Nolten the Painter. A Novella in Two Parts (review)

Abstract

Eduard Morike, Nolten the Painter. A Novella in Two Parts. Trans. and with a Critical Introduction by Raleigh Whitinger. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005. xxii + 312 pp. When I was a callow graduate student, one of my prestigious elders suggested that I write my dissertation on Morike's Maler Nolten, a consequence, if I remember correctly, of a term paper I had submitted. When I mentioned this proposal to another of my elders, much younger than the first but well advanced in prestige, he said:But what will you do in the afternoon? I took this as a sign that I should look in a different direction. Nevertheless, I continued to be fascinated by the oddities of the novel and gradually composed an essay that, with the naive bravado of youth, I submitted to PMLA. The scathing rejection, composed by a prestigious elder elsewhere, with which I became acquainted because the evaluator sent a blind copy of the confidential document to my own elders, was directed, as I recall, not so much against my results but against the propriety of giving any critical attention to a German novel worthless by the international standards of the genre. Eventually I injected my essay into a Festschrift for the elder who had made the original suggestion, which seemed only fair and was not so difficult as I was coeditor of the volume. I recite this not to vindicate myself-Raleigh Whitinger, in the introduction to his brave translation, is good enough to refer fleetingly to my boyhood achievement-but as an example of the extraordinary repugnance, even within our own field, toward the post-Romantic German novel. Once when I was asked by a prestigious department for a lecture, I was nearly disinvited when I offered a talk on Karl Immermann. Admissible were only a handful of exceptions protected by the label of Bildungsroman. Maler Nolten exhibits anxieties about Wtlbelm Meister and other Goethean texts, but it is definitely not a Bildungsroman (even if Whitinger seems determined to retain it in an expanded definition of that category); its destructive intersection of three self-deluded neurotics and one psychotic might recall Die Wahlverwandtschaflen in structure if not in spirit. There have been some signs in recent, years that the ice jam is breaking up, and Whitinger's translation of this innovative novel located squarely on the boundary between the Romantic and the post-Romantic may possibly advance this development. It should be said before addressing the translation that Whitinger deserves credit and gratitude for undertaking the task.Translations, sitting ducks for the illintentioned, often bring out the worst in critics and reviewers; hundreds of pages and thousands of words accurately and felicitously rendered are passed over as though they were an entitlement in order to strain at gnats. Much here has been excellently achieved, especially the verse inlays, about which Whitinger expresses understandable apprehension in a translator's note. But with dexterous rhymes, assonances, and off-rhymes, the results are admirable, notably the Feuerreiter ballad, the Peregrina poems, and the verse sections of the Orplid play. If I were editing the text I would call attention to places where the translator's necessary freedom edges into inaccuracy, of which there are quite a few. Most of these do not affect the larger meaning, though one might be mentioned because it is crucial to the interpretation of the Orplid play:Denn graulich ist verifier liebe Qual appears as grey in hue is hated love's torment (71). German-English dictionaries and the modern Duden give this meaning for graulich, but Grimm lists it simply as a doublet of greulich, horrible ,as I have understood it here, and as it is in fact rendered elsewhere in the text (220).The President's farewell gesture to Larkens nicht ganz ohne lachenden Mund is rather different from without a smile on my face (250), which does not make sense in the context. For the benefit of the postcolonialists,Kapwein is not capuchin (197) but wine from South Africa. …