Victor Proetz - His Career As An Author

His Career As An Author

In 1934, while living in New Haven, Connecticut Proetz wrote and illustrated a series of articles called Comparative Studies of Regional Architecture in the United States published by House & Garden. Later he would write various articles about contemporary architecture, decorative arts in Sweden, the Classical Revival in America, and kindred subjects. His article, Private Museums and The Virtue of Curiosity, a history of the private museum, was published in 1962 by The American Association of Museums's Museum News.

Proetz self-published a book of poetry in 1965 called Milestones Under Water and Other Monticules.

In 1971, five years after his death, the New Yorker magazine published his essay The Astonishment of Words (also published in book form by the University of Texas press). It details the inadequacy of the translated versions of such texts as:

• The English translation of the Gaelic Rune of Hospitality
• Yankee Doodle
• W. H. Auden's Look, Stranger
• William Blake's Tiger Tiger
• Robert Burns's To a Mouse
• excerpts from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky
• Emily Dickinson's I Lost a World—the other day
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan

Examples of these texts are included, translated to French and German, then translated back into English. Through the whole essay he marvels at and displays the absurdity of such a task.