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.

A Translation of the transcript of "Monologe auf Mallorca"

Thomas Bernhard

A Provocation--Monologue at Mallorca

(1981)

I have never had a model or ever desired one. I have always only wanted to be myself and have only ever written as I myself have thought.

1. Mallorca

Mallorca in and of itself doesn't interest me at all. Because it's a country, an island that's like home too. Because of the atmosphere of the city, the harbor, the sea, what I need in order to work. Because I can only work where the climate is healthy for me and here I have both, right? The possibility of tending to my lungs, and of using my brain to make what is to be made out of whatever originates there. And my duty, to myself and to everyone else, is somehow to fetch something out of my head, in other words, to write books, or just string sentences together, thoughts--and they just come better here than up north, right? When I get a kink in my head in Austria then I just come down here--and that's ideal.

And then as far as work goes it's of immeasurable importance, for me at least, of course everyone's different, to be in a country where you don't understand the language, because you have the feeling that people are only saying pleasant things and only speaking on truly important philosophical subjects. And if you understand the language they're simply talking bullshit. And so in Spain bullshit becomes philosophical for me.

At bottom I really only write from the bottom, because a lot of things are unpleasant. Because if everything were pleasant then I probably couldn't write at all. Then nobody would write. You really can't write from a pleasant situation. Besides, you'd be an idiot to write if everything were pleasant, because you pretty much have to surrender to what's pleasant, right? You really are obligated to take advantage of it. And if you're in a pleasant mood and sit down at your desk, then that pleasant mood actually starts to self-destruct. And why should I let it self-destruct? I could even imagine myself living an entire lifetime only in a pleasant mood and not writing anything at all. But since, as [I] said, a pleasant mood only exists by the hour or for only a short time, you always come back to writing.

2. Philosophy

You don't need to worry about your anger towards your fellow men, because most of the time you are indeed annoyed by them. When you're in a coffeehouse and it's quite pleasant, at the end you have to settle up, and basically you're already angry about that in a way--because--why, actually? And when you're crossing the street and a car comes along, you get angry. Why does this car of all things come along when I'm crossing the street? You don't even need to worry about anger at all. It happens! At the moment I'm not angry at all. It's already getting a bit spooky, because there's no anger on the horizon.

How are you feeling at the moment?

It's splashing [only so]...Extremely content, I must say. The water's splashing, the sun is shining. Simple Spaniards and Englishmen who can't be understood. An ideal constellation, but it won't last long. All of a sudden some sort of flash of lightning leads you back to the whole and ruins everything.

I have a totally normal approach to life, like all other normal people too, probably, right? It isn't simply negative, but it's not exactly positive, right? Because you really do encounter everything uninterruptedly. That adds up to a life. [To say it's all negative is of course nonsense. ] But there are people who want to see it that way, to be sure.

It's really quite convenient that they say that so-and-so is a fool, right?--and all his life he's a fool, right? who will always figure as a fool, until the day he dies. And a certain other person is a lyrical, exalted writer from his twentieth year onward, and likewise remains one until the day he dies. And that's the starting point for the critics and the people you deal with, [and generally can't get rid of]. And another person writes some Punch and Judy plays, whether they're stupid or not is again of course another question, or no question at all, and he remains Punch for life.

And I'm probably the Negative Writer for life, but I must say, I feel quite comfortable in the role, because it doesn't irritate me in the slightest. Because people say I'm a negative writer and at the same time I'm a positive human being. And so nothing can happen to me, or[...]? Is this a dangerous position? I don't know. I find it all quite pleasant. Above all, when I'm far from home.

Of course, comic material always has to do with something missing, right?--with a deficiency, right? Some sort of spiritual or physical defect, right? You laugh at a clown, say he's completely normal, no one laughs, right? He has to walk with a limp, or be one-eyed, or fall over every third step, or his ass explodes and shoots out a candle or whatever, right? People laugh at that sort of thing, always at deficiencies, and at horrible afflictions. What else has anyone ever laughed at, really? Or some ancient, on-stage grandmother repeats herself every third sentence and is constantly saying "My [Eineizwilling]" or something of that kind, then people laugh. But of course no one in the world has ever laughed at completely normal, so-called normal people. As for laughing on your own, you only do that when you pinch yourself or whatever? Then you laugh up a storm. When my grandmother burned herself on one of her plates in the kitchen, I laughed like crazy, right? And when a week passed without, when a laugh-free week elapsed in our house, it was somehow completely boring. And when it got too boring for me, I would go into the broom cupboard, there was a curtain there, where the brooms were standing, and if I wanted, now my grandmother comes along, I would let my hand fall out from behind [the curtain], she--with a terrible scream, right?--would practically fall over dead of a stroke, because I frightened her. As a child. Because I was bored. But there are always afflictions and horrors.

Do you want to make people laugh?

No, but that happens automatically. I don't need to trouble myself about that. I myself sometimes actually burst out laughing, right? I think to myself I’ve actually made myself laugh. But sometimes people feel—when I burst out laughing, right?—already while I’m writing, or also when I’m reading Correction afterwards, then I do actually laugh out loud, and they don’t find it any great laughing matter, and I really don’t understand that, right? For example, if you read Frost, I’ve always produced plenty of comic material. It’s actually a side-splitting laugh every second. But I don’t know, do people just not have a sense of humor or what, I don’t know? It’s always made me laugh. It still makes me laugh today. If I’m bored or I’m going through some tragic period, then I open one of my own books and that makes me laugh. Or don’t you understand that it’s that way?

I mean that isn’t to say I haven’t also occasionally written serious sentences to make the comical sentences hold together. That’s the glue, seriousness is the glue of the comic project. Now naturally you can also say that this is a philosophically comic project that I somehow or other concocted more than 20 years ago, when I started writing.

Naturally a dry, a purely serious philosophy isn’t funny, is actually just terribly boring. But in Schopenhauer’s company I can also laugh. The glummer he is, the funnier he is. But people take it all so tragically seriously. But how seriously can you take a man who’s married to a poodle. From the outset you just can’t take him seriously. He’s a comic-cum-philosopher. These are the great historical jesters. Schopenhauer, Kant, hence, the most serious of all in the end. Pascal ranks among them too, in his own catholic, mysterious, religious way.

These really are the great comic philosophers. And the lesser ones, the second category, they’re all basically boring, because they just chew the cud that these jester-philosophers have written out for them. And I don’t read them anyway, because if I read anything, I only read the great ones. But it takes a long time for you to slowly figure out what’s great and what’s not so great. You really need a decade for that. No one ever tells you that.

Because in school everything’s categorized in the same way, right? There’s a lumping together of the philosophers, right? They all line up there like a group of package tourists or an army. There are, of course, thousands and hundreds of thousands of philosophers. And, of course, you have to pick out the greatest on your own. And, of course, nobody helps you out. But if you’re a kind of philosophical vulture, as I was quite early on, then you know which of them to pick out. And Kant and Schopenhauer are among those, because of their insane laughableness. Don’t you think so?

3. Innocence

I really only write about inner landscapes and most people don’t see them, because they invariably see almost nothing within, because they think that because it’s inside, it’s dark, and then they don’t see anything. I don’t think I’ve ever, in any of my books, described a landscape. There's really nothing of the kind in any of them. I only ever write concepts. And so it's always about the "ocean" or "mountains" or "a city" or "streets." But as to how they look, I haven't, I believe I haven't, ever described that. I've never produced a description of a landscape. That's never even interested me.

I observe uninterruptedly, when I'm not asleep, even when I am asleep I'm observing. Because a human being really does observe more intensively when he's asleep than when he's awake, in other words, in a dream, or in whatever gets called a dream. And during any given moment when a human being isn't observing, there's pretty much nothing.

I think I was already in school when it occurred to me that everybody actually does have a father, right? I didn’t even get as far as knowing that. In the first place, I never even knew I had a father, because no such person ever materialized. It was neither talked about, nor was any such person present, right? And it wasn’t even allowed to be talked about. And then I thought to myself, I have no organs like the other people who were around me, I never gave any thought to [the buam over the girls], that was different anyhow.

And I can still precisely recall how my best friend in those days, he was, I guess, seven or eight years old; I always used to play with him, he was the child next door, Fakler Gusti was his name, Fakler is a Bavarian name, this was in Traunstein. He’s…within a couple of days he was dead: I mean of appendicitis. And then I thought to myself, my God, poor Fakler Gusti, who has to die because he had appendicitis, which I can never have, because I haven’t got an appendix, probably. I always thought that I simply didn’t have whatever can make you die, probably. And so why, and from what, could I die? And so I felt pretty lucky. I think I was already ten years old when it occurred to me that I also have organs that can make you die. And so the idea was, there’s no father and no organs and on the whole nothing near me that’s mortal. I think that was one of my main assumptions for years, I mean for many years. Until roughly the age of twenty. No, not until twenty, because by then I was already deathly ill. If not until then, then until when? Until fifteen, sixteen, right? All right, then, it was then that it occurred to me that “No, no, my dear fellow, you too, right?, you, too, can go the way of all flesh. And death can stretch out his hand toward you and take hold of you at his pleasure, right?" It really was then that I first realized that. But I think that at 14 or 15 I pretty much had no inkling. I didn't know either what breathing was, [or] what lungs were. I pretty much didn't perceive myself physically. Like all healthy children, I imagine. They just don't notice things at all, that's the way it is.

And sexuality?

And sexuality, that this corporeality first first emerges with, to be sure, it's pleasure afterwards, of course, and beforehand, of course, it's simply a feeling of suspense. Sexuality was for me in this respect greatly curtailed, because at the moment when it was first up and moving, right?--and I somehow noticed that, "Aha!, there are these mysterious forces that suddenly carry you along, to specific objects, right?"--then I really did become deathly ill. And so for many years, and starting very early on, it was very much dammed up and curtailed, right? Which is really a shame because at precisely the time when sexuality probably has the greatest allure, namely at its quote-unquote "awakening"--and when "your cock [Schwanzerl] is up and moving" as we say in German, well, then I was in the hospital. Then everything pretty much tapered off, more or less--and I was bedridden indoors and it was simply neutralized. And when I got out I was at first tired and a bit weak. OK, right?--so between the ages of 20 and 30, I imagine, it was entirely regular and normal in that department. Even with great pleasure, with all the ups and downs they talk about in words and images. You don't need to feel embarrassed about this. At the seaside nobody is embarrassed about anything. Or are you feeling modest? Well, anyhow, look, that kind of thing is all nonsense.