(For a PDF version of these notes, go to The Worldview Annex.)
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.
1. They are all of them[1] 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. Flagrant interpolations and conjectures,
passages obviously unfit to stand in their present state, undigested bits of
Deutsch (whether for the sake of clarification or the lack of a dictionary
definition), and editorial comments are all enclosed within square brackets.
5. Now that the reader has been apprised that
this site is not a part-time Project Gutenberg syndicating engine, he may well
be wondering what, if anything, my original translations have to offer that
certain free inline alternatives to them do not. Suppose, for example, that
having penned a review of his local opera company’s production of Les Contes
d’Hoffmann, he is vacillating over which of the top three conjectural
Google hits for “Hoffmann Don Juan translation” to post as a link for further
reading. Above a listing of my translation he espies one of a 1999-copyrighted
translation by one Mark Caputo, Orville Redenbacher Professor of German at
Vermont State University (i.e., an evidently non-native Germanophone with
evidently impeccable if not necessarily sterling academic credentials); while
below it he finds some Gutenbergian reference to an 1858 translation by one
Penelope Schfinster (academic qualifications unknown). The first listing holds
in promise, at minimum, the fruits of a decades-old daily immersion in the
source language plus a degree of articulateness in the target language
sufficient to teaching and grading therein; while the second arrogates to
itself—however feeble Miss Schfinster’s skill as a Germanist might turn out to
be—the un-overratable advantage of historical proximity. Whereas mine…well,
what can I tell you? I have, on the one hand, been seriously, intensively—and
whatever other emetic adverbs traditionally stand as a screen for “spending a
measurable fraction of each and every goshdamn day”—studying the German
language for only about three years now. And well into the second of those
three years I was blithely oblivious of even so elementary a grammatical
idiosyncrasy of the language as the separable verbal prefix. Yea--I kid thee
not, DGR--a scant 33 months ago, in my first dry-run at translating Hoffmann’s Don
Juan, I rendered “Das Theater fängt an!” as “The theater is catching on!” And
yet, even then, I was hardly a stranger to German. Indeed, the two of us—Deutsch
und ich—were already, in a certain manner of speaking, alte Freunde.
For from the age of 16 onwards, I had been intimately familiar with the sound
and a certain portion of the lexicon of the language, and the typographical
realization of both, thanks to numerous liberally-annotated and libretto’d
recordings of the lieder of Schubert and Mahler, and of Berg’s two operas Wozzeck
and Lulu. It is difficult to qualify and quantify the merit of such a
superficial but longstanding acquaintance with the source language; at minimum,
I suspect, it means that I have a better than average inner German reader,
and that as a consequence I will do a better than average job of preserving the
rhythms of my source texts. In the end, though, my chief qualification may be
of a negative and more general nature; inasmuch as, unlike many professional
Foreignists, I have not sought in my second language a refuge from any
perceived shortcomings of my native one, and I do not seek to punish my
fellow-countrymen for not having accompanied me into exile. Such that you will
never catch me writing the likes of this: “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[.]”; or this: "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."[2]
The first block of assertions is partly true:
German words (and not just philosophical terms) are more often than English
ones derived from verbs (and nouns) “describing familiar and rudimentary
actions.” But in “latinizing” such words into English do we really “deprive
them of their truth-content”? Perhaps, but only to the extent that we deprive a
preface of a book of its truth-content in renominating it a foreword,
or that in comprehending something we fail to understand it; or
that Schlegel corrupted Shakespeare’s philosophy in rendering it as Schulweisheit.
To the Sontagsdeutschfreund such distinctions can only carry so much Schwere.
Being a lover—some would perhaps say, rather, a futator--of words tout
court, and one, moreover, hyper-scrupulously heedful of their various
denotative and connotative force-fields, he cannot for the life of him exorcise
something more corporeal than the mere ghost of a suspicion that his choice
between this and that English word allegedly mutually segregated by twenty
Hindoo [sic] caste levels of register is more often than not wholly arbitrary,
or, to put a sufficiently fine a point on it, it is governed prevailingly by
the criterion of novelty—by the question of which of the two is newer to
him, or of which of them he is less tired. And being deeply and by nature an
internationalist, he cannot help suspecting that the same sort of
capriciousness is sometimes at work in the soul-smithies of even the most
punctilious native Germanaphone stylist; that his opting for say, wahrnehmen
in place of fühlen may at least occasionally be governed by the brute
fact that he has already used fühlen ten times in the last two pages of
the composition to hand, rather than by some sort of ineffaceable mental
snapshot of a pair of hands snatching at an allegorical statue of Lady Truth
(i.e., in place of a mental snapshot of a pair of hands groping at
nothing in particular). And finally, in putting this suspicion into
translational practice, and seeking principally to reproduce the sheer number
and variety of words in his original text, he may just—despite his limited
Erfahrung—come to produce a more readable English version than certain
of his more etymologically-orientated professional non-colleagues have done.
The second block, on the other hand, can most
favorably be read as an eloquent tribute to the damage wreaked on received
opinion of the English prose tradition by the likes of Messers Hemingway and
Mailer (or, perhaps, by their fans among the faculties of American higher and
lower education). Sterne and Byron are not “polemical exceptions” to some
KISS-ian norm of Anglo-Saxon prose composition established by Bede or King
Alfred; indeed, in their bent for the hypotactic and the periodic they were
very much in the mainstream of their respective times. The “absence [sic] of
word genders and inflections” in their vernacular medium never discouraged
Thomas Browne or Samuel Johnson or Edward Gibbon or William Hazlitt from
penning whole paragraphs and indeed pages devoid of full stops; nor can the
presence of grammatical gender and merely relative abundance of
inflections have done much on their own to facilitate German prolixity. (As
these notes presuppose no knowledge of or curiosity about the technicalities of
German grammar on the reader’s part, I shall confine my elaboration of that
last clause to this brief parenthesis: the marking of oblique cases in certain
forms of the articles, and of three genders in the relative pronoun derived
from the definite article, together allow for substantially greater flexibility
of word order within clauses in German than in English, but in his
transit between clauses [and it is in interclausial betweenness alone
that hypotaxis consists], the decorous Germanophone writer is practically as
syntactically straitjacketed and hamstrung as his Anglophone counterpart.) Like
many another polemicist on behalf of the continental old world, Mr. Weber has
mistaken a uniquely recent global quality or phenomenon for a uniquely,
trans-historically Anglo-Saxon one. I now yield the floor to W. G. Sebald, an
author whose patiently anti-telegraphic prose style has won more admirers in
Britain and America than in his native Germany: "There are hypotactical
syntax forms in these [i.e., his own self-consciously archaic] sentences which
have been abandoned by practically all the writers now for reasons of
convenience. Also because they are no longer accustomed to it. But if you dip
into any form of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century discursive prose--the
English essayists, for example [he probably means the romantic essayists, viz.
Lamb, de Quincey, Hazlitt, etc.[3]--these forms exist in previous ages of
literature and they have simply fallen into disrepair." And here, in
connection with this syntactical “disrepair,” is where I—a veritable verbal Bob
Villa in search of a late Georgian or early Regency fixer-upper (or its German
stylistic equivalent [Biedermeier, as far as I know, is a style of
furniture and not of architecture proper]) —come in, and where Professor Caputo
might at least consider graciously to step aside. For even supposing he is a specialist
in Die Romantik, Professor Caputo has probably devoted the better part
of his reading since graduate school to critical essays and monographs penned
by his fellow Germanists, few of whom are sympathetically inclined to the old
hypotatctic tradition, and fewer still of whom manage to smuggle any traces of
such sympathy past the internal and external customs officials of contemporary
professional academic style; whereas I have read little in the past decade that
does not hail from the high period of the old hypotactic style, such that I may
with a certain sort of legitimacy claim Sterne, Hume, and Johnson as my
contemporaries and Dickens, Arnold, and Twain as my juniors. Oh, to be sure,
I’m all about the F******k, the Y**-T**e, the B*n-w*h b*lls; I doff my assless
chaps one leg at a time just like the next intermillennial yobbo, but when it
comes to putting a sentence together—why, I would sooner coordinate a pair of
peppermint tartan slacks with a Charlie Brown pullover than one plausibly
subordinable or superordinable clause with another. (Yes, I know the content of
the preceding sentence is contradicted by its form, in exchange for which
contradiction I hereby append the present sentence, whose triple-subordinated
construction attests, I trust, to my proclivity for, if not competence in, the
old style.) Such that in my eyes the convoluted periods of Hoffmann and Novalis
appear entirely natural, and any attempt to untangle them into something more
conformable to intermillennial prejudices in favor of the paratactic is bound
to seem perverse, counterintuitive, or what have you—in other words, the
rendering of these sentences into so-called acceptable intermillennial prose
would effectively involve a second translation that I would just as soon
not undertake, given that, well, in the first and most obvious place, it would
involve extra work, and in the second—well (I at last exclaim, succumbing to my
exasperation in outrage, and with arms akimbo) just who the heck are these
troglodytic contemporaries of mine who can’t be arsed to sit through a few
measly semicolons at a stretch, and why must their impatience be humored?
Where, for example does Alain de Botton get off writing, a propos of
translating out of Proust’s French: “[P]lenty of challenges remain for the
Proustian translator. One of these stems from the way that the French language
changes much less slowly [sic] than English: you only have to read Pascal’s Penseés,
written in 1660, then switch to Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burriall,
written in 1658. The former sounds like it could have been written yesterday,
the latter verges on incomprehensibility.” Both the former and the latter of these assertions verge on
the ridiculous: in point of its grammatical essentials, none of the big five or
six modern Western European languages has changed very much in the past
half-millennium. The principal reason that the Penseés is more
accessible to a twenty-first century Francophone readership than Urn Buriall
is to a twenty-first century Anglophone one is that that Pascal’s vocabulary is
much smaller and more commonplace than Browne’s, and that Browne happens to
prefer longer and more involved sentences than Pascal’s. Neither Pascal’s
apparent up-to-dateness nor Browne’s apparent archaism is an ineluctable
quality of the French or English of their time, and the soulier would be
very much on the other pied were one to use, say, Pepys and Bousset as
exemplary comparanda. Anyway, to take up Mr. de Botton again from where I
forced him to leave off (of necessity, as he is inadvertently alluding to quite
a different pseudo-problem in this next sentence): “As a result, the old Scott
Moncrieff [translation] can on occasion feel very anachronistic. Characters
say, ‘By jove,’ and ‘Old Boy,’ and come across as Edwardian, whereas their
French counterparts continue to move with the times.” Here, Mr. de Botton is
guilty of what one may term the Ptolemaic fallacy: Scott Moncrieff’s Anglophone
realizations of Proust’s characters may be indeed be off-puttingly Edwardian to
a certain hyper-whiggish Elizabethan (sichissimo!) sensibility, but even
if their French counterparts are not correspondingly off-putting to present-day
Francophones, this axiomatically cannot be because they “are moving with the
times”—for that expression absurdly suggests that they have adopted the oaths
and epithets of Chiracian (and now Sarkozyian) France—but rather because the
times have stood still for them; in other words, that the French lexicon of the
present retains vestiges of “Edwardianism” that have disappeared from English
since Proust’s and Moncrieff’s day. In any case, if the repulsiveness of
Moncrieff-Proust’s linguistic folkways, whatever their provenance, is so acute
to “us” as to be remedied only by the substitution of more palatably intermillennial
oaths and epithets, then why stop there? Why not, say, “translate” the frock
coats, crinolines [?], and pantaloons of M. and Mme. Swann et al. into
T-shirts, thongs, and jeans? Or the various tilburies, barouches, calashes, and
fiacres into cars of socio-demographic significatively analogous brands, makes,
and models (actually, it occurs to me now that this would be a more worthwhile
exercise for the translator of Balzac)? By this point, I may seem to have
strayed rather far afield of my topic, but fear not: my coté du chez Swann
is about to join up with my coté du Guermantes; for it is Professor
Caputo above all others, catering as he must do to an audience of
undergraduates, who is most likely to be inclined, and ultimately to succumb,
to this temptation to level and update. At the very least he is bound
occasionally to barbarize by omission, by forbearing to use a given word or
turn of phrase for fear that it will not be instantly recognized and understood
by his semi-literate, dictionarophobic constituency, and substituting in its
place some more commonplace synonym, which while not being technically
anachronistic, sells short the lexical resources of his source language, and
buys short those of our own.
What, then, given that my motto is essentially “The more
unabashedly old-fangled, the better,” can I say in comparative defense of my
own translation against that of Miss Schphinster? The rudiments of such a
defense are, of course, to be found above, in my orchidically burdensome
assertion of virtual contemporaneity with Hume, Sterne, and Johnson, but this
assertion hardly constitutes an open-and-shut, water-tight case on its own, for
Miss Schphinster may, after all, turn out to have been an aficionado and
student of all three authors, and to have written a monograph or two on each in
the way of proof of such devotion and attention. The (again O-B) case I really
needs must make is that I, as a certain sort of native-born citizen of the
early twenty-first century, enjoy a twinned citizenship with the early nineteenth
such as could never have been enjoyed by even a native-born undevicentarian.
There are at least two ways I could go about this. I could, in the first place,
and more prosaically, draw on notable precedents in one of the other so-called
arts, namely musical performance. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Glenn Gould, for
example, certainly have their detractors, but it is generally agreed that they
did a much finer job, in their recordings, of realizing the so-called
intentions of Schubert and Bach, respectively, than did any of the most
ardently Schubertophile or Bachophile singers and keyboardists of the preceding
generation—the Hotters and Landowskas et al.—who were axiomatically situated,
in virtue of sheer accident of birth, a good quarter-century closer to the date
of their expounded works’ inceptions. And if they could thus cheat history in
so flagrantly successful a fashion, why can I not do the same? Oh, of course,
at first blush I may seem to be hoist once again by my own petard; at first
blush, the potential laurels of any such endeavor needs must be placed on the
brows of Professor Caputo—if, that is, all I am talking about are certain
parallel improvements in philologico-hermeneutic and musico-performative
technique as have been witnessed in the past three hemi-centuries. But in point
of fact, the virtue that I am getting at has absolutely nothing to do with
either of these. What I am getting at, rather, is a kind of so-called 24-7—or
at least 8-3.5—imbuement of one’s total habitus with the objective materials
of one’s so-called craft as has been witnessed in the specific cases of Messers
Gould and Fischer-Dieskau. I am thinking here, of course, of all of those
thousands of hours and millions of feet of paper and videotape and cinefilm to
which DFD and GG both devoted not to their official bailiwicks, to vocal or
keyboard technique, but rather to the music of Bach and Schubert and plenty of
other composers eo ipso, in perverse defiance of the division of labor
that more or less insured that, as the specialized musicological likes of H. H.
Stuckenschmidt and Karl Dalhaus and (more contestably[4]) Charles Rosen were already penning the
very last definitive words on these subjects, their own ruminations thereunto
would be relegated to the dustbin of gentleman-amateurdom. As they more or less
have been qua musicological treatises, but qua sheer bona
fides of their authors’ profound commitment to and understanding of the
music of Bach and Schubert, they are of course very much out of the dustbin,
and alive and kicking. Now, I may be—nay, decidedly am—lacking in the
degree of technical competence at my chosen instrument (the German language)
and understanding of my chosen media (the specific works), that DFD and GG
enjoyed at theirs, but I am certainly every bit as fain as they were to devote
my so-called off hours to talking about the medium and the instrument, should
anyone be equally fain to give me a platform for such discoursing. Indeed, even
in the absence of such a platform, I’ve managed to insinuate thousands if not
tens of thousands of words on the subject into my writings and personal
chit-chat; which is more than either Professor Caputo or Miss Schphinster can
say for himself or herself (or, more to the point, has ever gotten around to
saying for himself or herself). These Notes constitute but a minute fraction of
the actual extant total of such remarks, and of the potential
total thereof, the total that I would deliver myself of given my druthers (or,
what comes to the same thing, the aforementioned platform) …why, the proportion
must be incalculably tiny. In short, DGR, if what you’re looking for is an hermetically
idiomatically correct nineteenth-century translation, Miss Schphinster’s
version might just suit your purposes. But I dare you to try to get hold of
Miss Schphinster on the blower in the wee small ones of a Thursday, or even at
mid-day on a Saturday, to ask her why she chose to render empfinden as perceive
rather than as feel on line 253 in her translation of Novalis’s Lehrlinge;
or why (unlike Professor Caputo), she did not think “is initiating
relationships” was a suitable translation of “knüpft Verbindungen” in Letter
No. 6 of Book I of Tieck’s William Lovell. They don’t exactly keep office hours
on that side of the bourn from which no traveler, etc. Whereas I am not only
corporeally capable (touch wood) of answering such queries, but eager to do so
till the proverbial cows come home. After all (and equally proverbially), I got
nothing better—and plenty worse—to do.
More poetically I could perhaps favorably liken my endeavor to the
most celebrated feat of a certain not uncelebrated Frenchman of the early part
of the last century, Pierre Menard. I shan’t insult the reader’s urbanity by
reminding him of the nature of the feat, or rehearsing the so-called story
behind it—for this story is, after all, by now known to every schoolboy;
and, in any case, I was not put in mind of the possibility of such a comparison
by the feat itself but rather by a certain remark made apropos of it by one of
Menard’s more alacritous boosters:
Menard selects as his “reality” the land of Carmen
It seems to me that the majority, if not totality, of twentieth
and twenty-first century English translations of pre-twentieth century texts
suffer from a defect not merely analogous to, but even coterminous with, the
defects that this commentator ascribes by negative implication to the modern
historical novel of the Salammbôian type; that is to say, they are more
principally interested in those aspects of their subjects that appeal to us—or,
rather, a certain idea of us—than in those that would have appealed, as near as
we can tell, to their subjects’ contemporaries. Among historical novels, this preference
manifests itself in—among many other more reprehensible things—what the
commentator disparages as “local color,” a pedantic over-attention to the way
things are supposed to have looked or been done or been said in a given place
or epoch. Thus, Salammbô gives us a nineteenth-century real-estate
appraiser’s view of ancient Carthage, Ships Shooting at Each Other: In the
Middle of Nowhere, a view of Nelsonian naval life that only a truly
Gulliverian[5] sensibility can appreciate. Among
translations, this predilection is made manifest—please pardon my decidedly
inelegant variation—in the sort of linguistic present-ifying efforts of which I
have already complained and given sufficiently abundant examples. In succumbing
to either predilection, one is taking the easy, indeed the libertine’s, way
out; to avoid doing so, and thereby to risk making the text virtually
unreadable by any empirical twenty-first century reader, requires a
well-nigh heroic degree of asceticism. Or perhaps this asceticism is merely
perverse: for whose approval or attention is one seeking, if not some empirical
living reader’s--one’s own self’s, perhaps? To be sure: but of what stratum or
register of that self? Surely not the so-called innermost core thereof;
for that would imply an extremity of so-called identification with one’s source
text as has been realized perhaps only by one Watt at the ***** tavern in Alexandria , Virginia
[1] Yes, even the Bernhard interview, to whatever extent an
unauthorized translation of a pirated text can be legally copyrighted.
[2] Samuel M. Weber in the preface to Shierry Weber’s and his
translation of Theodor W. Adorno’s Prisms (Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1967; pp. 12 and 13, respectively).
[3] If so, he might be less censoriously getting at much the same
thing as Edmund Wilson is getting at in the following passage from A Window
on Russia (New York, 1972) : “Gogol’s style is a variety of that
viscous prose which—for reasons rather difficult to understand—was so popular
in the early nineteenth century. The plum cake of Charles Lamb is a typical example; so in a
different field, is the maddeningly impeded narrative style of a Hawthorne or a
Herman Melville. This style allows no rapid progression. A paragraph seems a mere clot of words, which might almost
as well be read backward as forward and in which the contrived rhythms have the
air of being ends in themselves, since they are always forcing the reader to
stop and pay attention to them instead of sweeping him on. This style must have been due to some very strong pressures,
for it is shared to some extent by a writer who worked on a big scale, like
Balzac; and even by a popular writer like Scott, who did want to tell a story. The settings of the stage in Balzac, the antiquarian
preliminaries of Scott, are often entanglements of this littered non-functional
style, which combines the facetious with the pompous, clumsily handled
actualities with jaunty mythological allusions” (41). I don’t know about “clumsily handled actualities,” but
“jaunty mythological allusions” are certainly characteristic of Hoffmann and
Tieck (and uncharacteristic of their eighteenth-century model, Sterne).
[4] More contestably: because Rosen, like Gould, was—and still
is—a professional pianist. I sometimes wonder whether his reputation as a pianist has not
more suffered than benefited from his reputation as a musicologist and literary
critic.
[5]I mean specifically characteristic of the Gulliver of the early
paragraphs of the Voyage to Brobdingnag, as exemplified by the following
sentence: “We got the Star-board tacks aboard, we cast off our weather-braces
and Lifts; we set in the Lee-braces, and hawl’d forward by the
Weather-bowlings, and hawl’d them tight, and belayed them, and hawl’d over the
Missen Tack to Windward, and kept her full and by as near as she would lye.”
Copyright
©2008 by Douglas Robertson
1 comment:
I have assembled a collection of bones to pick with recent translators of the modern classic
Indeed. Of these bones are quarrels made.
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