Peter Burke, born in London, UK, 1937. Ph.D. from Oxford University. Professor Emeritus of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.
KB Fellow (1 Februari 2005 – 30 April 2005)
GILBERTO FREYRE (1900-87): AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT
I came to NIAS and the KB expecting to devote half of my time to a book about Gilberto Freyre, to be written jointly with my wife Maria Lúcia, and half to the cultural history of translation in early modern Europe. This double project had the advantage of being adapted to a Fellowship supported by two institutions, held in two places.
Circumstances conspired to modify the original plan. Maria Lúcia needed first to finish her book in Portuguese on the relation between Freyre and English culture. While she was doing this, I drafted two articles about Gilberto which will be utilised in our book.
At the same time, I was working on translation beginning with the lecture on translation (of which the KB needed a text by the end of March). As expected, there were valuable resources in the Netherlands not only for this lecture, but also for my current work on translation into Latin and translating modern history.
An invitation to give a lecture at the Meertens Instituut, for which I decided to speak on the social history of Dutch, led not only to useful encounters with linguists but to the invitation to publish the lecture as one of their pamphlets. To revise and footnote it properly I extended my reading and, thanks to the NIAS book-fetching service, I was able to find and study a number of books and articles which would be difficult if not impossible to find in Britain.