Faithful Ugliness or Faithless Beauty: The Translator's Problem Author(s): Paul F. Guenther Source: The German Quarterly, Vol.

35, No. 4 (Nov., 1962), pp. 504-510 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Association of Teachers of German Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/401586 Accessed: 06/11/2009 12:07
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Blackwell Publishing and American Association of Teachers of German are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The German Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

FAITHFUL UGLINESS OR FAITHLESS BEAUTY: THE TRANSLATOR'S PROBLEM Paul F. Guenther By the very nature of things translation is a bridge between two languages, and if we speak of the problem of translation with regard to the literature of one particular language we appear to be dealing solely with either a beginning or an end, rather than with an entire process. It is precisely this mediatorship of the translating process which makes what J. Shipley has termed "the modest art" into one of the most fascinating fields of study for the historian of literature and the philologist alike.1 For, let us not deceive ourselves; while we language teachers are all paying lip service to the ideal which led a German translator of Homer to exclaim "Lieber Leser, lerne Griechisch und wirf meine Ubersetzung ins Feuer," the extent of world literature will always be greater than the individual humanist's linguistic potential. Very few people have ever been able, or will ever be able, to read all important books in their original languages. This being so we can readily dispose of the all-too-widespread assumption that translation is a third-rate fringe activity of literature which can be left to semi-learned writers incapable of creating literature themselves. The fact is that translation must be a compromise between two different languages and of all that they, individually, stand for. Language is far more than vocabulary and grammar; it is a representation of a whole unique way of life. Since the reader is often in no position to pass judgment on the merits of a translation, a grave responsibility is placed on the conscientious translator. When in the German version of the Carmen libretto the words "Voyez ces enfants de Boheme", meaning "Look at those Gypsies . . ." appear as "Seht diese Kinder aus B6hmen . . ." we can't speak of translation any more than we can accept a moving picture like The Blob as an expression of a form of art. This is just ignorant manipulation of the dictionary. My favorite example for that type of activity is the "faithful" dictionary translation, into German, of the word "homesick"; translated according to its parts rather than in accord1Joseph T. Shipley, Dictionary of World Literature. New and revised

edition. (New York, 1953), p. 425. 504

FAITHFUL UGLINESS OR FAITHLESS

BEAUTY

505

ance with its sum, it would result in a nonexistent term, "hauskrank", which, if there were any such word in German, could only mean "to be sick and tired of home". In a recent English translation of a German short story we find a statement to the effect that an officer was forced to quit the service because he had his ears boxed by "Fleischsalcher."2 The last word is translated as a name, while "Fleischselcher" (not "Fleischsalcher") is actually an Austrian dialect term for "butcher"; the officer referred to was dishonored not because he had been beaten up by a stronger man but because his adversary was a butcher and thus socially the officer's inferior. Apparently, the crucial term was too specifically Austrian to be included in the translator's dictionary. One of the most famous examples of mistranslation in our time is that of the British communique of the last war which, dealing with an air raid, mentioned that bombs fell at random. The Germans got hold of a printed version of that report in which by accident the word "random" had been capitalized, whereupon the Germans in their own release stated that among other inhabited places the city of Random had been hit. (From this incident James Hilton derived the title Random Harvest.) Surely, inasmuch as all these mistranslations appear superficially to make at least some sense, it follows that it is not enough, in translating, to do justice to the language into which something is translated, no matter how readable the result appears to be. It is equally important to do justice to the language out of which a text is translated, which means, as indicated earlier, the reconstruction of a whole way of life in terms of another way of life. No wonder that the challenge of translating has at all times endless fascination for even the greatest masters of the written word, notwithstanding the contention of Croce that the translator has only two alternatives, namely faithful ugliness or faithless beauty.3 It is possible and has been proven countless times that there can be a happy meeting of the two, not in all instances, to be sure, but in many. The best translators, in spite of uninformed denigrators of the art, are creative artists insofar as they shape out of three given components-the original language, their own language, and the charac2

Arthur Schnitzler, Leutnant Gustl, translated by Richard Simon

under the title None but the Brave . . . (New York, 1926), p. 14.

3 Benedetto Croce,Aesthetics, translated by Douglas Ainslee. Second edition. (New York, 1953), p. 68.

506

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

teristic genius of the original author-a new independent whole, which is a piece of art. If, in the process, the original is in some way improved upon, must we quarrel with its "faithless beauty"? Should we carp at the fact that the writings of Immanuel Kant, without any distortion of the intrinsic meaning of the original, often read better in English than in German? Ezra Pound observes with reference to one great English translator that "Gavin Douglas has made something of the Aeneis which I like better than Virgil's Latin", and he supports that statement with the remark "Douglas knew the sea."4 The true creative power of translation is uniquely evident in the history of German literature. While the Germans, whose literary Golden Ages have occurred spasmodically, did not have anything comparable to the great translators of English literature with their Florios, Urqharts and countless others until the late eighteenth century, their very language itself is indebted to translation for much of its development. Already under the Carolingians translation of theological matter was practised not only as a propaganda instrument to assist in the spread of Christianity but with the definite purpose of elevating the native vernacular; the genius of Latin was brought to bear upon an essentially uncouth peasant tongue in an effort to make it, as it were, socially acceptable. The greatest of all these early German translating "Sprachsch6pfer"was the St. Gall monk Notker Labeo of the 11th century, the translator of Boethius and of the Psalter. One fine example for the creation of a functioning language through the agency of translation was that of the Gothic Bishop Ulfilas who, by translating the Bible from the Greek into the rather under-developed language of his people, turned Gothic into a civilized tongue. Far and away the greatest example of translation as a creative force is, of course, the Bible translation of Martin Luther. Certainly, Luther had competent "assistants,"Reuchlin for Hebrew, Melanchthon for Greek, and he had the good fortune of having been born right on the theoretical line which divides the areas of the two great German dialect groups, High and Low German, but, above all, the peasant Luther was a man of the people who knew where to go for linguistic experience: "Man muB [den gemeinen Leuten] auf das Maul sehen . . ." In this way Luther was able to produce a Bible translation which, by and large, could be read and understood all over the realm, unlike
4

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York. n.d.), pp. 45 and 58.

FAITHFUL UGLINESS OR FAITHLESS

BEAUTY

507

preceding German versions of the Scripture, whose usefulness was restricted because they were merely translations into one or the other German dialect. This all-but-singlehanded creation of a language is unique in itself. English and French evolved gradually, and although it might be possible to say that from the standpoint of language enrichment the Norman conquest had the same effect upon English as Luther had upon German, only the latter language among the leading ones of our civilization was materially advanced as the result of translation. This is doubly interesting considering that Italian, by contrast, appears to have entered the literary stage at the point of its highest development, namely with Dante's Divine Comedy. The same might be true of Greek and the works of Homer, save that lack of records tends to make such an assertion difficult to support. It is also interesting to rememberthat Luther domesticated the Bible in German lands through the language only because he used a language almost all Germans could understand, but did not choose to adapt the story to German conditions. The Old Saxon Heliand of the ninth century did precisely that in retelling the story of Christ in such a fashion as to make Christ and his disciples Germanic knights acting like Germans in a German setting and in places called Nazarethburg, etc. The Heliand, of course, is not a translation but a "Nachdichtung," a re-telling of the story. This device is often very useful with regard to the aforementioned untranslatable materials. Let us consider, for instance, an important piece of regional writing in which locale and local speech are of paramount importance even though they are not, as in the case of dialect literature, ends in themselves. Hauptmann's Die Weber furnishes an example. Translators of that and similar plays have several alternatives: either they make no effort to do justice to the dialect and translate into a standard language which in this case would detract from the play; or they attempt to retain the dialect in which case two new possibilitieswill arise: 1) the dialect will sound artificial, which is obviously undesirable, or 2) the original dialect is satisfactorily reproduced by another one. In the case of Die Weber the dialect of Silesia could be replaced by that of Lancashire. Such a version would probably be quite satisfactory for people who are unfamiliar with the original. Those who know the latter, particularly if they understand at least enough of the dialect to follow events, might well feel that the dialect is so closely interwoven with the set-

508

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

ting and with the very nature of the play that the former cannot be transferred to a foreign stage without the latter. If Silesian speech becomes Lancashire speech, let the setting be Lancashire also. This will be immediately clear if the reader once makes a deliberate attempt at what may be called overtranslation.Take, for instance, a German text dealing with a New York City setting and substitute "MauerstraBe" for "Wall Street," or "Fiinfter Damm" for "Fifth Avenue." The result will be silly because these street names are more than mere combinations of words, they have a specific meaning which has its roots in the locale, in history, in the particular experience of certain people: they are but symbols for intangibles which are meaningful only within a given frame of reference. That is why Rainer Maria Rilke mourned his inability to find a really good German word for the French term "offrande,"5that is why it is impossible to say "Never was so much owed by so many to so few" in any language other than English. For that reason it is all but impossible to achieve a truly satisfactory translation of Shakespeare into French, at least from the Frenchman's point of view, because, as one critic has pointed out, the French would find it difficult to put up with a Hamlet who does not go mad in a rational way. The best that can be accomplished in such instances is something in the manner of an explanation, or exposition, of a work of literature. If that exposition is made esthetically satisfying, we have the "Nachdichtung." The German Humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who, in general, lacked the sophistication of the Italianate Englishman were often "Nachdichter" rather than translators.Johann Fischart who turned Rabelais' masterpiece into a Teutonic farce with the title Die Affentheuerliche, Naupengeheuerliche Geschichtsklitterung . . . probably could not have done any better because neither Fischart nor his language possessed sufficient resources to tell the story in German without impairing its Gallic genius. And yet, by 1599, the Germans had a complete Terence! Thus, if German translators of that time could not compete for literary merit with contemporaneous English translatorsit was not for want of trying. Actually, it was the combination of universal awareness with a highly developed language which made the great Elisabethan
5

Quotedin the introductionto Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, as translated by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender. (New York, 1939), p. 18.

FAITHFUL UGLINESS OR FAITHLESS BEAUTY

509

translators possible. Such a situation did not exist for the Germans before the late eighteenth century, when it found expression in Schlegel's proclamation of Romantic poetry as "Universalpoesie." Schlegel's own Shakespeare renditions constitute one of the great translation achievements of all time. It is true that precisely those Shakespearian qualities which Voltaire had criticised as barbaric, the completely humane irrationality of the Bard, made him a kindred spirit of the Germans. In addition, it was the merit of the Schlegel group that they translated Shakespeare's plays in the original meter. A survey of German Shakespeare translations can be a most instructive study in literary growth. Half a century before Schlegel Wieland translated the plays into prose; so did others, like Eschenburg and the Vienna theater genius Stefanie der Jiingere.6 Wieland was chiefly interested in introducing Shakespeare to his countrymen, others were concerned only with the stage values of the plays. Von Borck, Prussian ambassador to London, translated Julius Caesar into hexameter because his generation was unfamiliar with the blank verse which Lessing was to introduce forty years later in his Nathan der Weise. In 1741, when Borck's translation became known, neo-classicism still reigned supreme in German lands. Its German apostles lost out to the disciples of Shakespeare eventually. Although they had done German literature a great deal of good, they did not realize, in their blind adulation of French models, that Germans are not Frenchmen, and that the differences between their languages, between any two languages, are not merely those of syntax and vocabulary. The Alexandrine verse, magnificent in French, is intolerably monotonous in German. Schiller, who was, among other things, a truly great translator, knew this and did not hesitate to be unfaithful to his original when he rendered Racine's Phedre into blank verse. Phedre says: Je t'en ai dit assez pour te tirer d'erreur. Eh bien, connais-donePhedre et toute sa fureur. J'aime. Ne pense pas qu'au moment que je t'aime, Innocente a mes yeux, je m'approuvemoi-meme. Ni que du fol amour qui trouble ma raison Ma lache complaisancea nourri le poison. Objet infortune des vengeances celestes, Je m'abhorreplus que tu ne me detestes. 6 Gottlieb Stefanie der Jiingere, a Viennese actor, translated Macbeth in 1771. His translation can be found in Deutsche Literatur in Entwicklungsreihen,Reihe 14 (Aufklirung), Bd. 8.

510

THE GERMAN QUARTERLY

Schiller translates as follows: Genug sagt' ich, die Augen Dir zu offnen. So sei es denn, so lerne Phaedra kennen Und ihre ganze Raserei. Ich liebe . . . Und glaube ja nicht, daB ich dies Gefiihl Vor mir verberge und mir selbst vergebe, DaB ich mit feiger Schonung gegen mich Dies Gift geniihrt, das mich wahnsinnig macht. Dem ganzen Zorn der Himmlischen ein Ziel Hass' ich mich selbst noch mehr als Du mich hassest. Let us say then, that faithfulness can be, but need not be, a virtue in translation: the translator has to be the judge. Goethe, who stated that a good translation should come close to being an interlinear version,7 began his German version of Manzoni's ode on the death of Napoleon with the words "Er war," thus faithfully reproducing the opening words of the original poem, "Ei fui." Others might prefer the unfaithful, but rather powerful opening of a later translator whose version begins with the words "Er ist tot."8 The complexity of the problem is such that good translation, certainly, merits better than Shipley's appelation quoted earlier. Speaking for those who love literature, who are aware of their ignorance, and are willing to depend on translation when their linguistic experience gives out, we should remember one humble truth aptly expressed by the Thomas Mann translator Mrs. Lowe-Porter in the introduction to her English version of the Zauberberg: ".. . it may be better that this task of transferring of a great piece of literature into another language be done poorly than that it not be done at all."9 Southern Illinois University Southwestern Campus

. . . die beste ttbersetzung ist die, die sich der Interlinearversion nahert" - in his essay "ubersetzungen" in "Noten und Abhandlungen zum Divan", Jubildumsausgabe, V, 306. 8 Dr. Savielly Tartakower, Vienna. Quoted from memory. 9 Introduction to Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, translated by I. T. Lowe-Porter (New York, 1927), p. iii.