Review Essay: Translating the Untranslatable

Abstract

J. HILLIS MILLER Review Essay: Translating the Untranslatable Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther; Elective Affinities; Novella, trans. Victor Lange and Judith Ryan, ed. David E. Wellbery. Goethe's Collected Works, Vol. 11. New York: Suhrkamp Publishers New York, Inc., 1988. By a strange fatality (into whose causes it would be interesting to enquire) the German and English terms covering the phenomena discussed in these pages seem never to coincide: they seem always too narrow or too wide — to leave gaps between them or to overlap. 0ames Strachey)1 Traduttore — Traditore! 2 All those interested in Goethe will rejoice in the rapid completion of an authoritative new English translation of "Goethe's Collected Works" in twelve volumes, under the general editorship of Victor Lange, Eric A. Blackall, and Cyrus Hamlin. This is the eleventh volume of this project. It includes a new translation by Judith Ryan of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, revised versions of the translations by Victor Lange oÃ- Die Leiden des fungen Werther and Novelle, and a substantial concluding essay on the three works by David Wellbery. Such projects presuppose that translation can occur, without essential loss, or, to put it more modestly, that it is better for those who do not read German to read Goethe in English translation, whatever the losses, than not to read him at all. My brief remarks here, without challenging those assumptions, attempt to ask what, in the case of these works, may not get carried over in translation. The words "translation" in English and Ãœbertragung in German of course etymologically mean just that: the act of carrying over. I shall center my discussion on Die Wahlverwandtschaften. 270 J. Hillis Miller Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Die Wahlverwandtschaften, writes as follows: "The Elective Affinities has possessed all along a disturbing power [ein trüber Einfluß]. In congenial temperaments [verwandten Gemütern] this may rise to rapturous enthusiasm. In those who are alien to the novel the reaction becomes hostile consternation [widerstrebende Verstörtheit]. Only an indefectible rationality [die unbestechliche Vernunft] is able to cope with it. Under the protection of such rationality the heart may dare to abandon itself to the prodigious, magical beauty of this work."3 Is this "disturbing power," this "prodigious, magical beauty," translatable? Can it be carried over from one language to another? If not, what aspect of the work, exactly, would fail to make it across the gulf from language to language, the gulf supposed to be bridged by translation? Ãœbersetzung is another German word for "translation." The word suggests the act of picking the original meaning up, carrying it across, and then positing or depositing it in the language of the translation. If something essential gets lost on the way, might translation itself not be a form of that "indefectible reason" serving to insulate the reader from the work's disturbing power and beauty in the original? The dust jacket copy for this new translation by Judith Ryan does not stress the disturbing beauty and power of Goethe's novel. Rather the jacket praises the translation for a "freshness" that leads to "enjoyment" in the reader: "Ryan's fresh new translation lets the reader enjoy a text obscured until now by stiffness and formality. " This must be meant as dispraise for the two previous translations into English, that by James Anthony Froude and R. Dillon Boylan, and that by RJ. Hollingdale.4 It might conceivably be argued, however, that something like "stiffness and formality" are, strangely enough, a fundamental part of the power and beauty of the original. These stylistic features, moreover, appear in unexpected parts of the text, not only in the stylizations of the interpolated tale, for example, but in all those oddly detailed discussions of landscape planning, or of chemistry, and in the selections from Ottilie's Journal. The latter sound far less like the diary of a young girl than like the sober maxims of the aging Goethe. In any case, one way to test out this new translation is to set side by side the three translations of key passages, measuring them against the original. But let me ask first whether it is possible to be any more specific...