Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe

Foreign Words

German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies Liliane Weissberg, Editor

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1. TRANSLATING AND INTERPRETING—GERMANY—HISTORY—18TH CENTURY. 2. TRANSLATING

AND INTERPRETING—GERMANY—HISTORY—19TH CENTURY. 3. TRANSLATING AND INTERPRETING

—PHILOSOPHY. 4. KLEIST, HEINRICH VON, 1777–1811—CONTRIBUTIONS IN TRANSLATING

AND INTERPRETING. 5. HÖLDERLIN, FRIEDRICH, 1770–1843—CONTRIBUTIONS IN TRANSLATING

AND INTERPRETING. 6. GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON, 1749–1832—CONTRIBUTIONS IN

TRANSLATING AND INTERPRETING. 7. LITERATURE—TRANSLATIONS INTO GERMAN—HISTORY

AND CRITICISM. I. TITLE. II. KRITIK (DETROIT, MICH.)

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Foreign Words

Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe

SUSAN BERNOFSKY

For my parents,

my sister,

and my beloved Don

Contents

PREFACE

1.

From Homer to Shakespeare:

The Rise of Service Translation

in the Late Eighteenth Century

2.

The Translation as a Doppelgänger:

Amphitryon by Molière and Kleist

3.

Hölderlin as Translator:

The Perils of Interpretation

4.

The Paradox of the Translator:

Goethe and Diderot

Coda:

From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Preface

THIS IS A BOOK about translation history and practice. It has protagonists: three great early-nineteenth-century German authors who were translators as well. It is also intended as an introduction both to a period in which translation began to play an unprecedented role in literary culture and to the theoretical perspectives from which this period can now most productively be viewed. The turn of the nineteenth century was a golden age of translation as an art form with respect both to the quality of the translations being produced and to the seriousness with which they were received. Indeed, the turn of the nineteenth century saw the emergence not only of modern translation in the form in which we know it today but of modern translation theory as well.

Studies of the developments in literary translation during this period are often dominated by the buzzword Romanticism. There is good reason for this: the key text of translation theory dating from this time was the work of a card-carrying Romantiker, Friedrich Schleiermacher; his friend and ally August Wilhelm Schlegel produced what were beyond all doubt the most influential translations of the age, Die Werke Shakespears, which immediately became one of the core texts of Romantic literature. The revolution in literary translation they helped initiate centers around what I call service translation: translation in which the translator strives to subjugate his own authorial intention to that of the author of the original text, a mode of translation that had not previously been practiced. The contributions of the Romantics to both the practice and theory of translation will be discussed at length in the first chapter of this book (From Homer to Shakespeare: The Rise of Service Translation in the Late Eighteenth Century). In the three chapters that follow it, I turn to the spectacular achievements of the great translator-authors who followed in the Romantics’ wake, producing important works of translation in the first half-dozen years of the nineteenth century.

The three figures of the Goethezeit (Age of Goethe) whose work I will analyze in depth—Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hölderlin as well as Goethe himself—were all strong translators who placed their own unmistakable imprint on the works they translated. In a sense, this is a claim that can be made of all translation; the notion that there might be such a thing as a neutral, merely accurate rendering of any work of literature is a fallacy. But it is as authors that these particular translators translated the way they did, intervening in the constructions of the original texts, and their translations are marked by literary concerns that can be found elsewhere in the oeuvre of each. They were authors in the sense of the auteur directors in film.¹ As such, their work as translators is deserving of study quite independent of all period concepts. Translation of this sort—I will call it authorial translation—is defined not by the translator being an author in his own right, but by his active shaping of the translated text in a particular direction. Authorial translation is not the antithesis of service translation; rather, it depends on it, as authorial intent in translation can be recognized as such only after a norm of fidelity to the original has been established. None of the three translator-authors whose authorial translations will be investigated here was a member of the Romantic circle, yet the sorts of translation they practiced can best be understood when viewed against the backdrop of the advances in the field of translation that preceded their work, advances clearly owed to the Romantics.

In the case of Kleist, the translator’s authorial interventions are relatively straightforward: after producing a translation of the first two acts of Molière’s play Amphitryon whose fidelity to the aims of service translation is nothing short of virtuosic, Kleist writes his own third act, one that thoroughly undermines Molière’s authorial intentions. In the process—and via a series of minute interventions at other points in the text—Kleist manipulates the doppelgänger-driven plot of Molière’s comedy to produce a tragicomedy that thematizes the translation process and subverts the original/copy relationship. His work is a hybrid PREFACE of service translation and its diametrical opposite: the outright erasure of the original through its replacement by a new text.

Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles’ tragedies Oedipus Rex and Antigone present a more complex constellation of issues. On first glance, Hölderlin’s work appears to be an extreme case of service translation, with sentences attuned to Greek syntax to the point of risking outright incomprehensibility. Walter Benjamin names him as the ideal of the translator working to achieve a hybridization of languages, using the patterns of one to enrich the other. Yet at the same time, Hölderlin’s understanding of tragedy causes him to make decisive alterations in Sophocles’ text, which then provide the basis for his interpretations of the plays. The key moments in these texts turn out to be not Sophocles’ but Hölderlin’s.

Of the three authors whose translations are discussed here, Goethe is the most difficult to categorize. In his novel Wilhelm Meister, he advocates a pre-Romantic form of translation, freely shaping the translated text to conform to the presumed wishes of the audience. Yet even in his early translation of Denis Diderot’s Essays on Painting, in which he revises Diderot’s thought in nearly every line, he clearly assumes a (service-oriented) responsibility vis-à-vis the original text that prompts him to identify and account for his changes as he makes them and to translate with meticulous precision wherever not otherwise noted. In contrast, Goethe’s translation of Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau nearly a decade later is full of authorial interventions in a text that is on the whole a masterpiece of service translation. For all his differences from—and disagreements with—Diderot’s thought and worldview, he succeeds in creating a language in German that is remarkably Diderodian. At the same time, the discrepancies between the original and the translation in both these cases bear witness to a farreaching debate on the nature of artistic representation in which both authors were participants.

This book is a tribute to the art of translation. It concerns itself first with the emergence of modern translation as we know it today, but then turns to the practitioners who broke the rules, the bad, the prodigal translators who hopped the fence of fidelity to enter into a realm of autonomous, emancipated translation that became itself a mode of original art, of discovery. This new mode—deliberately skewing a work to a particular end—enjoys renewed theoretical interest at the turn of the twenty-first century,² making these great nineteenth-century virtuosi even more important as forebears. Though we might not directly emulate the work of these renegades today, they have played a crucial role in defining literary translation as it can and does exist for us now.

The research for this book was begun and completed in Berlin with the help of two generous grants from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. I would like to thank my dissertation advisor, Stanley Corngold, who helped see an earlier version of this project into the world, as well as series editor Liliane Weissberg, who offered invaluable guidance and support for its expansion into the present form. I am grateful to Franz Kempf, Laurie Dahlberg, and Tabatha Ewing for their constructive readings of parts of the manuscript, to Anne-Lise François and Lutz Koepnick for their advice and encouragement, and to Aimée Ergas and Tom Broughton-Willett for their expert editing and indexing.

Excerpts from an earlier incarnation of chapter 1 appeared under the title Schleiermacher’s Translation Theory and Varieties of Foreignization: August Wilhelm Schlegel vs. Johann Heinrich Voss in The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication 3:2 (1997); an abbreviated version of chapter three, Hölderlin as Translator: The Perils of Interpretation, was published in The Germanic Review 76:3 (2001).

1

From Homer to Shakespeare: The Rise of Service Translaiion in toe Late Eightoenih Centory

The tradition of German authors who were active as translators dates back to well before the dawn of the Age of Goethe, but it was only near the end of the eighteenth century that the labors of authorship and translating came to be sufficiently differentiated for their combination in a single person to seem in any way remarkable. The translation norm in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had been largely what is now referred to in German as Nachdichten, in English, retelling or paraphrase. The translator was at liberty to alter the tone, style, diction, or form of a work, even to delete certain passages or add new ones of his own if he thought it would improve the final product. In a very real sense, these early translators were themselves the authors of the texts they produced, and there were a number of prominent literary figures among them. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock translated Homer; Christoph Martin Wieland translated plays by Aristophanes, Euripides, and Shakespeare; Johann Christian Gottsched translated Racine’s Iphigenia, Leibniz’s Theodicee, and B. Le Bovier de Fontenelle; Luise Gottsched translated Addison, Pope’s Rape of the Lock, and Moliére’s Misanthrope; Johann Jacob Bodmer translated Milton’s Paradise Lost, Pope’s Dunciad, and Samuel Butler’s Hudibrast; and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing translated two plays by Diderot.

The final decades of the eighteenth century witnessed a sea change in the dominant mode of translation, one that decisively shifted the relationship between authors and their translators. The intent of the original author began to determine the shape of the translated text, giving the author an unprecedented authority over the translator’s work. This change can be observed not only in individual translations but also in the critical and theoretical responses to them—reviews in which translators were criticized for their deviations from the original texts and, beginning in the early nineteenth century, theoretical essays arguing for the role to be played by faithful translations in the aesthetic education of a nation. The translator’s work acquired a new scholarly component previously reserved for translations from classical languages, a responsibility vis-à-vis both the language and the cultural context of the original text. The turn-of-the-nineteenth-century translator’s task, then, involved as much diligent study as poetic inspiration. These new translators were no longer authors in their own right for whom the foreign text was primarily a source of raw material and inspiration, but rather skilled craftsmen putting their talents at the service of a foreign author. They were, as I will be referring to them throughout this book, service translators, not because they did not themselves write original works of their own (many of them in fact did so) but because in the translation process they subordinated their talents to the authority, the perceived artistic intention, of another.

The term service translation intersects with and complements Lawrence Venuti’s term foreignizing translation, without doubt one of the most powerful ideas about translation to emerge during the 1990s. Venuti’s foreignizing, described in his 1995 book The Translator’s Invisibility, was inspired both by the theories of Schleiermacher, which will be discussed at length later in this chapter, and by Antoine Berman’s notion of an ‘.ethics of translation’ that entails ‘.bringing out, affirming, and defending the pure aim of translation as such,’ ‘.defining what ‘fidelity,’ and, above all, developing a ‘.non-ethnocentric translation.¹ Foreignizing’ translation stands in opposition to the ‘.domesticating’ sorts of translation whose aim is to ‘.bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar,’ and includes a range of strategies by means of which translators impact the development of literature in their own mother tongues.² Foreignizing most often involves the deliberate use of cultural references and linguistic structures specific to the work being translated and its original language, but the translator can also develop different sorts of techniques for ‘.disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the target language’ so as to signif[y] the difference of the foreign text."³ These techniques may consist of the use of unexpected vocabulary items or syntactical structures chosen to signal the translated text’s difference from its new literary and cultural context, or even simply a choice of text that subverts expectations for work in a certain genre or from a certain language, country, or continent. Service translation, by contrast, while it also privileges those characteristics of the translated text that reveal its origins in another language and culture, strives above all to emulate the characteristic features of the individual original work (style, tone, diction, imagery, metaphor, and poetic and/or narrative form). Its aim is to provide not merely an index of difference but a specific sense of the nature of this difference and the ways in which a particular language and culture manifest themselves in a particular work.

Foreignizing, ethical translation has become a linchpin in most recent discussions of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century translation theory and practice, and it provides a useful link between the work of these early translators and their present-day counterparts. That I have chosen to frame my argument in different terms marks a conscious deviation from a strictly Venutian approach, which would preclude all suggestion of a hierarchical relationship between authors and translators.⁴ But for purposes of my discussion, terms linked to the notions of service and authorship most clearly represent the issues at stake in the work of the figures I am investigating. The distinction between foreignizing and service translation, for example, is useful in discussing translators like August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose highly service-driven translations are foreignizing to only a moderate degree. The term service translation serves also to distinguish the work and intentions of these turn-of-the-nineteenth-century translators from those working at the turn of the twenty-first century for whom foreignizing translation is, as it were, a political tool, a means to escape the position of "invisibility’ that is in fact nothing other than the legacy of their service-translator forebears. Finally, it is important to note that a translation’s functioning in a service mode in no way precludes its being foreignizing as well.

This thumbnail sketch cannot, of course, do justice to what was a complex development spanning several decades. In the course of this chapter I will be describing in far greater detail the principal developments and events that served to effect a dramatic change in the fundamental understanding of translation during this period. Only when viewed against this backdrop—the newly forged standard of fidelity that had emerged by the beginning of the nineteenth century—can the achievement of the three translator-authors to whom this book’s final chapters are dedicated be judged. As will be seen, all three of these figures—Kleist, Hölderlin, and Goethe—exercised certain rights of authorship in their translations, but in none of the three cases does this represent a return to early-eighteenth-century translation norms. Rather, the particular forms of authorial translation that govern their work became possible only after a standard of service translation had been established. All three of these translating authors deviated from the norms that had implicitly come to govern the translator’s work by the time they began their translations, and assessing the extent to which they did so requires an understanding of the standards that were then the status quo.

The establishment of service translation as a norm was in large part the achievement of the early Romantics: the Athenäum circle around the Schlegel brothers, including Friedrich Schleiermacher, Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), and Ludwig Tieck. Many of the critical discussions of translation method were carried out in the form of literary skirmishes in various journals between the members of this circle and their adversaries. Indeed, the most accomplished service translator of this period was beyond all question August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose translations of seventeen of Shakespeare’s plays became canonical as soon as they began to appear in 1797 and remain so today; and the foremost theorist of service translation was Schleiermacher. While the three sets of translations to be examined in depth in this book are not themselves Romantic works, they would not have been possible without the contributions of the Romantics who preceded them.

This introductory chapter, then, first describes the rise of service translation that paved the way for the appearance of the new authorial translations early in the nineteenth century, then turns to the problem of establishing a theoretical basis for the work of the authorial translator.

THE SHIFT IN TRANSLATION THEORY

We can date the beginning of the rise of service translation to the appearance of Johann Heinrich Voß’s translation of Homer’s Odyssee in hexameter verse in 1781. This well-received—at least initially—and widely read volume prompted a number of published responses that gave new direction to the ongoing debate about what constituted "faithful’ translation. The ethically weighted term faithful (treu) was introduced into the discussion of translation by critic Georg Venzky in his Bild eines geschickten Übersetzers’ (Portrait of a Skillful Translator—), which was published in Johann Christian Gottsched’s influential journal Critische Bcyträgc in 1734. For Venzky, the faithful translator was the author’s advocate in ways that would come to be judged unacceptable by later critics: he might "assist’ his author by deleting or altering passages he found objectionable, or translate poetry as prose for the sake of clarity. The product of the translator’s work, in Venzky’s view, might even surpass the original text in quality. Venzky’s position was typical of those underlying many of the critiques of translations published by Gottsched in the Bcyträgc throughout the 1730s. It also reflected widespread translation practice at the time, which involved not only the production of translations that would be considered by later standards unacceptably loose but also translations of translations. There had been a decline in the study of foreign languages other than French during the first half of the century, and a large number of Greek, Latin, English, and Spanish works were routinely "translated’ into German from their French translations, resulting in texts whose link to their originals was tenuous.⁵

In general, quantity outstripped quality in the translations of this period. Gottsched himself complained, Die Uebersetzungssucht ist so stark unter uns eingerissen, daß man ohne Unterschied Gutes und Böses in unsre Sprache bringt: gerade als ob alles was ausländisch ist, schön und vortrefflich wäre⁶ (The translation mania has proliferated to such an extent among us that good and bad works alike are being translated into our language as though everything foreign were necessarily beautiful and admirable⁷). In 1740, French critic éléazar de Mauvillon provoked a flurry of defensive replies with his widely publicized charge that the Germans were only translators: they had produced, he said, no memorable literary works of their own and now were mangling those of foreign writers with their inferior translations.⁸

These criticisms soon began to prompt serious critical responses addressed to both the mode of the translator’s work and its purpose. The stakes for judging the "fidelity’ of a translation were raised with the appearance of Breitinger’s Critische Dichtkunst (1740), in which he demanded that the translator avoid the "periphrastic coldness’ (periphrastische Kaltsinnigkeit) that produces a dull effect (Mattigkeit). Rather,

Man muß nicht bloß ungefehr dasjenige sagen, was der Urheber gesagt, sondern auf die Weise und mit dem Nachdruck, wie er es gesagt hat. Des Uebersetzers Pflicht ist, daß er neben den Gedancken auch die Form derselben liefere.⁹

One must not only say approximately the same thing the author said, but in the same way and with the same emphasis with which he said it. The translator’s duty is to deliver, along with the thoughts, the form in which they appear.

This standard of fidelity—one that includes not just the "content’ of the text per se but the form in which it is communicated, the ordering of the thoughts, and the placement of emphasis—anticipates the demands for fidelity that were to become standard around the turn of the nineteenth century. The question of the criteria to be used in judging translations played a role in the so-called Zürcher Literaturstreit, the quarrel (largely about the relative importance of the imagination and rationality in poetic works) between the Swiss and Leipzig schools that pitted Bodmer and his compatriot Johann Jacob Breitinger against Gottsched. By the early 1740s, Gottsched himself had accepted his Swiss opponents’ criteria for judging translations and used them to question the quality of translations published by Bodmer and Breitinger themselves.

Despite the presence of these proposed critical standards for literary translating, few of the translations produced between 1740 and the late 1760s came close to fulfilling the task set by Breitinger. For one thing, the practice of paying authors and translators for their work, which had begun in the late seventeenth century and become more widespread in the eighteenth, encouraged a number of lesser talents to try their hands at it. As Lessing complained,

Unsere Übersetzer verstehen selten die Sprache; sie wollen sie erst verstehen lernen; sie Übersetzen, sich zu Üben, und sind klug genug, sich ihre Übungen bezahlen zu lassen.¹⁰

Our translators rarely understand the language [from which they are translating]; they translate for practice and are clever enough to get paid for these exercises.

Lessing’s own translations of Diderot’s plays (Le fils naturel and Le père de famille, published in 1760) were an exception to the general trend in these decades. They were in fact quite service-oriented and nonetheless enjoyed at least as much popular success as Lessing’s own plays;¹¹ but they were prose dramas, and by far the greatest variation in approaches to translation was to be seen in translations of verse.

A number of conditions that existed in this period encouraged the proliferation of mediocre translations. Translators were generally paid by the signature (rather than according to the quality of their work), and often they were placed under severe time pressure by their publishers to complete translations of works that had appeared in other languages—above all French—fast enough to avoid having their work preempted by some other translator/publisher team. This extreme form of competition developed because of pre-copyright practices: publishers could apply for the privilege’ of being the sole publisher of a book in an individual state (there being as yet no politically unified German nation), but even when they held such privileges’ they were in danger of being undercut by cheaper, or more rapidly produced, editions published in neighboring states, or even by locally produced illegal reprints. Literary piracy was rampant. Only in 1773 did it become illegal to reprint a book without permission within a given state (the first such law was in Saxony)—and even then certain states continued to encourage the practice of unauthorized reprinting because it boosted local economies. The first work to be granted a legally binding copyright valid in all the German states was the definitive edition of Goethe’s works in 1828. The English government, by way of comparison, began granting authors copyright protection of their works in 1710, and the copyrights paid to English authors throughout the eighteenth century far exceeded those received by their German counterparts¹² parts.

By the mid-1770s, translations accounted for a good one-third of the new books offered for sale at the Leipzig Book Fair each year—and this despite the fact that translations were affected by the new laws governing reprints. According to the laws in some states, translations could be interpreted as reprints of the original texts (which were sometimes printed locally) unless the translator deviated substantially from the original, supplied notes, or otherwise added his own material. And new translations of previously translated books—even those that had been translated poorly—were considered reprints of the first translations as long as copies of the original edition remained unsold. Bad translations, then, could be attacked by critics on two grounds at once: both for ruining the work of good authors and for making it inaccessible to better translators.¹³ Indeed, translations during this period were subjected to the most exacting critical scrutiny in journals such as the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, founded in 1765, in which, for example, a translation by Gottsched prompted