Author: Lu Mingjun
Goethe famously said, "Travel increases knowledge." We can also say, "Translation increases knowledge." Goethe's translation is the best commentary on imitation.
Goethe, the great German writer, is best known for his literary works, but his other important role is as a translator. We can trace Goethe's growth as a translator.
Good command of both mother tongue and foreign language, ideal for a translator. Goethe's fathers enabled Goethe to master the tools of language. Goethe's father had little success, so he deliberately spent a lot of money on the education of his children. This not only reflects his vision, but also implies a father's desire to "regenerate" himself: "to see what he cannot accomplish for his son." (Goethe's Poetry and Truth, translated by Simu Liu)
Young Goethe studied diligently and highlighted the word "bitter", which is not an exaggeration. Others may think that Goethe has a rich family and talent, and he can become famous with a little effort. In reality, however, it is not so easy. In 1824, Goethe had reached the age of antiquity, and when he recalled the past, his memory was still full of resentment:
People usually see me as the luckiest person... My whole life is basically just hard work. I can say that I lived seventy-five years and not a single month was truly comfortable. It's like pushing a stone up a hill, and the stone keeps rolling down and pushing up. (Ekmann's Goethe Conversations, translated by Zhu Guangqian)
The corresponding text for "hard work" is "Mühe und Arbeit". Mühe means "toil"; Arbeit means "work". In the German context, Arbeit refers not only to the work of a person who is employed, but also to the work that results from study and research. Goethe looks back on 75 years since Bisissyphus, toiling, every day, and so on. As a child, he was sent to the "game preschool" to learn Italian, and later received family education, learning various European languages: Latin and Greek are indispensable as carriers of European humanistic traditional knowledge; Born in 18th-century Germany, which prides itself on speaking French, learning French is fashion-driven; English should not be ignored; Hebrew and Jewish German are also on the course list. Although these languages are not acquired at the same time, the amount of learning in them can be imagined. Reading Goethe's "Juvenile Study", we can see that translation is the "commonplace" of his language learning, in other words, Goethe has practiced translation "Tongzigong" since he was a child. His practice material is based on religion, history and literature, mixed with serious, playful heterogeneous material in a variety of styles.
Time lived up to the hard work of the youth, Goethe's translation was fruitful, and the translated text exceeded 1,000 pages. The Frankfurt edition of Goethe's Complete Works Volume 11 contains four lengthy translations: The Autobiography of Cellini and The Nephew of Ramour, as well as Voltaire's Don Creddy and Mohammed. The translation section of The Complete Works of Goethe, Volume 12, Translations II, Adaptations (hereinafter referred to as "Volume 12") contains translations scattered throughout juvenile work, letters, periodicals and works, giving us a glimpse into Goethe's short translations. According to the table of contents arranged in volume 12, in addition to translation exercises and translations from letters during his teenage studies, Goethe's translations of 14 translations in Greek (e.g., Pinda Olympia's Fifth Ode), 5 in Latin (e.g. Tyrentius's Gelding), 8 in French (e.g. Corneille's The Liar), 17 in Italian (e.g. Tanka Roma), 15 in English/Irish (e.g. Byron's Manfred), and 12 translations in other European literature (e.g., The Song of Finland). 6 Far Eastern and Near Eastern literature (e.g. Song of Solomon), 3 South American literature (e.g. Death Song of the Prisoner), and 19 translations for cultural and natural exchanges (e.g. The Kingdom of Coal).
Goethe's way of translating
Goethe famously said, "Reisen bildet" (Travel increases knowledge). I may wish to parody it: "Translation Growth Insight" (Translation Growth Insight). Goethe's translation is the best commentary on imitations. The above statistics show that Goethe's translation is extensive, and it is no wonder that he was in the small town of Weimar, but he was able to draw styles from the literature of all countries in the world, and his eyes were broadened. Scholar Karl Deichgr ber points out: "Goethe did not translate simply for the sake of translation, he did not translate for the sake of practice, but to try to understand and absorb the literary work he faced." After translating a poem from Byron's Don Giovanni, Goethe attached a commentary arguing that "English poetry has developed a full-fledged comedic language that we Germans completely lack" and that translating Don Juan "may allow us to learn something good from the English." Byron's works were arrogant and uninhibited, and were not well received in the German literary circles of the same era. Nevertheless, Goethe boldly recommended that young talents of his country choose from among them to practice their skills, and in this way he responded to criticism that "to such a loyal, peaceful and prosperous people" he introduced "the most immoral product of the art of poetry from ancient times to the present".
Reading Goethe's translation, "touching" the story behind the translation, Goethe's outline as a translator gradually becomes clear. Needless to say, translators encounter difficulties and challenges when translating due to language and cultural differences. At the beginning of October 1795, Goethe made up his mind to translate from French the literary essay "Experimental Essay Works" by the strange woman Germaine de Sta l-Holstein, which he planned to publish in the "Goddess of Time" edited by Schiller. When he said he did, Goethe immediately set about it, full of confidence. Madame Staël was not long, and Goethe was quick to share the initial results with Schiller: "You will soon receive the 21-page manuscript of the first part. At the same time, he informs his translation strategy: "I brought her words closer to our understanding, while trying to treat uncertain expressions in French more precisely in our German way." ”
As the translation progressed, Goethe really felt that the translation road was bumpy, and he could not be comfortable with it. On October 10, as the translation was nearing completion, he revealed to Schiller: "You will soon receive (Madame Staåer's work, author's note)... It's all things written by kind ladies that are either consistent or inconsistent with herself! "The troubles caused by the self-divergence of the original work are already looming. Three days later, he complained to Schiller again: "The woman's way of thinking and French expression have added a lot of work to me, especially to converge her opinion with ours, not to mention the differences and countless 'buts.'" "It seems that not only language differences can cause problems, but gender differences can also hinder the translation process. Having personally experienced it, Goethe knew that translation is not easy, so he called the translator "the prophet of his own nation" and "the intermediary of universal spiritual trade", giving the translator a very high status.
From these experiences, Goethe developed his own way of translating. One way to do this is to "transform" the original text with its own linguistic features. Commenting on Goethe's translation of Hippocrates, Daisy Grebel wrote:
Goethe's efforts are embodied in the general transformation of words and sentences through another, even more impressive form, manifested in the transfer of the original sentence into his own thoughts and expressions. Everywhere he removed the abstract, inanimate, pedantic, the words and sentences were colored and vividly intuitive, the living sensation removed the rigidity of Greek expression, and the sleeping static took on movement. Goethe's change of the rigid and repetitive expression of the original is precisely this characteristic that breathes life into the original work.
Goethe mobilized both translator and literati identities at the same time, and made the original work "reborn", which was also praised. Commenting on Goethe's translation of the English poem "From a 1604 Souvenir Book of Guest Inscriptions", the scholar Harold Jantz praised: "Goethe's translation is a very faithful reproduction of the original English work, and although it may lack some brisk intonation, it is a beautiful, translated into German poem." Poetically, this is probably one of Goethe's most successful translations. Interestingly, the available information is not yet conclusive about the author of the poem, which Goethe mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare at the time. This is mostly due to the fact that the original text he refers to has only the abbreviation "W.S." in the author's final paragraph, and it is understandable that it is misleading. It can be seen that translation is a sophisticated system engineering, and mistakes can be made at every turn, and geniuses are not "spared". According to the author's incomplete statistics, in the translation of volume 12, there are more than 20 suspected mistranslations or omissions by Goethe. There are many mistakes in translation, and perfection is almost a luxury. As far as the volume of Goethe's translations is concerned, these errors are insignificant.
China in Goethe's translation
Goethe was not late in Chinese literature, but he wrote very little. In the afterglow of his life, Goethe increasingly set his sights on distant China. Between 1827 and 1829, Goethe, who was about to reach his old age, published two works related to China. Volume 12 includes it as a "translation". The first is "Chinese Works". The work was originally published in 1827 in the journal "On Art and Antiquity" edited by Goethe in his later years, and was a "translation" of four songs by Goethe from the "Hundred Beauty New Songs". Goethe was able to speak European languages such as French and English, and it was only natural that Goethe could speak comfortably. However, Chinese is probably too unfamiliar to Goethe, and the so-called translation should be Goethe's translation from a third language, which can be confirmed by a manuscript during Goethe's creation. This draft shows that Goethe considered starting the translation with the following perspectives: Abel Rémusat's translation of The Jade Pear and Peter Perring Thoms' translation of the Chinese Courtship Poem "enable us to observe this well-guarded country more deeply and keenly." This fully shows that Goethe was aware of these two translations and used them for reference.
Thomas's Chinese Courtship Poems are based on the Notes of Flowers and its appendix, The New Song of Hundred Beauty. Goethe's "Chinese Works" basically refers to the "Hundred Beauty New Songs" in Thomas's book, mixing "translation" and "creation", and chanting four women: Xue Yaoying, Concubine Mei, Feng Xiaoli and Kaiyuan. In addition to one poem, Goethe made a quotation for each woman and an epilogue for the story of Xue Yaoying and Kaiyuan. Four women have four destinies. Xue Yaoying dances lightly, can dance on the lotus, and a pair of golden lotus feet lead all women to follow suit; Concubine Mei, who used to fall in love with the country, was snubbed, but still refused the emperor's reward; After Feng Xiaoli was captured, he was included in the harem, and his playing was sad; The palace maid Kaiyuan used ingenuity to sew the poem into the military uniform, and finally found a good fate. The four women were distinctive, and their appearance and behavior were very different from the image of China that was quietly changing in the second half of the 18th century. During the Enlightenment, philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff admired China. But by the end of the Enlightenment, the philosopher and writer Johann Gottfried Herder argued in terms of looks, language, behavior, and even educational methods that the image of China circulating in Europe was idealized.
Goethe and Herder were very close in their early years, and it is reasonable to be influenced by their view of China. However, after reading Chinese works in depth, Goethe's mind changed in his later years. In January 1827, he spoke about his experience of reading Chinese literature:
It's not as strange as one might think. Chinese are almost identical to us in thought, behavior, and emotions, making us quickly feel that they are of our kind, only in them everything is clearer, purer, and more moral than we are. In them, everything is understandable, approachable, without strong lust and soaring poetry, so there are many similarities with "Hermann and Dou Green Terrace" written by me and novels written by Richardson in England.
Goethe felt unexpectedly. Chinese and European literature had something in common in Goethe's eyes. In the final draft of the Chinese Works, Goethe solemnly declares before the text: "The following notes and poems from the anthology of biographical essays 'A New Song of the Hundred Beauty' convince us that, despite all the confinements of this unique and peculiar country, people still live, love and write poetry." Clearly, reading and creating related works allowed Goethe to reverse the stereotype of Chinese.
Surprisingly, volume 12 also includes "Sino-German Four Seasons of Morning and Dusk" (also translated as Sino-German poems) as a "translation". The poem dates back to 1827 and was finally published in the Berlin Literary Yearbook of 1830 in 1829. The title of the poem has a strong Chinese reference. The poem consists of 14 stanzas, and the first line of the poem is "Mandaren" - quite Chinese. The first verse "tired of serving numerology, / for the officials every day" became the reason why the characters in the poem "left the north". The poems use flowers and plants as a medium, and plants such as daffodils, azaleas, nettles, feilian, roses and other plants depict the beauty, while at the same time, alluding to the changing seasons of spring, summer and autumn. The quiet of the East, the picturesque imagery has become a world to escape the hustle and bustle of the world. The final verse ends with a dialogue between the subject and the guest:
"Come on! We're about to say goodbye.
What more do you have to say? ”
quelling the desire for the distant and the future,
Today, life is busy here.
With his final allegory, Goethe draws the reader's attention from the relaxed garden scenery back to real work, as if determined to return to the real track and deal with the trivial everyday life of Weimar. Obviously, although this poem has elements similar to China, it is not a translation, but a pure creation. The arrangement of the translation of Volume 12 is clearly complete, and the editors explain in the notes that the poem is not a translation of specific Chinese poetry, but incorporates "common features" of Chinese and German culture. However, this all-encompassing arrangement also allows us to re-explore the Chinese meaning of Goethe's poems.
epilogue
For Goethe, translation can also be a kind of argument, through which he "dialogues" with the deceased "on the boundary of life and death". Let's see how Goethe refuted Diderot. Goethe used the method of translating and theorizing while translating to deconstruct and refute Diderot's remarks in The Theory of Painting and to correct deviations. The same strategy was used to refute Newton. Goethe translated some of the theories in his "Optics", criticizing the shortcomings of Newton's scientific experiments and refuting the blind obedience of Newton's theories in the scientific community.
Guo Moruo once summed up Goethe's life as "a promiscuous boy - a literary hero, a young prime minister - a new discoverer in science". Goethe straddles both the arts and sciences. In his mind, science can be compared with literature and art, and it is also one of his lifelong desires. This can be seen in its translation. Goethe's translations covered minerals, cloud formation, coal mining, mathematics, physics, botany, etc., and most of these translations were the result of his interest and interest. In addition, his "Color Science" and "On Morphology" strongly prove another identity that Goethe diligently sought - natural scientist.
(The author is a professor at the Department of German, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies)■
Source: Wen Wei Po