Friedrich Nietzsche On the Problem of Translation Translated by Peter Mollenhauer - Классики о переводе - Каталог статей

Friedrich Nietzsche On the Problem of Translation Translated by Peter Mollenhauer I One can gauge the degree of the historical sense an age possesses by the manner in which it translates texts and by the man-ner in which it seeks to incorporate past epochs and books into its own being. Corneille's Frenchmen—and even those of the Revo-lution—took hold of Roman antiquity in a manner that we— thanks to our more refined sense of history—would no longer have the courage to employ. And then Roman antiquity itself: how violently, and at the same time how naively, it pressed its hand upon everything good and sublime in the older periods of ancient Greece! Consider how the Romans translated this material to suit their own age and how intentionally as well as heedlessly they wiped away the wing-dust of the butterfly moment! Horace, off and on, translated Alcaeus or Archilochus; Propertius translated Callima-chus and Philetas (poets who were in the same rank with Theocritus, if we be permitted to make such a judgment). How little concern these translators had for this or that experience by the actual creator who had imbued his poem with symbols of such experiences! As poets, they were averse to the antiquarian inquisitive spirit that precedes the historical sense. As poets they did not recognize the existence of the purely personal images and names of anything that served as the national costume or mask of a city, a coastal area, or a century, and therefore immediately replaced all this by present realities and by things Roman. They seemed to ask us: "Should we not make antiquity to suit our own purposes and make ourselves comfortable in it? Why can't we breathe our soul into this dead body?—for it is dead, no doubt, and how ugly all dead things are!" These poet-translators did not know the pleasure of the historical sense; anything past and alien was an irritant to them, and as Ro-mans they considered it to be nothing but a stimulus for yet another Roman conquest. In those days, indeed, to translate meant to con-quer—not merely in the sense that one would omit the historical dimension but also in the sense that one would add a hint of con-temporaneousness to the material translated and, above all, in the sense that one would delete the name of the poet and insert the translator's name in its place. And all this was done with the very best conscience as a member of the Roman Empire, without realiz-ing that such actions constituted theft. II What is most difficult to translate from one language into an-other is the tempo of its style: that which is grounded in the charac-ter of the race or, to speak in a physiological manner, in the average tempo of its "metabolism." There are some well-meaning transla-tions that are nothing but involuntary generalizations of the origi-nal and as such can almost be considered forgeries. This is so be-cause they failed also to translate the original's courageous and cheerful tempo which helps us to be consoled for, if not to skip over, all that is dangerous in words and things. The German speaker is almost incapable of expressing this presto quality in his language and, as is fair to conclude, is incapable of many of the most delightful and daring nuances of unfettered, freethinking thought. Just as buffo and satyr are strangers to the corporeal and oral sense of the German, so will Aristophanes and Petronius be untranslatable to him. Everything that is pompous, viscous, or sol-emnly plump, all those tedious and boring turns of style are devel-oped in the German in a superabundant variety. I hope I will be forgiven if I mention the fact that even Goethe's prose, with its mixture of stiffness and daintiness, is no exception. Reflecting "the good old times" of which it was a part, Goethe's prose was an expression of German taste at a time when a "German taste" was still in existence—albeit a taste that was a rococo taste in moribus et artibus, in morals and arts. Lessing was an exception. He had the temperament of an actor who knows how to do as well as how to comprehend many things. Not without good reason did he translate Bayle, and take pleasure in seeking the intellectual company of a Diderot and a Voltaire, and even more so that of the Roman writers of comedy; he loved the tempo of freethinking, the flight away from Germany. But even if the German language were to speak with Lessing's prose, how could it possibly imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who, in The Prince, lets us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence, and who cannot help but express the most serious matter in a refractory allegrissimo: perhaps he does this not without a malicious artistic inkling of the contrast he is daring to expose. His thoughts: long, difficult, hard, and dangerous! His tempo: gallop, accompanied by the very best and most mischievous mood! Finally, who could possibly dare to write a German translation of Petronius, who, more than any great musician to date, was the real maestro of the presto tempo in his inventions, his ideas, his words. What does the whole morass of a sick and evil world, even the "old world," matter if, as Petronius did, one possesses the wind's feet, its pulling strength and breath, and its liberating disdain—this wind that heals everything because it makes everything flow! And then consider Aristophanes, that illumining, complementary spirit for whose sake one can forgive all of ancient Greece for having existed at all, provided one grasps deep inside what exactly is in need of forgiveness, of transfiguration. I don't know of anything that caused me to dream more about Plato's obscurity and his Sphinx-like nature than the petit fait that I was lucky enough to receive: the fact that under the pillow on one's deathbed one would find no Bible, nothing Egyptian, nothing Pythagorean or Platonic—no, but only the writings of Aristophanes. Without Aristophanes, how would Plato have been able to bear life—a Greek life whose essence he negated?
1 2 3 4 5 Категория: Классики о переводе \| Добавил: Voats (20.09.2011)
Просмотров: 2909 \| Рейтинг: 2.0/2