General Notes on the Translations from the German Contained Herein
1. They are all of them wholly original efforts neither profiting from nor handicapped by consultation of other translations, and hence my exclusive copyright. I feel obliged to make this declaration out of fear not so much of willful and outright theft--for Lord knows the interest in them hitherto evinced has been slight enough!--as of the casual stopper-by's inadvertent misconstruction of this site as a part-time Project Gutenberg-syndicating engine.
2. Only those translations postscripted by "THE END" are even provisionally complete; the rest are (at most) so-called works in progress.
3. The date of the post in which a translation is contained corresponds to the date of its most recent augmentation or revision.
4. Over the years, as a reader, I have assembled a collection of bones to pick with recent translators of the modern classics; and in the translations here assembled I am trying to pick all of these bones at once, as best I can, from the opposite end, in full and humble cognizance of my own translatorial tyrohood. To lay these bones out on the table (again, from a readerly point of view): the typical present-day English translation out of French, Russian, or German seems to me to suffer from an improbable combination of pedantry, absentmindedness, and populism. The pedantry consists in an overestimation of the peculiarities of the so-called source language to the inevitable detriment of smooth reading in the English version. Samuel Weber, co-translator of Adorno's Prismen, epitomizes the pedantic translative ethos thus: "Anschauung, Vorstellung, Aufhebung, formed, like so many philosophical terms in German, from verbs describing familiar and rudimentary actions, are rendered [by previous translators] into an English which deprives them of their effective connotations and thereby of their truth-content, generally by latinizing them[.]" Now, the fact that German relies to a far greater extent than English upon our common Teutonic vocabulary (or Wörterverzeichnis) is obvious to every first-year high school student of the language. But from this obvious fact it does not follow, on the one hand, that Teutonically-derived words in either language are axiomatically immune to the "deprivation of their effective connotations" or, on the other, that Latin-derived words (again, in either language) are axiomatically condemned to live in perpetual hifalutin exile from the realm of the "familiar" and the "rudimentary." Case in point of my first hand: August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s rendition of thrift (in Hamlet, I.ii.180: "Thrift, thrift: Horatio the funeral bak'd meats / did coldly furnish the marriage tables.") as Wirtschaft. Thrift, as it so happens, numbers among the homeliest and down-to-earth of English abstract nouns, denoting as it does a policy of fiscal restraint applied on a mandatorily small scale, that of a personal or—at biggest—household budget; whereas Wirtschaft in German is an altogether more capacious and flightworthy abstraction, denoting as it does a fiscal policy of any sort (however niggardly or prodigal) on any scale whatsoever (from personal to international). Wirtschaft may have “originated as a [noun] describing a familiar and rudimentary [condition],” but its prevailing connotations for a present-day German speaker are apt to be no more “familiar” or “rudimentary” than the peaks and troughs of the DAX index as charted in the Wirtschaft (i.e., Economics or Business) section ofthe FAZ. Case in point of my second hand: AWvS's rendition of philosophy (ibid., I.v.167: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.") as Schulweisheit. Now, philosophy emphatically does not stand in relation to Schulweisheit as, say, dictionary does to Wörterbuch: that is to say, the teutonically-derived Schulweisheit is emphatically not the most obvious notional German equivalent of the Hellenically-derived philosophy. The most obvious German notional equivalent of philosophy is in fact the equally Hellenogenetic Philosophie, about which there lingers not so much as a whiff of schulweisheitlich "unfamiliarity." Schelgel opted instead for Schulweisheit possibly because he believed (on impeccable philological grounds, for all I know) that in this case Shakespeare was employing philosophy as a kind of synecdoche for "book learning" rather than in its primary and more specific sense; or, possibly, in order to forestall any construal of the "philosophy" in question as Horatio's personal Weltanschauung. Either way, in so opting Schlegel was performing the office of an editor and thus exceeding the proper bounds of his bailiwick as translator (unless these can justly be said to encompass the "translation" of Renaissancese into the pan-European vernacular of the late eighteenth century).
Of course, neither of these violations of the sacred English Sprachesgeist has ever menaced Schlegel's Hamlet with the remotest prospect of dislodgement from its perch atop the steeple of the Pantheon of translations into German; and four cheers to that, I say. Indeed, I would never have chosen this text as the shoe to try on my Anglophone other foot had I not known from the start that, notwithstanding its extra half-size above my official measurement, it would still turn out to be a pretty comfortable fit. For the point to be driven home here, contra the pedants, is that the most well-founded cavils against a translation on behalf of the so-called source language must yield to the adjudication of the so-called target language's idiomatic high tribunal; in other words, to the question of "Will it play in Peoria?" or "Wird das in Darmstadt spielen?"
For these selfsame self-flagellating pedants on our side of the pond-and-sleeve, though/of course, it's less a question of whether it will play in Peoria as of whether Peoria is worth playing in in the first place. Let's not mince words here: for these people English is an all-around shitty language, suitable, at best, for the advertising of commercial products, the provision of emergency instructions to the mentally retarded, and the like. Hence, according to their lights, insofar as a given translation into English is in harmony with the native genius of our tongue, it more closely harmonizes with, say, a London street atlas addressed to Tarzan than with its source text. Again (and at greater length) I quote from Samuel Weber's introduction to Prisms:
"The criterion of clarity [in English] is rigidly enforced by a grammar which taboos long sentences as clumsy and whose ideal remains brevity and simplicity at all costs. Polemical exceptions, from Sterne to Byron, have only reinforced the prevailing maxim that if something is worth saying it can be said directly and to the point. This tendency to break thought down into its smallest, self-contained, monadic parts is probably the most formidable barrier to dialectics. The absence of word-genders and inflections make long sentences prohibitively clumsy if not impossible, and thus prevent or discredit the complex hypotactic constructions which are the life-blood of dialectical thinking."
The first thing it occurs to me to do once I've weathered the full brunt of this here tirade is to shift my pince-nez a few micrometres back and take a second look through screwed-up eyes at that phrase "polemical exceptions, from Sterne to Byron"; and after I've done that, what first strikes me is the narrow historical compass of the thing: "What about," I ask myself, "the roster of 'polemical exceptions' alive during or before 1768 [Sterne's year of decease]? What of Robert Burton, Thomas Browne, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell? And what about the roster of exceptions born since 1788 [Byron's birth year]? What of...well, whom?" And here's where I'm struck by the second thing, namely that I really am rather hard pressed to come up with any post Byronian additions to the polemical-exceptional canon. Mind you, this hard-pressedness is hardly the byproduct or epiphenomenon of, say, a thorough acquaintance with the contents of the second half of the Norton English anthology along with the latter eight-ninths of the American one; it would seem, indeed and to the contrary, to be the byproduct and epiphenomenon of my at best spotty acquaintance with those selfsame contents. To my eyes Mr. Weber's caricature of the
English Sprachesgeist suggests that the syllabus of his Anglophonic literary education from kindergarten to graduate school was confined to the works of Ernest Hemingway; but I freely confess that this impression may be owing to the fact that Ernest Hemingway was one of the very few Anglophone writers of the past two centuries whose works formed part of my own literary education.
The simple, sobering fact is that all such sprechsgeistige considerations are trumped by those appertaining to the faithful translation of the style of the original text, and that the hallmark or skeleton or foundation or what have you of any literary style--whether of an author, a genre, or an epoch--consists in its predilection for certain words or combinations of words, and in the brute typographical evidence of this predilection. Such that insofar as your main aim as translator is to seduce or repel your present-day Anglophone reader in as proximate a fashion as your author seduces or repels his present-day linguistic compatriots, you are best served (all things being necessarily unequal, and all other things necessarily of less import) by sticking to a single translation of any given word or turn of phrase--regardless of its register, derivation, syllable-count, or what have you--throughout your English text.
2. Only those translations postscripted by "THE END" are even provisionally complete; the rest are (at most) so-called works in progress.
3. The date of the post in which a translation is contained corresponds to the date of its most recent augmentation or revision.
4. Over the years, as a reader, I have assembled a collection of bones to pick with recent translators of the modern classics; and in the translations here assembled I am trying to pick all of these bones at once, as best I can, from the opposite end, in full and humble cognizance of my own translatorial tyrohood. To lay these bones out on the table (again, from a readerly point of view): the typical present-day English translation out of French, Russian, or German seems to me to suffer from an improbable combination of pedantry, absentmindedness, and populism. The pedantry consists in an overestimation of the peculiarities of the so-called source language to the inevitable detriment of smooth reading in the English version. Samuel Weber, co-translator of Adorno's Prismen, epitomizes the pedantic translative ethos thus: "Anschauung, Vorstellung, Aufhebung, formed, like so many philosophical terms in German, from verbs describing familiar and rudimentary actions, are rendered [by previous translators] into an English which deprives them of their effective connotations and thereby of their truth-content, generally by latinizing them[.]" Now, the fact that German relies to a far greater extent than English upon our common Teutonic vocabulary (or Wörterverzeichnis) is obvious to every first-year high school student of the language. But from this obvious fact it does not follow, on the one hand, that Teutonically-derived words in either language are axiomatically immune to the "deprivation of their effective connotations" or, on the other, that Latin-derived words (again, in either language) are axiomatically condemned to live in perpetual hifalutin exile from the realm of the "familiar" and the "rudimentary." Case in point of my first hand: August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s rendition of thrift (in Hamlet, I.ii.180: "Thrift, thrift: Horatio the funeral bak'd meats / did coldly furnish the marriage tables.") as Wirtschaft. Thrift, as it so happens, numbers among the homeliest and down-to-earth of English abstract nouns, denoting as it does a policy of fiscal restraint applied on a mandatorily small scale, that of a personal or—at biggest—household budget; whereas Wirtschaft in German is an altogether more capacious and flightworthy abstraction, denoting as it does a fiscal policy of any sort (however niggardly or prodigal) on any scale whatsoever (from personal to international). Wirtschaft may have “originated as a [noun] describing a familiar and rudimentary [condition],” but its prevailing connotations for a present-day German speaker are apt to be no more “familiar” or “rudimentary” than the peaks and troughs of the DAX index as charted in the Wirtschaft (i.e., Economics or Business) section ofthe FAZ. Case in point of my second hand: AWvS's rendition of philosophy (ibid., I.v.167: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.") as Schulweisheit. Now, philosophy emphatically does not stand in relation to Schulweisheit as, say, dictionary does to Wörterbuch: that is to say, the teutonically-derived Schulweisheit is emphatically not the most obvious notional German equivalent of the Hellenically-derived philosophy. The most obvious German notional equivalent of philosophy is in fact the equally Hellenogenetic Philosophie, about which there lingers not so much as a whiff of schulweisheitlich "unfamiliarity." Schelgel opted instead for Schulweisheit possibly because he believed (on impeccable philological grounds, for all I know) that in this case Shakespeare was employing philosophy as a kind of synecdoche for "book learning" rather than in its primary and more specific sense; or, possibly, in order to forestall any construal of the "philosophy" in question as Horatio's personal Weltanschauung. Either way, in so opting Schlegel was performing the office of an editor and thus exceeding the proper bounds of his bailiwick as translator (unless these can justly be said to encompass the "translation" of Renaissancese into the pan-European vernacular of the late eighteenth century).
Of course, neither of these violations of the sacred English Sprachesgeist has ever menaced Schlegel's Hamlet with the remotest prospect of dislodgement from its perch atop the steeple of the Pantheon of translations into German; and four cheers to that, I say. Indeed, I would never have chosen this text as the shoe to try on my Anglophone other foot had I not known from the start that, notwithstanding its extra half-size above my official measurement, it would still turn out to be a pretty comfortable fit. For the point to be driven home here, contra the pedants, is that the most well-founded cavils against a translation on behalf of the so-called source language must yield to the adjudication of the so-called target language's idiomatic high tribunal; in other words, to the question of "Will it play in Peoria?" or "Wird das in Darmstadt spielen?"
For these selfsame self-flagellating pedants on our side of the pond-and-sleeve, though/of course, it's less a question of whether it will play in Peoria as of whether Peoria is worth playing in in the first place. Let's not mince words here: for these people English is an all-around shitty language, suitable, at best, for the advertising of commercial products, the provision of emergency instructions to the mentally retarded, and the like. Hence, according to their lights, insofar as a given translation into English is in harmony with the native genius of our tongue, it more closely harmonizes with, say, a London street atlas addressed to Tarzan than with its source text. Again (and at greater length) I quote from Samuel Weber's introduction to Prisms:
"The criterion of clarity [in English] is rigidly enforced by a grammar which taboos long sentences as clumsy and whose ideal remains brevity and simplicity at all costs. Polemical exceptions, from Sterne to Byron, have only reinforced the prevailing maxim that if something is worth saying it can be said directly and to the point. This tendency to break thought down into its smallest, self-contained, monadic parts is probably the most formidable barrier to dialectics. The absence of word-genders and inflections make long sentences prohibitively clumsy if not impossible, and thus prevent or discredit the complex hypotactic constructions which are the life-blood of dialectical thinking."
The first thing it occurs to me to do once I've weathered the full brunt of this here tirade is to shift my pince-nez a few micrometres back and take a second look through screwed-up eyes at that phrase "polemical exceptions, from Sterne to Byron"; and after I've done that, what first strikes me is the narrow historical compass of the thing: "What about," I ask myself, "the roster of 'polemical exceptions' alive during or before 1768 [Sterne's year of decease]? What of Robert Burton, Thomas Browne, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell? And what about the roster of exceptions born since 1788 [Byron's birth year]? What of...well, whom?" And here's where I'm struck by the second thing, namely that I really am rather hard pressed to come up with any post Byronian additions to the polemical-exceptional canon. Mind you, this hard-pressedness is hardly the byproduct or epiphenomenon of, say, a thorough acquaintance with the contents of the second half of the Norton English anthology along with the latter eight-ninths of the American one; it would seem, indeed and to the contrary, to be the byproduct and epiphenomenon of my at best spotty acquaintance with those selfsame contents. To my eyes Mr. Weber's caricature of the
English Sprachesgeist suggests that the syllabus of his Anglophonic literary education from kindergarten to graduate school was confined to the works of Ernest Hemingway; but I freely confess that this impression may be owing to the fact that Ernest Hemingway was one of the very few Anglophone writers of the past two centuries whose works formed part of my own literary education.
The simple, sobering fact is that all such sprechsgeistige considerations are trumped by those appertaining to the faithful translation of the style of the original text, and that the hallmark or skeleton or foundation or what have you of any literary style--whether of an author, a genre, or an epoch--consists in its predilection for certain words or combinations of words, and in the brute typographical evidence of this predilection. Such that insofar as your main aim as translator is to seduce or repel your present-day Anglophone reader in as proximate a fashion as your author seduces or repels his present-day linguistic compatriots, you are best served (all things being necessarily unequal, and all other things necessarily of less import) by sticking to a single translation of any given word or turn of phrase--regardless of its register, derivation, syllable-count, or what have you--throughout your English text.
