was publicly exhibited for more than 200 years. I do think the image should be PD, but I have removed it and replaced it by an engraving published in 1798 or 1799 (Year VII of the Republic) based on the same original Graff painting (which seems to have been lost; it seems Ludwig Ferdinand Huber took it home to Stuttgart in 1804, and I would assume it was most likely inherited by Michael's grandson Victor Aimé Huber, who did not have children). Sourcing The section about the Elector's support for him in Leipzig is pretty close to the German original, particularly in terms of the sentence structure. Slightly better now I think. Heiss is dead long enough for this to be PD, so it would be plagiarism, not copyvio. Yes, I think the reworks further up have tipped this one; I don't see an issue any more. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 12:43, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Live comments

Lead

• Born as an extramarital child: this sits oddly on two counts. Firstly, it's a bit of an odd idiom: I'm not sure I've seen it in English (is it calqued from German?), where "he was born out of wedlock" would be more common. Secondly, in this more liberated age, it feels odd to draw attention to his illegitimacy in the lead but not to the names of his parents. Did his illegitimacy have any significant impact on his life?

  If it sounds off, it is probably calqued from German. I dropped the illegitimacy from the lead; I don't think it is super important for what modern scholarly sources are interested in. It is a bit surprising that he became what he became despite his background. Knöpfler 1928 speculates that Huber might have had a noble father, but I think other than not wanting to believe that a bastard farmboy would move to Paris and become highly cultured there is no basis for this at all (so I don't mention this).

  Yes, it sounds like this angle ("rags to riches"?) is there in the sources: there might be room to push it a little more in the artlcle. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 09:46, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

  We just don't know anything about the cultural "rags". And I'm really bad at sensationalising things (I can make the juiciest stories sound boring; see terrible hooks at Template:Did you know nominations/Eliza Stephens). —Kusma (talk) 21:03, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Early life

• it is assumed he worked as a language teacher and that his financial situation was unstable: do the sources say anything as to why they assume this?

  Not really. Espagne notes that Huber was about to get a job at a military school in 1763, and says "Von Sprachstunden und gelegentlichen literarischen Übersetzungen ließ sich freilich eine Familie schlecht ernähren" ('From language lessons and occasional literary translations it was certainly difficult to feed a family'). Jordan makes some assumptions about the likely difficulties caused by illegitimacy and concludes "Apparently, he turned up in Paris around 1750 when he emerged, after initial struggles and deprivations, as a respected member of the intellectual community".

  • It does sound like at least Espagne thinks they're doing more than just assuming that Huber didn't have money: see "rags to riches" comment above. I very much respect your approach in not simply parroting what might be unsubstantiated material in the sources, though: it's often very tempting to do the opposite! UndercoverClassicist (talk) 19:37, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

    I have added a sentence about Huber mentioning that his early life was difficult (a side remark in a letter to a friend in Paris, where he hopes a young man from Saxony who goes to Paris will have an easier life than he did). —Kusma (talk) 21:03, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Teacher, translator and art expert in Leipzig

• Huber had a collection of copper engravings and used it for teaching; the young Goethe was one of his students.: was Huber still a (sort-of) professor of French at this point? I'd suggest splitting these sentences: the semicolon implies that there's some logical connection between his having an engraving collection and his teaching of Goethe, which isn't obviously the case.

  I think Goethe learned art from him, not French, but I am not absolutely certain.

  When the article says that Huber "became an art historian", does that mean that he took up a teaching post in art history? If so, I'd suggest putting the Goethe comment immediately there, rather than after the engravings. It sounds like this might be a slightly murky area. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 12:39, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

  I have seen no indication that he had a teaching post as an art teacher; as I understand it, this was more or less private tuition. Goethe also learned about art from the father of LFH's later fiancee Dora Stock, who was not affiliated with the university at all. —Kusma (talk) 13:33, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

  OK: again, sounds murky, but also sounds like we're at the edge of what we have the sources to say .UndercoverClassicist (talk) 13:42, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

  Clarified a bit after checking what Heiss says about this. —Kusma (talk) 21:03, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

• A general theory of art was included in the work: can we say any more about what Huber's general theory of art was?

  Added a bit of what the source says, but I am very much out of my field here.

  The first bit works well, but I'm now unsure when reading reflected on the principles of the collection as to precisely which "collection" is meant here. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 12:39, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

  It was ambiguous in my source, but after looking at the original text, I have clarified this. —Kusma (talk) 13:33, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Final years and legacy

• Huber was an important mediator between German and French literary circles: this is a little abstract: I'm not sure what it means in more concrete terms. The sentence also seems to be cited to his daughter-in-law's letters: should this be to an essay or introduction in the same volume?

  Tried to clarify. This is from the editorial material, which doesn't have a defined author. Compromised by using the |loc= parameter.

  The word mediator in this context is giving me pause: you can talk about how someone's work mediates between e.g. French and German literature, but to call someone a mediator really implies that they were some kind of diplomatic or other negotiator. Perhaps it's worth translating "Editorischer Bericht"? Separately, I think the usual way to cite e.g. an introduction to a writer's work is to treat it like a separate chapter in a volume: so to cite this one as "Bergmann-Törner et al 2020", using contribution=Editorischer Bericht, contributor-last=Bergmann-Törner, and so on. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 12:39, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

  Done the citations. I don't really have a better translation for "Vermittler" than "mediator", though. I could go for "facilitator of cultural exchange", but really, he was among those doing the cultural exchange, not only facilitating it. Is "cultural mediator" acceptable as it sounds less like diplomacy? —Kusma (talk) 21:03, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

  A thought: could we simplify to Huber was a significant figure in introducing German literature to France? The "cultural mediator" bit still reads as unclear or stilted, and I'm not sure it really does much more than introduce the substantive point made in the second clause. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 06:25, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  He also played a (less significant) part in the other direction (although his son did quite a bit more in translating from French). I don't want him to sound just like an evangelist of German to the French. —Kusma (talk) 09:36, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  As ever, very sensible. I think, at this point, we're into minor details: there might be a way to improve it further, but we're talking about something far in excess of the GA criteria: I'll drop this one for now. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 12:16, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

• He has been described as a precursor of German literary scholarship.: precursor means someone or something that goes before something: since he wrote German literary scholarship, this is almost certainly not the right word.

  I think the thought here is that there was no proper scholarship of German before the Brothers Grimm...

  So could we say "one of the first writers of..."? UndercoverClassicist (talk) 12:39, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

  The source says "H. gehört mit diesen Arbeiten [..] zu den historisch-theoretisch orientierten Vorläufern der deutschen Literaturgeschichtsschreibung", 'With these works, H. belongs to the historically-theoretically oriented predecessors of German literary history scholarship". I would like to avoid making claims about the origins of Germanistik; that article mentions Georg Friedrich Benecke (1762–1844) as one of the first teachers at university level, but anything I could say would need too many qualifiers. —Kusma (talk) 13:33, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

  As I read that in my very dodgy German, Vorläufern means that the author thinks he is not part of German literary-historical scholarship (Literaturgeschichtsschreibung): is that fair? If so, I think we're again in a murky area but probably as far through it as the sources will allow us to go. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 13:44, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

  Yes, he is not part of Literaturgeschichsschreibung proper in the author's view. —Kusma (talk) 21:03, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Images

• All check out now. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 14:35, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

References and spot-checks

• Optional for GA, but there's inconsistencies as to whether ISBNs, OCLCs etc are included (in general, I wouldn't bother with an OCLC or OL if an ISBN exists), and the ISBNS aren't formatted consistently.

  I have added an OCLC and formatted one ISBN, and I think it is good enough.

• Perhaps related to the comment about "uncivilised" Germans further up, the French source text Par cette anthologie, Huber se propose de combattre le préjugé d’une culture barbare ... [et] affirmer la dignité de la poésie allemande is pretty close to the article's Huber attempted to overcome French prejudices against an uncivilised German culture by showing the dignity of German poetry. A good rephrase here would sort both the earlier issue and the WP:CLOP concern.

  Better now?

  Honestly, the sentence structure is still recognisably the same, though each individual part is rephrased. How about something like Huber attempted to use this anthology to demonstrate what Buffet has called the "dignity" of German poetry, often the butt of French prejudices which saw German culture as "barbaric".?

  No more "dignity"; I hope this is now unrecognisable. —Kusma (talk) 21:03, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

  Fine from a CLOP point of view. Are "high aspirations" quite the same as "dignity", though? Aspiring to something (dignity/status/grandeur, here) means, by definition, that you don't have it. This isn't perfect, but perhaps something like "tried to assert that German poetry sufficiently elevated and dignified to stand among the European canon"? UndercoverClassicist (talk) 06:28, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  I do think it comes from a feeling of German culture being a bit behind. The "aspirations" are my interpretation of the top of Buffet p. 209, right after he explains what Huber means when he quotes "Germans can also raise onto Parnassus". —Kusma (talk) 09:32, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  Happy with that: as above, certainly a minor detail for which it would be foolish to hold up the review. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 12:16, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

• I've checked out a sample of the references: slow going for me in German, but everything I've found checks out for WP:TSI.

  Thank you for putting so much effort into this review!

Review template

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a. (prose, spelling, and grammar):

   Well over the GA standards; I'm sure that further refinements will continue to come.

   b. (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a. (reference section):

   b. (citations to reliable sources):

   c. (OR):

   d. (copyvio and plagiarism):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a. (major aspects):

   b. (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images and other media, where possible and appropriate.

   a. (images are tagged and non-free content have non-free use rationales):

   b. (appropriate use with suitable captions):

7. Overall:

   Pass/fail:

   A lovely article that has done a good job of navigating some tricky elisions and ambiguities in the available sources. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 12:21, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

(Criteria marked are unassessed)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.