If the poet you’d understand
Go you must in the poet’s land.

Wer den Dichter will verstehen
Muss in Dichters Lande gehen.
– Goethe. 

I read that these lines are frequently cited by guidebooks and corporations for the promotion of tourism in places where literary tourism is popular.  For myself, I had always read it as in injunction to try one’s hand at artistic production.

Translator’s Note

Adorno published Der getreue Korrepetitor in 1963. Subtitled Lehrschriften zur musikalischen Praxis it was taken up after his death into volume fifteen of his Gesammelte Schriften or collected writings, which volume also contains Komposition für den Film, a book he co-authored with Hans Eisler in 1944. Parts of The Faithful Répétiteur derived from Adorno’s time in America as well, namely from the studies he made of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour. They provided much material for the book’s first chapter, from which the excerpt presented here is taken. The excerpt begins at the point in the chapter at which “the negation of music appreciation turns into the plan for an idea of structural listening”, as Adorno says in the book’s preface. There he contextualises the book in relation to essays he had already published. “The Faithful Répétiteur takes up the considerations put forward in Dissonances and in the essays ‘The Maestro’s Mastery’ and ‘New Music, Interpretation, Audience’ from Sound Figures and pushes them further, into the area of musical practice. The attempt is made to progress from the insight into a number of failures of contemporary interpretation and reception to an account of how new music could be correctly heard and presented, and how the new technical media could be correctly employed.” Once the idea of structural listening has been announced in the last pages of the chapter on music appreciation, The Faithful Répétiteur goes on to make good on its prefatory promise. There is a chapter providing ‘Directions for Listening to New Music’, a set of ‘Interpretive Analyses of New Music’—which consists in analyses of three works by Anton Webern, and one by each of Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg—and a chapter on ‘The Musical Employment of Radio’.

The Excerpt

[Adorno has just been criticising the NBC Music Appreciation Hour.]
The answer to that would be education for adequate listening. Instruction would have to lead towards the ability to apprehend compositions structurally, that is, to mediate their moments with each other such that a context of sense is illumined. The present crisis of musical sense can itself only be grasped against the foil of that context. It is, as something negated, preserved precisely in those works that resist merely asserted sensefulness. The resistance to musical sense today is, as it was already during the revolutionary period of the Schönberg school, the resistance to the faking of sense by means of the traditional forms, which are themselves by no means identical with the only thing that counts, the concrete musical figure. It is this, and nothing else, which the listener must be helped to experience. Even in the case of living music of the traditional type, acquaintance with its typical forms is perhaps a necessary but by no means a sufficient condition of adequate listening. Being musical—what gets hypostatized under this name as Being is a becoming, something that has to form itself, something that is open in principle—does not mean the subsumption of what is heard under its covering concept; not merely the capacity to say which position the details have within the logically superordinate schema. It means, rather, the ability as sounds unfold to think that unfolding in its necessity with one’s ears. The ideal of structure as of structural listening is the ideal of the necessary unfolding of music from the individual to the whole, without which the individual is indeterminate. Insofar as in traditional music this dynamic was not external to the formal types, but was as much nourished by them as they, in turn, constituted themselves only in their specific unfolding, musical education needs consciousness of the historically established forms; to act as if each work began again from the beginning, without presuppositions, would be just as Bœotic as reducing it to the skeleton that it has in common with countless others of the most various rank. But consciousness of the forms always involves consciousness of the divergences at the same time; the forms live in that wherein they are unidentical with themselves, and their substantiality is in many ways one with their capacity for modification. Little of conservative composition teaching was as fruitful as the demonstration of the difference of Bach’s fugues from the fugue type, which scholastic rules had abstracted from Bach himself; say in the free treatment of the transitional phrases in his fugues, compared with the mechanical recipe for producing sequences with inversions of the sequence members in double counterpoint. The student who learns to write a respectable fugue must feel the drive towards such divergence in the analysis of the Bach models, just as he must be aware of that from which they diverge. Insofar as authentic new music all places the specific structural moments, to the detriment of the typical façade, on the outside, the desideratum of structural listening could also be put this way: that every piece of music since the beginning of the thorough-bass age should be heard as if it were modern. The lay belief that in order to understand music one has to have studied the usual theoretical disciplines, harmony and counterpoint, or even with respect to newer constructions mathematics, is silly. That music appreciation is still stuck below the level of scholastic knowledge is no reason for the restoration of the latter; the scholastic disciplines have themselves been abstracted from musical history and the concrete works, then made didactically independent and with the help of natural-scientific hypotheses wherever possible, hypostasized as absolutely valid. They are already reifications of just that which an adequate apprehension would have to call to life. A person can have in their power all of the rules of pure harmonisation, all of the prescriptions of counterpoint, and nevertheless be incapable of spontaneously following the first movement of the Eroica.
That is the response to the accusation of intellectualism, behind which resistance to the aesthetic obligation to the matter in hand likes to hide. No listener should be burdened with acquaintance with concepts that don’t inhere in what he listens to; concepts that don’t present themselves to him as mediated through the concrete structure. But the anti-intellectualism to which the old aesthetics of pure intuition has been reduced in the intellectual economy of the comfortable consumer won’t let itself be satisfied at that. Such anti-intellectualism gets itself annoyed at even the first sign of the synthesis of what appears sensuously. It is through this synthesis that the latter first becomes art at all; in it reception converges with the law of form. Anti-intellectualism tells itself that such effort would rob it of the enjoyment that it demands of art as something to be occupied with during free time. While, at least in ideology, it won’t do without the cultural concept of art as a spiritual matter—for why else listen to serious music?—it wordlessly defends its supposed naïvety with the idea that the intellectual moment is the expression of a feeling, and is always present in the singular sensual moment in time; it need do nothing more than nothing at all: than surrender to that which pleasantly flows over it. But there it deceives itself. In music, as in every art-form, that which the language of philosophy calls sensual and categorial moments are in each other. If the stubborn naïve listener is right that art tolerates nothing intellectual that does not appear sensually, then contrariwise the sensual itself already has an intellectual destiny. It is an illuminated window, and it has the light to thank even for sensual beauty. The perception of the sensual now and here is a function of structural perception, of the turn to the whole, and this is more than just intuition. In the subjective reception of music the place where the spiritual and the sensual each end, where one becomes the other, is contingent, psychological. For the sake of the structure the neophyte, or the deconcentrated person, has to direct his attention intellectually to parts that have already passed away, parts that are no longer in his ear, so that the balance obtains that is produced when what has passed returns again. The experienced listener carries out such a synthesis not by means of the “recognition in the concept” but through the simultaneously active and involuntary reproduction in imagination. The spiritual moment in the force-field of the artwork just as in the adequate relation to it is subject to no logic external to the sensual; there is nothing one would have to think at that point—a suggestion which Hegel already ridiculed. Rather, the spiritual moment is the self-transcendence of the sensual and its presence at a particular point. The reception of artworks is not attention for the sake of orientation. With the labour of self-oblivious openness it lets itself be driven by such transcendence rather than be blocked up in the mere existence of the moment. It is a kind of thinking, just not a conceptual one; its own strength consumes itself in absorbing that which is locked up in the work, and is virtually extinguished in it. Art’s stringency is sui generis; art comes closer to the image of freedom as that which takes leave from empirical reality the closer, the more purely it structures itself according to the necessity of being just so and not otherwise: this necessity constitutes its objectivity. As a simile art anticipates for humanity how complete domination of the material could introduce a state free of domination, how rationality could restore nature. It takes more than memory and expectation to know that in listening to music. The relationship of these indispensable categories is dynamic, one of tension and release; it decides the question of stringency. For that reason sensuality and thought are related reciprocally in the work: perception, as the tension which draws unto itself, determines the non-present just as much as this latter, as fulfilment, either seals that which was perceived earlier, or subverts it. The whole becomes, the sum of all relations, those of succession and also of simultaneity; because music takes place in time, is not already there at an isolated point in time, the structure is not present for the listener as something primary either. It is only a result, and the sense something mediated. That is why the comportment towards music that hopes to receive everything exclusively from the sensual moment in time is insufficient. And yet the totality of the work’s relations, in which the temporal tensions balance each other out, may lift it up out of time’s stream, and the pure time-art do away with time. If it is the wish of primitive consciousness that music kill the time of boredom, then it is mature consciousness that arrives back home at this goal, after first liberating itself from it and thereby healing music of boredom. For time to halt, as the image of the end of all transience, is the ideal of music, of the experience of it and also of musical instruction. This ideal is an ideal of insights, but not of any insight about art, but rather that insight which art itself is, as the correlate to the scientific: knowledge from within. Artworks are the only things in themselves; they stand proxy for the reconciliation with things, which are lost, with nature. The listener’s co-execution of music is the successful self-externalisation of the subject into something that thereby becomes its own: an anticipation of a condition in which estrangement would be nullified.

[A translation of a post by Anatol Stefanowitsch of Bremer Sprachblog. The original is here.]

Language doesn’t only allow us to exchange information about the world, it also serves to negotiate and signal interpersonal relationships.

This is something we do by means, amongst others, of so-called polite-forms (or honorifics). In the simplest cases, they can involve special forms of address, like sir and ma’am, which are frequently found in American English, or the somewhat superannuated mein Herr or gnädige Frau in German.

But they can also occur as inflectional endings, which constitute a stable component of the grammar of a language, as, for instance, in Korean. If I should like simply to say “I eat lunch” in Korean then the neutral form is as follows:

Na-nun cemsim-ul mek-nun-ta
I-TOP lunch-ACC eat-INDICATIVE-DECLARATIVE

But there are five further levels of politeness:

“deferential”

Na-nun cemsim-ul mek-sup-ni-ta

I-TOP lunch-ACC eat-RESPECT-INDICATIVE-DECLARATIVE

“polite”

Na-nun cemsim-ul mek-e-yo

I-TOP lunch-ACC eat-INTIMACY-POLITENESS

“familiar”

Na-nun cemsim-ul mek-ney

I-TOP lunch-ACC eat-FAMILIARITY

“intimate”

Na-nun cemsim-ul mek-e

I-TOP lunch-ACC eat-INTIMACY

“abrupt/direct”

Na-nun cemsim-ul mek-so/-uo

I-TOP lunch-ACC eat-DIRECT

To explain the intricacies of this very complex system would take us too far. A few years ago I was at a party in Berkeley, which apart from me was attended only by Koreans. We spent a large part of the evening imagining various situations and asking ourselves who would use which level of politeness in those situations. It quickly became clear that there are big individual differences, but also that which form is appropriate when depends on gender, age, profession and many other things. That somewhat crude classification of examples does demonstrate one thing, however. At least two different dimensions play a role here: respect and distance.

In German and in other European languages honorifics in the pronoun-system play a role. There are typically two different forms for the second person, often refered to in linguistics as the T-form and the V-form (named after the French tu and vous):

	T-form	V-form
French	tu	vous
Spanish	tu	usted
Italian	tu	Lei
Russian	ty	vy
Swedish	du	ni
Hungarian	te	maga
German	du	Sie

The frequency of the V-forms varies strongly across the different languages. Whilst they are very frequent in French, that are hardly found any longer in the Scandanavian languages. The particular situations and social relationships that are marked by the use of the V form diverge also (a freely available paper on the topic is Helmbracht 2005). In general, however, it can be established that the same two dimensions that were mentioned above play a role: respect and distance.

The potential for friction, in all of this, lies in the fact that those two dimensions are expressed by means of a single distinction. Each of the two forms therefore has a double function: du can express closeness, but also lack of respect; Sie can express respect, but also distance. In each case, which dimension is intended depends on the situation and the relationship between the speaker and the addressee.

Which brings me to my topic. As a reader of this blog [Bremer Sprachblog], you [Sie] will certainly have noticed that in our posts and also in our responses to your comments we address you as ‘Sie‘. That’s not unheard of in the blogosphere, but it is definitely rare. And a few days ago, it elicited the annoyance of a reader, A.T.: he came to us via a link from Nils Reiters Goetheblog 3 (Nils, many thanks by the way for the link and first and foremost for the flattering comparison with Language Log) and then left the following comment:

Thanks for the link, but is that done in any other country, a blogger addressing his readers with ‘Sie’ in the comments?

I let myself in on the discussion and wrote the following:

Well, when I entered the blogosphere I gave some conscious thought to forms of address. Of course it’s clear to me that communication on the internet usually has a more informal character, especially in forums and blogs. Which would suggest that a general “Du” would certainly not be inappropriate (and I’m never offended when a reader calls me du). But still I thought that it can’t hurt to cultivate a polite tone, seeing as bloggers and readers are, to begin with, strangers.

That was formulated extremely imprecisely, and I can only excuse that by saying that I’ve no qualifications in pragmatics (pragmatics is a sub-discipline of linguistics which investigates T/V-forms, amongst other things). The V-form doesn’t codify politeness per se, but rather respect or distance, according to the situation. A.T. saw through my imprecise formulation immediately, and replied:

So that would make me impolite, because I call my readers du?
By the way, it can cause trouble, because on the internet using Sie is usually much rather considered to be impolite, ultimately it creates a certain distance, which in the blogosphere at least is uncommon. It’s like here in Sweden. If I used Sie I’d get funny looks, so consider yourself the recipient of a funny look

For A.T. the internet itself (or at least the interactive part, so blogs and forums) creates such a great closeness between users that using Sie becomes primarily a signal of distance (an interesting discussion in this direction can also be found here). This distance is then felt to be impolite.

But for me, as I suggested in my response, quoted above, the internet is more a place where users initially encounter one another as strangers, strangers who may have a common interest, but who will not automatically become close friends. Foremost in my mind when I decided on Sie was the cultivatation of a respectful interaction between like-minded people. By no means do I wish to express distance thereby — I feel myself closely bound to the readers of the Bremer Sprachblog, say through a common interest in language and languages, and through the fact that together we constitute a part of the blogging subculture. For those reasons I shall definitely stick with Sie, however I am very interested to learn what your opinion is on the use of du and Sie on the internet.

HELMBRECHT, Johannes (2005). Typologie und Diffusion von Höflichkeitspronomina in Europa. Arbeitspapiere des Seminars für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Erfurt Nr. 18 [PDF].

STRAUSS, Susan & EUN, Jong Oh (2005). Indexicality and honorific speech level choice in Korean. Linguistics 43(3), 611–651.

Translated from the German by Marc Hiatt, 9.04.07. Published under this Creative Commons license.

63. The body belonging to a monad that is its entelechy or its soul constitutes together with the entelechy that which can be called a living being, and together with the soul that which is called an animal. Now this body of a living being or an animal is always organic; since each monad is, in its own way, a mirror of the universe and the universe is ruled according to a perfect order, there must be an order in that which represents, i.e. in the perceptions of the soul, and consequently in the body that is represented in correspondence with the universe.

64. Thus every organic body of a living being is a kind of divine machine, or natural automaton, which infinitely surpasses all artificial automata. Because a machine made by the art of man is not machine in every one of its parts. For example: the tooth of a brass wheel has parts or sections that for us no longer count as something artificial, and no longer have anything which, on account of the use for which the wheel was destined, indicates a machine. But the machines of nature, i.e. the living bodies, are still machines even in their smallest parts, into infinity. That is what distinguishes nature from art, i.e. the divine art from ours.

65. And the author of nature was able to carry out this divine and infinitely marvellous work of art, because not only is every part of matter divisible into infinity, as the ancients recognised, but, moreover, each is actually divided without end into further parts of which every one possesses a movement of its own: for otherwise it would be impossible that each particle of matter should be able to express the entire universe.

66. From which one sees that there is a world of creatures, of living beings, of animals, of entelechies, of souls, in the slightest part of matter.

67. Every part of matter can be conceived of as garden full of plants and a pond full of fish. But again every twig of a plant, every member of an animal, every drop of its humours is such a garden or such a pond.

68. And although the earth and the air between the plants of the garden; or the water between the fish of the pond are neither plant nor fish they always contain these, but in a subtlety that for us is imperceptible.

69. And so there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos and no confusion except apparently; much as a pond might seem to one who from a distance perceived a confused movement and a swarming, so to speak, of fish, without discerning the fish themselves.

Translated from the German (c) by Marc Hiatt, with reference to the original French (parallel French and German texts can be found in Hartmut Hecht’s Reclam edition, Stuttgart: 1998).

THE DOGS’ DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

When in the course of the history of living beings, it becomes necessary for one species to dissolve the bands that have bound it to another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the independent and equal station to which the laws of nature and its divinity entitle it, a decent respect for the opinions of all creatures requires that it should declare the grounds on which it acts.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

that all creatures are created equal,

that they are endowed by the creator with inalienable rights, that among these
are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,

that in this respect no difference between human beings and animals obtains,

that therefore, according to the measure of the highest ideals, the proposition holds, all animals are human beings,

that accordingly dogs too may properly claim human rights,

that among the human rights of dogs there are included, aside from eating, drinking and sleeping: sniffing, straying from the path, barking, biting, cocking legs, playing at nonsense and a reasonable measure of general destruction,

that dogs have the divine right and the moral duty to bring about for themselves, among themselves as in their relations to all species, a state in which all those activities and possibilities of happiness are guaranteed, without renunciation, without collar, lead or punishment.

The present state of dogs which on historical, not rational grounds, subjects them to the power of human beings has not guaranteed the human rights of dogs.  Those rights in particular are denied us which derive from human nature as it is concretized in dogs.  Sniffing, one of the dogliest and as such humanest activities, is denounced as beastly.  We are forced to walk straight paths, whereas according to our nature the path is more important than the goal, and hence a wandering path always better than a straight one.  Barking activities, the purest expression of which we are capable, are deformed to human purposes and restricted to the arbitrary occasions that suit our masters.  We are forbidden to bite human beings, even though they themselves yearn for it, and are secretly pleased when one of us succeeds, like my fellow dog Prince did with Miss Garbo. Leg-cocking activity is reduced from our most intimate olfactory language to a lowly matter of regulated health-care.  Human beings make playing at nonsense a privilege of their own, and won’t allow it us since they are too ashamed by the thought that we are as good at it as they are at their bridge.  They don’t even allow us to satisfy our appetite for destruction with polished brown boots and saucily curved chair legs, whilst they themselves with their machines, so hostile to dogs, give free rein to their own appetite for destruction.

In just consideration of all these circumstances and assured of the good nature of our cause, appealing to the public conscience of all creatures, from superhumans to bacteria, we have come to the recognition that it can no longer go on in this way, and so we declare, as a species equal to the human, our independence from degenerate humanity.  But in order to preserve our well considered resolution, founded not upon blind inclination but upon inborn truth, from any semblance of impassioned irritation, ingratitude or enmity, in order that it be recognized as arising out of the matter itself, and not out of self-interested partiality, we deliver this declaration to one whose understanding for all suffering creatures is as certain as his deep and sensitive knowledge of the human nature of Dogs:

FRITZ LANG

whom I have to thank for the possibility of living, for the preservation of freedom beyond the measure otherwise so restricted by human beings, and for happiness achieved.  May he make himself the advocate of our great cause to a less panhumanistically oriented humanity.  The gratitude of all dogdom will be his until the colonization of the moon.

This declaration has been formulated in consultation with the creator of panhumanism, Archibald the Hippopotamus-King.  However, I alone take responsibility for it, in the name of all dogdom, and by the power of my own historically attested name.

Given at

Los Angeles, California, on the fifth day of the month of December in the year one thousand nine hindred and forty-six.

Translated from the German (c) by Marc Hiatt. (11.06-04.07)

Zanthens Yacht Xanthippe
war völlig unberechenbar,
trieb stets regelwidrig quer,
prosperierte oft nicht mehr,
landete kreuz-jammerbar
im Haitihafen gar,
fuhr entgegenkreuzend dann
Cubas Blumenküste an.

[By J Krüss, via !anaj ,em s'taht.]

Untranslatable, surely, but imitable. Some day.

For Moominissa.

Most translations have as one of their central goals an attempt to render the sense of a source text into a target language. But there is more to a text than what we mean by its “literal meaning”. One could even go much further, and say that phonic or graphic properties of a text, more than merely adding something the sense of the text, are co-constitutive of its sense, and that if they are changed, then the sense is changed. The concept of “translation loss” registers the fact that no translation can keep all the elements of a source text the same as they are: every translation must concentrate on some at the expense of others.

Aside from the interesting philosophical issues that this raises, it can pave the way to a broader conception of the possibilities of translation. I was first alerted to “phonic imitation” by Hervey, Higgins and Loughridge (Thinking German Translation, 44):

An entertaining illustration of the way phonic imitation in a [target text] renders the sense of the unrecognizeable is John Hulme’s Mörder Guss Reims, which consists in a playful imitation of English nursery rhymes. Here, for example, the text of ‘Humpty-Dumpty’ is reproduced as

Um die Dumm' die Saturn Aval;
Um die Dumm' die Ader Grät' fahl.
Alter ging's Ohr sä¨ss und Alter ging's mähen.
Kuh denn 'putt' um Dieter Gitter er gähn.

Here is Gustav Mahler’s Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht in phonic imitation. Mahler’s original text is available here, together with a translation that attempts to convey more literal meaning.

Venn mine shuts, hocked sight mucked


Venn mine shuts, hocked sight mucked,
Fur licker hocked sight mucked,
Hub BIC mine ant row, rig an' tug!
Gay hick in mine gamma line,
Do inkless gamma line,
Vine, an' vine, ooo! Mine an' shuts,
Ooo! Mine, an lea, ban shuts!
Bloom line blow! Bloom line blow!
Fair Dorevitch! Fair Dorevitch!
Berg-line Zeus, berg-line Zeus,
Dosings Alf crooner hide 'er.
Yuck! VSD felt's ocean!
T's a cute! T's a cute!
Zing! it nicked! Blue! it nicked!
Lenses char for buy!
Alice' singin', listnin' 'ouse.
Tess' are Ben's, Venn Nick's laughin' gay.
Then kick un-mine lied 'er.
Un-mine lied 'er.


Notes and Difficulties

Venn (ll. 1, 17), John: English logician 1834-1923.

Row (l. 3) must be pronounced as the word for ‘altercation’, not as the word
for ’scull’.

VSD (l. 12): an abbreviation for I know not what.

In many places one could have chosen between an “an’” and a present participle verb
ending “-in’”.

Further reading

Charles Bernstein cites a few examples of phonic imitation, or, as he terms it, homophonic translation:

Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s Catullus., David Melnick’s Homer
at Eclipse: Men in Aida – part one and part two; Ron Silliman on homophonic translation (his own, Melnick’s, and Chris Tysh’s), and two examples by Charles Bernstein — from Basque and from Portuguese.

No art has more warrant to look towards future centuries than typography. For what it produces today is for the good of the world to come no less than for that of living generations.

Translated from the German (c) by Marc Hiatt. (12.01.07)

This quotation from Bodoni (1740-1813) is given as a typographical example by Jan Tschichold in his Meisterbuch der Schrift (1952) (known in English as Treasury of Alphabets and Lettering):

Keine Kunst hat mehr Berechtigung, ihren Blick auf die künftigen Jahrhunderte zu richten als die Typographie. Denn was sie heute schafft, kommt der Nachwelt nicht weniger zugute als den lebenden Geschlechtern.

Trento, the 11th of September [1786], morning.

After wholly fifty hours of life and continual occupation I arrived here yesterday at eight o’clock, went soon to rest, and now find myself again prepared to continue my story. On the evening of the ninth, when I had brought the first portion of my journal to a close, I still wanted to draw my lodging, the post office, in its place in the Brenner pass, but it was unsuccessful, I missed its character and went home half annoyed. My host asked whether I should like to leave, by moonlight was the best way, and whether I knew that he needed the horses in the morning to take in the hay , he would like to have them back by then. Although his counsel was self-serving I was pleased to take it, since it accorded with my inner impulse. The sun let itself be seen once more, the air was tolerable; I packed, and left at seven o’clock. The atmosphere got the better of the clouds and the evening turned quite beautiful.

The postillion fell asleep and the horses went down the mountain at the fastest trot, always taking the way familiar to them; if they came to a flat spot we went correspondingly slower. The driver woke up and drove them on again, and so, passing between high rocks, I reached the roaring Etsch river [1] with great speed. The moon came up and illuminated monstrous objects. Several mills between ancient pines over the foaming stream were complete Everdingens.[2]

When at nine o’clock I reached Sterzing, I was given to understand that they wished me away again. In Mittenwald at twelve o’clock on the dot I found everything in a deep sleep, except the postillion, and so we continued on to Brixen, where I was once again helped on, so to speak, so that I arrived in Kollmann with the day. The way the postillions drove deprived one of all sight and hearing, and as sorry as I was to pass through these magnificent places at such horrifying speed, in the night, as if fleeing, nonetheless I felt an inner joy at the thought that a favourable wind was blowing behind me, chasing me on to my wished-for goal. At daybreak I glimpsed the first vineyards in the hills. I met a woman with pears and peaches, and then we left for Teutschen, where I arrived at seven o’clock and was immediately forwarded on. Now, after once again travelling northwards [3] for a while, I glimpsed in full sun the valley wherein Bozen lies. Surrounded by steep mountains, which are cultivated to quite a height, it is open towards the midday sun, sheltered towards the north by the mountains of the Tyrol. A mild, gentle air fills the region. The Etsch turns here once more towards midday. The hills at the foot of the mountains are planted with grape-vines. The vines are drawn along long, low scaffolds, the blue grapes are draped elegantly down from the top, and ripen on the close, warm earth. In the plain of the valley, too, where otherwise there are only meadows, the vines are grown in tightly arranged rows, and between them the Turkish corn, that now raises ever higher its stalks. I have often seen it reach teen foot high. The fibrous male bloom has not yet been cut, as happens when the bearing of fruit is a while past.

The sun was shining cheerfully when I arrived at Bozen. I took joy at the many faces of the shopmen. A purposeful, contented existence was giving itself lively expression. In the square sat fruit-women with round, flat baskets, more than four feet in diameter. The peaches they contained lay beside each other, so as not to get squashed. The pears too. At that point I remembered some verses that I had seen written on the window of the inn in Regensburg:

Comme les pêches et les mélons
Sont pour la bouche d’un baron,
Ainsi les verges et les bâtons
Sont pour les fous, dit Salamon.

That a northern baron wrote this is clear, and that these regions would alter his ideas goes equally without saying.

The Bozen market hosts a vigourous silk trade; manchester is brought in too, and as much leather as is gathered from the mountain regions. However its main visitors are the numerous merchants who come to collect money, take orders and give new credit. I greatly desired to investigate the many products, all found together there at one time, but the impulse I feel, the restlessness, will not let me pause, and I hurry on again without delay. I console myself with the fact that in our statistical times it is probably all already in print and that where there is occasion one can inform oneself by means of books. For me at present it is only the impressions of the senses that are important, which no book, no picture conveys. What matters is that I take interest in the world again, that I essay my spirit of observation and test how far my sciences and capacities will extend, whether my eye is light, pure and keen, how much I can grasp with rapidity, and whether the folds that have settled and impressed themselves on my mind can be erased. Already now, serving myself, now that I must maintain continual attentiveness, continual presence of mind, these few days have given me an entirely different intellectual elasticity; I have to take care of my funds, to exchange, record, and write, where once I only thought, willed, meditated, ordered, and dictated.

Notes

[1] The editor of the German edition corrects: the Eisack [Italian: Isarco] river [which flows into the Etsch (or Adige) below Bozen-Balzano].

[2] Everdingen: Allart van Everdingen (1621-1675), Dutch landscape painter.

[3] The editor of the German edition corrects: westwards.

[4]

As are peaches and melons
To the mouth of a baron,
So are lashings and beatings
To the fool, says Salamon.

Translated from the German (c) by Marc Hiatt (27.01.07)

From J W Goethe’s Italian Journey (Italienische Reise).

Translator’s Notes

The passage illustrates some of the difficulties of translating a text across a gap that divides not merely German from English, but the literary culture that Goethe possessed, and could expect in his audience, from that attainable by most of the inhabitants of late-capitalist society.

To take one example: in this translation Goethe’s “Trieb” becomes “impulse”. Perhaps the more obvious solution, “drive”, had, I decided, to be avoided. In contemporary English “drive” is too associated with, on the one hand, the special meaning given it by Freud, and, on the other, with clichés (“he’s very driven, he’s got drive”) usually used to praise people whose supposed self-motivation actually consists in little more than adaptation to the “flexible” labour-market. Those clichés themselves resonate with the language of motor-vehicles (“overdrive”) and space-travel (“hyper-drive”). Goethe’s Trieb is not without relation to mechanical inventions (“meinem innern Trieb”), but Goethe’s language retains more memory of the scientific background to the metaphor than does most contemporary talk. A Trieb is a motive power that is communicated from a source through passive parts of a mechanical system. Thus Goethe writes: “der Trieb, die Unruhe die hinter mir ist, läßt mich nicht rasten”.

I render this as “the impulse I feel, the restlessness, will not let me pause…” To have written “the impulse, the disquiet behind me,” even though it points more obviously to the source of the metaphor, would have contradicted too strongly the expectations of the reader of English. My concessions to those expectations, in particular, “restlessness”, which in my text is not “behind” Goethe, run the risk of submerging that source under suggestions of subjective arbitrariness. My hope would be that “the impulse I feel” is enough to suggest the passivity of mechanical parts vis-á-vis a motive force, hence to stave off any hints of “impulsiveness”. Which is as much to say that the translator, who perceives but cannot work alone to prevent the expiration of language, needs allies amongst those rare beings, the ruminating readers.

Bozen. September 1st, 1788.

All my dear children: Gottfried, August, Wilhelm, Adelbert, little Luis and Emil!

I am now near to the borders of Germany and have nearly crossed the great highlands of the Tyrol. The mountains are high, on several there has been much snow, and the so-called “Portal” or “Cell” through which one passes into the Tyrol is especially beautiful, splendid and wild. We also came by Martin’s Wall where the Emperor Maximilian got lost, and in Innsbruck we saw a very beautiful memorial to him, of which I will tell you in person. I am now in Bozen where today there is a terribly great mass of people; 19,000 children are to be confirmed, since the bishop has not confirmed for many years. In front of our lodging-house, in the sun, there is a fruit market the like of which you have never seen in your life; there are pears, plums, grapes, nuts, figs; for figs do grow here. Soon we will come to the region where quinces and lemons grow. O, if only you were with me here, or that I could send you a basket of such fruit! But the lovely fruit would go bad on the way, just as lovely human hopes sometimes rot from the inside out. — Already there are flat roofs here, of which there are said to be many in Italy, where one can see a long way in all directions; and the air is entirely gentle, warm and mild. In the Tyrol highlands we saw chamois leaping, in Innsbruck we also ate one, and saw a tame one, entirely charming, that followed its provider, a farmer’s wife, everywhere. It was as agile as I wish you all to be. I would that you had been there with me and seen it, and I wish too, that you may one day see the mountains of the Tyrol and journey through them in gladness.

Apply yourselves to your studies with industry, and behave yourselves well; also, do learn to draw, for I regret very much that I cannot. The region is entirely too beautiful, and between the mountains there are a thousand waterfalls made by a stream, the Etsch. It flows very rapidly and particularly in the diocese of Brixen has beautiful trees on its banks: poplars, birches and willow-trees. For many hours we travelled far beside it. Seek it out on the map, you will be able to find our path. Tomorrow we arrive at Trento, perhaps I will have news of you there. Keep well, dear children, hold me in your affection and be healthy, and live in good accord with your mother and the rest of the household! It is late and no doubt you will be sleeping in your beds. Sleep tight!

Translated from the German (c) by Marc Hiatt. (6.08.06)

Reprinted in H G Fiedler (ed.), Das Oxforder Buch Deutscher Prosa von Luther bis Rilke (1943) Oxford.