Kathleen Maris Paltrineri has a very illuminating LARB interview with Damion Searls, the translator of new Nobel laureate Jon Fosse [ˈjʊn ˈfɔssɛ] — in fact, he learned Norwegian in order to read Fosse. I like his responses very much, both the ones where he expands on a topic and the ones where he sensibly ducks the question. Some excerpts:
How do differences between Nynorsk (the version of Norwegian Fosse writes in) and English — for example, the lack of present continuous verb tense in Nynorsk — shape your translations? How do Nynorsk and English enter into a dialogue in your versions?
That’s an interesting question, because I’ve never really thought about Nynorsk and English as being in dialogue. I might even go so far as to say that if the languages are in dialogue, that’s the sign of a bad translation. Isn’t that what “translatorese” is? When English is speaking a little bit in Norwegian (or whatever the language pair is)? Fosse is the writer who gets to use Norwegian — I have to use English, the whole English, and nothing but the English.
You mention the present continuous verb tense: “I am standing” instead of “I stand,” for example. This is crucial for Fosse, who writes a lot in the grammatical present tense but about overlapping time frames and levels of reality. You might be tempted to think that “I stand” is the correct translation of the Nynorsk eg står and “I am standing” is “looser,” but actually both are equally faithful and correct, because Nynorsk has only the one form; using the same English form every time would not be correct, even though the Nynorsk repeats, because English has two forms. The opening of Aliss at the Fire, for example, uses both forms this way: “I see Signe lying there on the bench in the room and she’s looking at all the usual things, the old table, the stove, the woodbox, the old paneling on the walls, the big window facing out onto the fjord, she looks at it all without seeing it…” (leaving aside the participles “facing” and “seeing,” which in Nynorsk correspond to “the window onto the fjord” and “without to see [anything]”). The original uses the same form every time, and it’s even more repetitive in Nynorsk because “to look” is the same verb as “to see” with a preposition added (basically “to see at,” so this short passage has the same verb ser for “see/sees/looks” three times). But I have to write clear and forceful English without clinging too closely to the Nynorsk, and that means availing myself of the subtle difference between whether she sees or is seeing.
Even if I put a foreign word into a translation, for a street name or holiday or kind of food, I’m still writing in English and putting “burrito” or “lutefisk” or an italicized less-common word into my English sentence. Even characters’ names! I changed Ales to Aliss in Aliss at the Fire, because “ales” is an English word; the literal book title, It’s Ales, would look like a beer guide. Another example is the dog character who totally steals the show and the reader’s heart in Septology: little Bragi. In Norwegian, his name is Brage, pronounced something like “BROG-uh” or “BRAH-geh,” and when drafting the book, I automatically put that name in the translation. Only very late in the process did I realize that English speakers might mentally pronounce it as “Brage,” rhymes with “rage” or “page,” and that would be all wrong. Plus, even if they knew enough to say it BROG-uh, that sounds adorable in Norwegian but isn’t very cute in English. There’s dialogue in the book where a friend says, “Oh, Brage, that’s a good dog’s name,” so it had to sound good. I asked Fosse about what the name meant to him, and he reminded me that “Brage” is the Norwegian spelling for Bragi, the Norse god of poetry; there’s a famous Brage Prize for Norwegian books, etc. Of course, I remembered Bragi from the Norse myths. And that makes it a great dog name, like naming your little lapdog “Apollo” or something. It’s funny and it just sounds better, and it even rhymes with “doggie.” I’m convinced that the readers who’ve told me how much they love Bragi would have loved him less if he were Brage-rhymes-with-page. That’s a translation decision where English and Nynorsk have to not be in dialogue.
I was taken with the lyricism and rhythm of your translations. What stylistic elements of Fosse’s Septology are paramount for you as a translator? What are your strategies for carrying across those elements from Nynorsk to English?
After that long answer, I’ll give a short one. As you say, lyricism and rhythm, what Fosse calls “the music,” are the most important qualities of his writing. I don’t have conscious strategies here, besides just trying to make it sound good — revisions and ear are about all I’ve got.
In Septology, we encounter an artist and widower named Asle, who has a doppelgänger named Asle, also a painter. Asle, the narrator, thinks a great deal about God, about art and language, and about death. In thinking of the following passage, which appears in V, I was curious about the ways in which Fosse’s aesthetics mirror or work in combination with the mystical or ecstatic explorations of Asle, and about your approach for translating these aesthetics […]
I just translate what he says — I don’t approach the religious passages or the aesthetic theory any differently from other passages. Since Fosse’s a good novelist, Asle’s explorations are never simply Fosse’s ideas dropped into Asle’s mouth — what Asle thinks and how he says it are always Asle’s mind at work, expressed in Asle’s voice.
Marilynne Robinson is currently teaching a seminar on the Old Testament here at the University of Iowa, and so I’ve been reading and thinking about Genesis as I’m reading the volumes of Septology. What is your interpretation of the form, a septology, in relationship to some of Asle’s musings in the work, such as his exploration of art as an occurrence, of light and dark, and of language in relationship to existence and creation?
I’m going to have to leave those questions for you to answer as a reader, and for every other reader to interpret on their own. I don’t have any special insight or knowledge about any of that as the translator.
I wanted to stand up and cheer at his “I just translate what he says”: the man’s a translator, not a preacher!
I have nothing to say, and I’m eager to say it! After all, I read his (short!) Andvake trilogy just this summer. I also thought I owned a Norwegian translation of Quelqu’un va venir, the French B.D. version of his play Nokon kjem til å komme, but I can’t find it..
I can say that he builds small, close universes for personal drama. The historical settings are historical in the way that they’re definitely not contemporary, but he doesn’t care for historical accuracy. It’s just there to provide the necessary setting or set the reader in the right mood, like a sparsely decorated stage set. It’s the same thing with geography. The scene may be set in Dylgja or Bjørgvin. The former is a rural community by a fjord, the latter is a city, but there’s not much description of either of them. Even the characters are vaguely drawn. They’re defined by actions and (rare) words and what the reader fills in between them.
I read in the international press that his Nynorsk is conservative. I guess it is, in the sense that it’s not (longer) deliberately close to Bokmål, but it’s also colloquial and easily readable. Instead close to the western rural dialects, it adds to the vague geographical descriptions. Simple and straightforward, it takes us into the mind of the characters during their sparsely described actions (much like another Norwegian Nobel candidate, Per Petterson, does with his “radical” colloquial Bokmål.)
It does sound like the translator has the right approach. A translator of Jon Fosse must be very careful not to add anything that isn’t there, to allow the unspoken to be read without intrusion, but also be ready to do minor alterations — paint a piece in the stage set in a slightly different nuance to get the right reflections of light in another theater..
I was hoping you’d weigh in — thanks for those illuminations!
Oh, on the extremely detailed level:
No issues with that, but for added precision: [ˈjʊn ²fɔssɛ] — with the bisyllabic surname in the second tone.
(The actual realization of the second tone varies between dialects, but the shared characteristic is that the accent is more equal between the syllables. The historical equivalent in Danish is no stød, i.e. no glottal emphasis on the first syllable.)
Thanks, you know how I love precision about matters linguistic!
Oh, one issue. You can see the ingrained Norwegian habit of using the consonant to show vowel length. The vowel of the first name is long, and the first vowel of the last name is short. The s of the last name is not that long but probably ambisyllabic. Introspectively, the onset is in the first syllable and the release in the second, but I’ve never bothered to find out exactly what that means phonetically. The final unstressed vowel is short by default.
Is Nynorsk either easier or harder than Bokmål for a literate Swede who has never had formal instruction in either (let’s say for example a member of the relevant Nobel committee) to get the gist of when reading, or pretty much the same? I guess one factor might be the extent to which literate Swedes will have over their lives-to-date been exposed to written texts in Norwegian (presumably mostly Bokmål) without deliberately seeking them out, and I don’t know the answer to that.
I assume Nynorsk isn’t any harder to learn, if deliberately pursued, for an L1 Anglophone who already has reading knowledge of Dutch and German … But is Fosse’s poetry old-fashioned enough in terms of meter and/or rhyme that if you don’t know how to pronounce what you’re reading you’ll be unable to get it? Although people claim on the internet that neither written-norm version of Norwegian corresponds to a single pronunciation norm …
For a Swede, Nynorsk would probably be harder initially, since the orthography reflects West Scandinavian sound changes, but become simpler fast, since Swedish and undanified Norwegian have much in common grammatically. Standard Swedish even upholds some morphological elements that only the most deliberately conservative Nynorsk does.
For an anglophone reader, the distance is about the same. It shouldn’t be difficult to find listening material either. The national broadcasters do news, sports commentary, documentaries and fiction in both forms. The Nynorsk will most often be normalized on a Western substrate, so sound similar to Fosse’s own language.
I don’t think you need to hear the sounds to appreciate Fosse. It’s more about listening to the unsaid. That goes for his novels as well as his dramas, and I would imagine it to be even more so for his poetry — but I haven’t read anything by Fosse except the Andvake trilogy, so I build my resident expertise on shaky ground.
I don’t think there’s any close equivalent to Fosse in Danish, whether as a surname or not. Does it have en etymology?
@JWB, David M has repeatedly observed that written Danish has so many lenitions and so on that it’s hard for a person literate in German to recognize cognate words and that probably goes for Bokmål as well. (The other way is easier, working by analogy, except for weirdnesses like /tʷ/ > /kʷ/ in MHG. tvær(s) ~ quer).
A quick glance at the Declaration of Human RIghts in Nynorsk didn’t yield anything that looked to be closer to NHG than the corresponding forms in Bokmål (or Danish, for all that). though there are a fair number of lexical differences. The way inflexions in Nynorsk have developed (or been retained) is often very different from Danish/Bokmål: Brüder ~ brødre ~ brør (de/da=nb/nn) or kommt ~ kommer ~ kjem.
A literate Swede is probably better off with Bokmål, which is after all East Norse too, unlike Nynorsk which is based on West Norse dialects and seems to have had a program of avoiding/replacing Low German words with native material that may have been shared with East Norse once but is utterly unknown now.
@lars
https://ordnet.dk/ddo/ordbog?entry_id=11015597&query=fos
Could this be one of those toponymic names (compare Bach in German or Brook in English)?
Fosse is a run-of-the-mill toponymic surname and could be from any one of a number of farms of the same name. The etymology is foss m. “waterfall” (so you’re right that you don’t have anything like it in Denmark) + an e that derives from a feminine plural ending. The f.pl. is very common in old settlement names and is thought (by Bjorvand) to be a vestige of the Indo-European collective.
German actually has the other form too: the anatomical diaphragm that separates chest and abdomen transversely is Zwerchfell.
It looks like this started as the exceedingly rare cluster *θw. That regularly became tv in North Germanic and dw words in OHG. Because /dw/ was so rare, the words that had it all joined the /tw/ set (from *dw). Words with /tw/ were still so rare, despite the occasional loan like Polish twaróg “cottage cheese”, that all of them ended up joining zw or qu at random, sometimes both.
Compare the one-by-one disappearance of CURE words in different Englishes.
Me: Fosse is a run-of-the-mill toponymic surname and could be from any one of a number of farms of the same name.
… though in his case, the name likely hails from one of the Fosse farms in the parish of Strandebarm, where he grew up.
Danish actually (re)borrowed fos, pl. fosse/fosser for Norwegian waterfalls, probably around 1750. (There was an ODa fors id. that didn’t survive that long). So yes, with a short vowel it doesn’t have stødbasis and necessarily no stød: The distribution of stød is not always the same as that of word tones in Norwegian and/or Swedish, there has been some innovation and dialectal levelling on the Danish side at least. (IIRC, word tones/stød were phonologized/lexicalized when syncope threatened to conflate a lot of two-syllable words with monosyllables, back in the 10th or so, so there’s been lots of time to muddle up the correspondences).
I could have sworn the English word force meaning waterfall was discussed in the comments here within the past year or so, but I can’t find it. I must have run across it in some other context.
That looks like the same word as Hungarian túró, as in the chocolate-covered Túró Rudi, or túrós csusza with pasta and bacon. Wikipedia’s page on Quark says it’s the same word; on the other hand Wiktionary says túró is from “a Turkic language”, whereas Polish twaróg and various Slavic cognates are traced to a proto-Slavic word that is “Unlikely to be from a Turkic language”. Considering that the Slavic words are well known in several languages near Hungary, I’m puzzled as to why Wiktionary would consider a Turkic source more likely.
‘Of course, I remembered Bragi from the Norse myths. And that makes it a great dog name, like naming your little lapdog “Apollo” or something. It’s funny and it just sounds better, and it even rhymes with “doggie.”’
Hmm, only for some versions of English pronunciation will the A of ‘Bragi’ sound like the O of ‘doggie’. And it also assumes that the G of ‘Bragi’ is pronounced as a hard G.
FWTW*, I find that convincing. Hungarian doesn’t do initial consonant clusters, and a final [k] would easily be interpreted as the Hungarian plural ending…
* I am the very model of a modern-day Uralicist…
So the Grand Turk was a Big Cheese?
the exceedingly rare cluster *θw
What’s with the asterisk? English doesn’t have a lot of thw, I grant you, but it is hardly hypothetical. Anyway, see here, there, and yonder.
Did you miss that that was preceded by “this started as…” and followed by “regularly became tv in North Germanic and dw words in OHG”? David is referring to *θw in Proto-Germanic, not English.
English thwart has the North Germanic form because it was borrowed from Norse, not inherited directly.
David is referring to *θw in Proto-Germanic, not English.
I did indeed miss that, because of the polysemy of asterisks: hypothetical forms or hypothetical languages.
English thwart has the North Germanic form because it was borrowed from Norse, not inherited directly.
Well, so say Etymonline and the OED, but why? The ON þver ‘transverse, cross’ (-t is the neuter ending) is < *þverh, which is exactly the same as OE þverh (without an asterisk). Is there some reason to think that þverh was lost from OE and then borrowed back from ON a century or so later, particularly when the OED specifically notes that the ME evidence is sparse? Evidence of absence (from the OE record) is not absence of evidence. I grant that this could be etymological nativization, but what’s the reason to assume it?
We also have thwaite ‘forest clearing, assart’ (now in proper names), which is said to be < ON þveit, but appears in OE in the guise of þwítan ‘cut (off)’. This is lost from the standard language, but survived (as of 1912) dialectally as thwite. The OED gives us the delightful phrase to thwite a mill-post (etc.) to a pudding-prick, where the last word means ‘skewer used to close a pudding bag’.
While I am at it, whittle ‘carve, especially aimlessly’ is < whittle ‘carving knife’, which is a variant of thwittle ‘id.’, clearly part of the same story.
The reasons etymologists give for thinking Middle English thwert wasn’t inherited from Old English þweorh/þwerh are (1) it doesn’t have the -h (representing /x/) on the end, which had already been lost from Norse by the time of contact, and more importantly (2) the -t ending has an obvious explanation in Norse morphology but no explanation in English morphology. Philip Durkin (OED chief etymologist) discusses this briefly in Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English, giving scant and want as other examples of this -t.
… and for thwaite, I think the regular OE cognate would have been *þwāt, Modern Eng. *thwoat, *thwote or similar. (The w looks odd there, and I think it would have been lost in speech if not in spelling.)
On top of all that, if beorht > bright is regular, *þweorht would have…
Well. Maybe it would not have ended up as the only case of thwr- in the language. :-S
giving scant and want as other examples of this -t.
Ah. So when you are in want for long enough, you become wan. Thanks.
@Keith Ivey: Both foss and force are recorded as English words for cataracts. They seem to be most common in northern British dialects, where they are prone to appear in the proper names of water features. (Foss, in particular, seems to be mostly limited to fossilized names.) All the dictionaries I have looked at state that the synonyms (and, in some accents, homophones) foss and force are a doublet, but some of them contradict themselves with their etymologies, saying the former is from Old Norse and the latter from Old French. Both of those etymologies are quite transparent, so what is the real history? (My wild guess would be that Old English got foss from Norse as a word for waterfalls and rapids; then, in Norman times, it was eggcorn-conflated with the Latinate force.)
when you are in want for long enough, you become wan
If you are in want, you’ll wane, then waste away, become vain, vacant, and void, and finally vanish — but wan is the odd one out, not etymologically related according to current dictionaries. (Or was that the joke?)
Both of those etymologies are quite transparent, so what is the real history?
I thought about that, but the Latin fossa is ‘ditch’, < fossa (terra) ‘dug (earth)’ < fodio ‘dig’, and anyway I don’t see how it can be f- on both sides of Grimm’s Wall if the words are actually cognate. So I think we have one of those have/habere coincidences here.
(Or was that the joke?)
I’ll never tell!
Bjorvand & Lindeman + Wiktionary: Norw. foss, dial. fors < ON foss/fors < PGmc *fúrsaz m. < PIE *pŕ̥s-os, stressed zero grade of *per-s- “sprinkle”. The root is also found in Anatolian, Tocharian, Indo-Iranian and Slavic
That makes sense for a nominalized adjective.
Brett: What dictionary says that the “waterfall” force is from French? Every dictionary that I can find that has it says it’s from Norse: OED, NOAD, Chambers, Collins, MW Unabridged, Encarta. I suspect you accidentally looked at the etymology for the other force, but if a dictionary has the waterfall one at all it’s going to be a separate headword.
@ktschwarz: It looks like that was indeed what happened, at least with respect to the OED: I misread what it was saying, largely thanks to the terrible new Web site structure. Wiktionary, however, does have the error, saying foss is a doublet of force but only having the Latinate-origin word force. I looked at another online dictionary also, but I don’t recall which one (I searched several, and many of them had no entry at all for foss, at least not in the “cataract” sense), and either I made the same kind of error I did with the OED site or the site had the same kind of error as Wiktionary.
Brett, you’re not having much luck using dictionaries today. Wiktionary has the waterfall meaning listed as etymology 3 for force (not Latinate), where it says it’s a doublet of foss.
Apparently not.
Brett, looks to me like foss is West Norse and force is East Norse. Does their distribution match a map of Norwegian vs. Danish occupation?
@Rodger C: I have no idea, and no idea how well such tenth-century distinctions are even documented. (In any case, my evident ineptitude looking things up these days would leave me hesitant to answer even if I thought I knew something useful about the subject.)
Works better vowel-wise at least: Turkic does have forms with /u/ like Middle Turkic /turaq/, Chuvash /turăχ/ (wide range of meanings from ‘yoghurt’ to ‘cheese’), while Slavic ⁽*⁾-wa- would probably be expected to give in Hungarian **tárog (Cw → C as in szabad ‘free’) or maybe **tavárog (CR > CVR as in e.g. kereszt ‘cross’). Still not clear to me why it has long ú and not short u though, Hungarian usually reflects Proto-Turkic vowel length or lack thereof.
It seems to be also unclear if this might still be an older IE loan in Turkic itself; besides Slavic there’s also the yet distinct Greek τῡρός to consider in the mix.
J Pystynen, thanks for the explanation.
I missed this post at the time, for some reason.
I notice that Searls has translated Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig. I’m quite interested in translations of that work (particularly the first paragraph, which is easy to find free of charge), because Lowe-Porter’s translation and its shortcomings have become a cause-célèbre in translation studies.
Regarding Searls’ translation, Amazon says:
A towering figure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature, Thomas Mann has often been perceived as a dry and forbidding writer–“the starched collar,” as Bertolt Brecht once called him. But in fact, his fiction is lively, humane, sometimes hilarious. In these fresh renderings of his best short work, award-winning translator Damion Searls casts new light on this underappreciated aspect of Mann’s genius.
I’m really curious as to how he’s done that in the opening paragraph, given that there are (at last count) twelve translations of the novella, including Lowe-Porter’s much maligned translation of 1928.
While many reviews of Damion Searls’ translation are glowing, others are not. One reviewer on Amazon says: “The translation are wooden or inaccurate sometimes both.”
Another says: “I very much prefer Michael Henry Heim’s translation of ‘Death in Venice.’ There’s an unfortunate tone in Damion Searls’ translation of the novella. He also makes some brash claims in his Introduction and Notes. And why are translators trying to update writers’ vocabularies? The ‘getgo’, ‘globe-trotter’ and ‘Hey’ are annoying distractions.”
Ronslate.com corroborates this observation: “…… Many other translation choices go even further in producing the wrong sound, such as “from the get-go” and “no-holds-barred” (making Mann’s narrator sound like a sports commentator), as well as “off of” and “inside of” and “outside of” (which are just plain bad English and sound anachronistic). Searls also seems to have penchant for the contemporary usage of “like” in place of “as if” or “as though” that is grammatically wrong and, where Mann is concerned, also aesthetically wrong. Gustav von Aschenbach, the aging writer of Death in Venice, at various points “felt like he was sitting there to keep watch” and “felt like his conscience was reproaching him” and “felt like he should just go home.” For the self-important Aschenbach (with his grandiose notions of his duty to sacrifice his life to art and to Europe) and his comparably grandiloquent third-person narrator to be rendered in the colloquial, informal grammar of 21st-century English is a misstep, one defensible neither for clarity nor sonority.”
Perhaps a stiff-shirted attitude but given Mann’s pompous prose arguably also quite apt.
The pomposity is evident from the first paragraph of Der Tod in Venedig, which is typically Mannian in its syntax, partly because it presents Aschenbach as he is: a puffed-up, erudite writer whom Mann is gently parodying with his mention of “von Aschenbach”‘s newly-acquired official name and the spurious allusion to Cicero’s views on what impels a writer. I’d love to know how he has translated this in a way that is better than the other eleven translations (but I don’t feel like forking out $40 odd just to find out).
Not to be confused with the legendary Aschbacher…
first paragraph
From GB:
I see no signs of vile colloquialisms there.
Thank you! I should have looked harder!
To be honest, his translation is almost indistinguishable from most other English translations. Nothing barrier-breaking, daring, or exciting here. Just a slight rehash of what has been done before.
Well, sure, as in almost all cases. The thing is that to sell a translation a publisher has to claim that it’s barrier-breaking, daring, unlike anything that’s come before; “slightly different and sometimes better” isn’t going to attract customers. Just like New! Improved! soap. It’s not the publisher’s fault — they have to sell books! — but it’s why you shouldn’t trust blurbs (or most reviewers, who basically expand on the blurbs).
Pretty much any translation of Mann is significantly better than Lowe-Porter’s, at any rate.
“Significantly better than Lowe-Porter’s!!” –David Eddyshaw
Mann’s text has “des Jahres 19.., das unserem Kontinent monatelang eine so gefahrdrohende Miene zeigte.” Searls has that as “the year 19—, a year that for months had shown such a threatening face to our continent,” which for me at least suggests the looming spectre of world war or some similar catastrophe. By contrast the early translation of Kenneth Burke (published in 1924 in The Dial) offers the more boring “the year 19—, when our continent lay under such threatening weather for whole months.”
Huh. Well, that’s certainly an interesting divergence; is it a genuine ambiguity in the original or did one of the translators screw it up?
We were taught that the only (deliberate) ambiguity was what European crisis year of the opening of the twentieth century was intended.
Lowe-Porter seemed to get the sense right, but the tone wrong.
Well “Miene” is literally “face,” as in English “mien,” which comes from the same French-origin loanword that German borrowed. Perhaps Burke was engaged in “dynamic equivalence” avant la lettre? For all I know someone with a good ear for the right register of idiomatic German as of 1912 would have understood the German as an unambiguous metaphor for the weather and Burke decided to make Mann’s implicit meaning more explicit (if less poetic) for an English readership who might have found the metaphor more opaque than the German readers would have. But that’s a charitable reading of Burke which could be wrong.
EDITED TO ADD: Mann published his book in German in 1912, and it does seem possible that some post-1918 translators into English were unconsciously tempted to retroject a sense of dread and impending calamity back into the pre-war years that might not have been what pre-war authors were actually getting at.
My understanding from reading about the pre-WWI period is that many people expected any of the crises of that time to explode into war (although most of them probably wouldn’t have been able to picture the horrors that actually ensued*), so I’d rather assume that this was what Mann was referring to. I also don’t believe that Burke thought that the sentence referred to a meteorological phenomenon, but that he just chose a different metaphor (heavy weather = storm clouds gathering). Why he thought that his metaphor was more fitting I have no idea.
*) And as we all know, there were of course very many deluded people who were looking forward to “cleansing baths of blood” or similar nonsense and shouted their hurrahs when the catastrophe finally arrived…
@Hans: For all I know to those inclined at the time to a sense of impending disaster, each of the twelve candidate years 19__ prior to 1912 might have seemed equally foreboding? Not like later on when e.g. David Bowie could prime you for catastrophe by adding the parenthetical triptych “(1913-1938-197?)”* to a song title and invite you to fill in the last digit in your imagination.
*Song was released April 1973 and reportedly written in December 1972 (while Bowie was crossing the Atlantic on an ocean liner and reading Waugh …), so at a minimum ’70 and ’71 were out of contention. It was probably already a year or two past ’79 when I first saw that detail on the record label or back cover, slightly spoiling the effect.
when Europe sat upon the anxious seat beneath a menace that hung over its head for months.
Like a chronically costive Damocles turned upside down ? It seems not:
#
“The anxious bench”, otherwise called “the anxious seat,” “the mourner’s chair,” and “the altar call”, this mode of revival and evangelism gathered attention in the early eighteenth century both through small magazine publications and lectures by the likes of Charles Finney.
#
A 1929 Kansas City Times article says:
#
Originally, the phrase was purely ecclesiastic. It had its inception in the practice, at Methodist and other religious revivals in the United States, to have special benches set aside for use only by those members of the congregation who had repented of their previous lives and who felt that they would be saved only by joining the church.
#
I’ve had another look at Searls’ translation, especially this sentence:
Mann
Überreizt von der schwierigen und gefährlichen, eben jetzt eine höchste Behutsamkeit, Umsicht, Eindringlichkeit und Genauigkeit des Willens erfordernden Arbeit der Vormittagsstunden,….
Lowe-Porter (for reference)
He was overwrought by a morning of hard, nerve-taxing work, work which had not ceased to exact his uttermost in the way of sustained concentration, conscientiousness, and tact…
Burke
Overwrought by the trying and precarious work of the forenoon — which had demanded a maximum wariness, prudence, penetration, and rigour of the will —
Luke
The morning’s writing had overstimulated him; his work had now reached a difficult and dangerous point which demanded the utmost care and circumspection, the most insistent and precise effort of will…
Appelbaum
Overstrained by the difficult and dangerous labor of the morning hours, which precisely at this moment called for extreme circumspection, discretion, forcefulness and exactitude of the will,…
Chase
overstimulated by many morning hours of difficult work, full of pitfalls and especially now demanding the greatest caution, judiciousness, probing insistence and exactitude of will,…
Heim
Overwrought from the difficult and dangerous labors of the late morning hours, labors demanding the utmost caution, prudence, tenacity, and precision of will,…
Doege
Overexcited by the dangerous and difficult work of that morning that demanded a maximum of caution, discretion, of forcefulness and exactitude of will,…
Garin
Overstrained by the difficult and dangerous work of the morning hours, which at that moment required the utmost caution, prudence, penetration, and accuracy of will,…
Searls
Overstimulated by his daring and difficult morning’s work, demanding of his will just now the greatest caution, circumspection, penetration, and precision,…
Granted that Mann’s prose is pretty idiosyncratic here, it probably doesn’t matter too much if you translate it rather freely BUT…
1. Searls’ choice of “daring” in preference to “precarious”, “dangerous”, or “full of pitfalls” seems a little, er, daring to me. Aschenbach was a very solid, conscientious writer. Was he really doing “daring” work? Wasn’t Death in Venice about Aschenbach’s departure from the solidity of his work and sudden yearning for his Dionysian side?
2. The German says “Behutsamkeit, Umsicht, Eindringlichkeit und Genauigkeit des Willens”. Most translators interpret the last one as “exactitude of will” or something similar. Is Searls’ interpretation correct — that his work demanded xxxx qualities of his will?
3. “Eben jetzt” is ignored by some translators, on the other hand placed into greater prominence by Luke. In Searls’ translation it is lame and almost awkward.
I’m starting to wonder if Searls’ method, which sounds like it has almost mystical undertones of the translator somehow entering into the spirit of the original, isn’t just that, a translator who doesn’t pay too close attention to the sense of the original and just “gets with the vibe”?
For a picture of the geopolitical zeitgeist in the first decade of the twentieth century, I offer this quote from Howard’s End by E. M. Forster, published in 1910, when Britain and Germany were about two decades into their naval arms race:
In the context of the story (and alluded to specifically in this paragraph) friction between the two states was particularly significant because while the Schlegel sisters’ mother was English, their father had been a Prussian army officer.
Überreizt von der schwierigen und gefährlichen, eben jetzt eine höchste Behutsamkeit, Umsicht, Eindringlichkeit und Genauigkeit des Willens erfordernden Arbeit der Vormittagsstunden,….
Granted that Mann’s prose is pretty idiosyncratic here
I don’t grant “pretty”. Of course Uncle Tom has a way of writing in general that can easily get on my nerves when I’m not in the mood. You can call it idiosyncratic, I call it borderline tiresome.
I didn’t pay particular attention to it when I read the story. The quoted sentence is merely a stately procession of simple abstractions, with that dash of extra hypotaxis that many readers cherish. It presents no problems for a reader inured to even statelier stuff. I simply go through it like a snowplow.
To translate it into English, just put on your hat of abstractions and step out in a stately manner. There’s nothing here that rewards inspection under a microscope. That’s just my opinion, of course.
For syntactic puzzle fans:
Überreizt von der schwierigen und gefährlichen, eben jetzt [eine [höchste Behutsamkeit, Umsicht, Eindringlichkeit und Genauigkeit des Willens]] erfordernden Arbeit der Vormittagsstunden,….
Just replace the text between the outer brackets with a single word that can be the object of erfordern:
Überreizt von der schwierigen und gefährlichen, eben jetzt Behutsamkeit erfordernden Arbeit der Vormittagsstunden,….
The German says “Behutsamkeit, Umsicht, Eindringlichkeit und Genauigkeit des Willens”. Most translators interpret the last one as “exactitude of will” or something similar. Is Searls’ interpretation correct — that his work demanded xxxx qualities of his will?
If your question is whether the scope of des Willens extends beyond Genauigkeit up to Behutsamkeit, then yes, that is a valid interpretation. But I prefer the approach of the other translators who keep the original construction and thus leave it open how far the scope extends.
Just got to this passage in Clark’s The Sleepwalkers:
Makes me sympathize with the Germans!
Erskine Childers’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riddle_of_the_Sands
was maybe an early straw in the wind, though at that date it was still the French who were the favourite Foreign Threat.
(I used to go drinking with a grandson of Childers’, and later on used to hang out with a bunch of maritime archaeologists, who all thought The Riddle of the Sands was wondeful. Not my kind of thing, though. I think you have to be a keen sailor to really appreciate it. I, on the other hand, am one of the few people living to have been totally becalmed on the Severn Estuary. Poseidon despises me.)
An anywhere-near-literal translation of these complex sentences with their very literary participial constructions would be a catastrophe, so I understand why all the translations quoted above are so far from literal. A Miene is the totality of a facial expression, a face you make; using “danger-threatening” instead of “threatening” for the downright Homeric compound adjective gefahrdrohend would make the sentence hopelessly cumbersome; so why not use the weather as the metaphor of choice instead of a frowny face.
Still, schwierig und gefährlich is straightforwardly “difficult and dangerous”. “Daring” is a fantasy.
(And yes, I agree the scope of des Willens is ambiguous; on top of that, it’s not clear to me what “precision of the will” is really supposed to mean – maybe having a precise plan as opposed to concepts of a plan?)
FEW, following Thurneysen, says French mine (the source of the German and the English words) comes from Celtic, specifically Breton min ‘snout’. Is that plausible?
@Hans: I prefer the approach of the other translators who keep the original construction and thus leave it open how far the scope extends.
What then would Umsicht des Willens mean ? Wille is the horsepower, but only a rider can provide Umsicht. It’s an oil-and-water, weaksauce paradox at best.
Man just loved to tease his readers in hard-to-grasp ways like that. Throughout his life he had the emotional maturity of a clever 16-year-old. Remember what his children later said about him and their family life, Klaus in particular.
I’ve read Zauberberg several times. I wonder whether I could read it again now. I certainly don’t particularly want to.
Min in Welsh is “edge”, but seems to have got there via “lip.” GPC says it means “face”, “mouth” or “appearance, mien” in both Middle and Modern Breton.
FWIW the Larousse etymological dictionary derives mine (in that sense) from Breton min too.
An anywhere-near-literal translation of these complex sentences with their very literary participial constructions would be a catastrophe, so I understand why all the translations quoted above are so far from literal.
But they are close to literal if you compare them with translations into non-European languages.
No surprise there – those languages are more different from German than English is.
Assuming that Welsh preserves the original sense “mouth/lips”, the synecdoche in Breton min “face” is like that in Latin os.
It’s interesting that different languages take different bits of the face as emblematic of the whole; in Oti-Volta languages it’s the eyes, not the mouth.
Kusaal for “face”, for example, is usually nindaa, where the nin- part is the combining form of nif “eye”, but nini “eyes” is also used for “face” sometimes, and some other Oti-Volta languages use the same stem for both, in different noun classes, as with Moba nùnm̀ “eye”, nùnŋ̀ “face” (the plurals have fallen together as nùnî “eyes, faces” via a Gurma historical sound change.)
Per TLFI, the earliest instances are from the 14th century, “faire mines” ‘to make faces’, from the 15th century, “faire faulce myne”, “faire bonne mine”, “monstrer bonne mine”, etc. Is that a likely semantic leap from ‘lip’? How much Breton got into 14th century French?
If GPC is to be believed, min was already “face, appearance” (and not “lip”) in Middle Breton*, so the semantics isn’t a problem, at least.
* Crn. C. myn ‘ymyl; gwefus; genau; wyneb’, Llyd. C. a Diw. min ‘wyneb; golwg; genau; safn’; ?cf. Gwydd. C. mēn ‘ceg’
“Middle Cornish myn ‘edge; lip; mouth; face’, Middle and Modern Breton min ‘face; aspect; mouth; snout’; ?cf Middle Irish mēn ‘throat'”
No idea how much Breton got into 14th century French; on the other hand, the Arthurian legends presumably first got into French via Breton, so the languages can’t have been hermetically sealed off from one another.
Welsh, surprisingly, has some loanwords from even Old English, so it wasn’t all fighting all the time even then. And the phonologically weird Welsh siarad “speak” is (according to GPC) perhaps from Occitan … they have no better suggestions, anyhow.
Hm. Deshayes’s Dictionnaire étymologique du breton:
Also an early compound: “Mingamm (mingam, 1477), adj. qual., à la mine tordue, de min + kamm, identique au cornique myngam et au gallois mingam, désabusé, aux lèvres tordues.”
There doesn’t seem to be any particular reason to believe in the *k in this imagined Celtic *mikna/mekna. It seems to be an effort to make the word cognate with English “maw” and German “Magen.” Obscurum per obscurius …
The “mouth” of a river (or lake) is its bank (or shore) in Kusaal. When I first discovered this, I though it might be a consequence of the fact that rivermouths (in our sense) are not much in evidence up there in the savanna, but it turns out to be the usual metaphor even in languages from the south of Ghana. “Mouth” is not used for “lip”, which is the transparent compound nɔŋgban “mouth-skin.”
Actually, I think that the *k might help to make min cognate with Middle Irish mén (as opposed to *mín) if both went back to *mekna. I’ll have to look it up. GPC seems dubious about the link with Irish, though.
What then would Umsicht des Willens mean ? Wille is the horsepower, but only a rider can provide Umsicht. It’s an oil-and-water, weaksauce paradox at best.
I have no idea and I don’t even want to guess; like DM, I already throw up my hands at Genauigkeit des Willens, which clearly is in scope.
We read Tod in school; I found it memorable, although I can bear Mann’s wordiness only in doses. It’s actually less bad in Buddenbrooks and Felix Krull. I never read Zauberberg, only watched parts of a German TV film adaptation (that must have been in the early 80s).
Nasal vowels really used to be spelled with ff in Breton.
I guess the lenited *[ṽ] is to blame…
Surely the bank and the mouth of a river are two separate things? The bank keeps the water in, the mouth lets it out.
It’s an odd metaphor even in English if you stop and think about it – is the water being vomited out?
I’ll have to look it up
OK: just looked at the relevant bits of Jackson and Thurneysen.
A Celtic *mekn- would have produced Middle Welsh *mein, not min, so if the etymon has lost *k at all, it must go back to *mikn-. As for *mikna, an awkward point not addressed by Deshayes is that min in (modern) Welsh is in fact masculine, not feminine. There are words that have changed gender since Middle Welsh, like dinas “city”, but min is not listed as one of them in Evans’ Grammar of Middle Welsh, at any rate.
Old Irish mén would have to go back to *mekna. However, this could (I think) be the regular outcome of earlier *mikna, by the usual lowering of *i *u before original *a in the next syllable.
So (waving away the gender issue) the Brythonic and Goidelic forms could indeed be cognate if you postulate a lost *k, but if so, point to Celtic *mikn-, not *mekn-, which as far as I can see doesn’t look too good for a cognate of “maw” or “Magen”, even assuming a convenient ablaut of the root vowel.
“Lip” and “throat” are actually not too convincing as a semantic match, either. The Welsh and Cornish reflexes suggest that “lip, edge” was the primary sense of the Brythonic etymon; if the Irish is actually just a lookalike (as GPC seems to imply), maybe just that one is truly from *mekna, and cognate with the Germanic words.
Surely the bank and the mouth of a river are two separate things? The bank keeps the water in, the mouth lets it out.
It’s an odd metaphor even in English if you stop and think about it – is the water being vomited out?
It’s not easy to find out how you actually do say “mouth of a river” in Western Oti-Volta languages, as the issue doesn’t really come up much locally, but Niggli’s Mooré dictionary gives kʋl-nao-satmẽ, which is literally “at the river-foot-end.” (Nao- is the combining form of naoore “leg, foot”, not noore “mouth.”)
The Gulmancema dictionary gives kpenñoabu, literally “river-mouth”, with a nice picture of one, and has the example sentence kpenñoabu juadi u kpenu, translated as “le fleuve se termine par une embouchure”; where juadi is presumably an error for juodi “finish” (juadi means “greet.”) But the sentence really seems to mean “a river-mouth ends the river”, which I suppose might actually apply to a riverbank too. I suspect that the gloss may be a mistake.
The only Oti-Volta language with a WP entry on the Volta river at present is Dagbani:
https://dag.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volta_m%C9%94%C9%A3ili
There is no mention of its mouth, unfortunately, but the article says
Di mɔɣi’zuɣu shɛŋa n-nyɛ; mɔɣi’sabinli, mɔɣi’piɛlli nti pahi mɔɣi’ʒee.
its river-head some be: river-black, river-white until reach river-red
presumably meaning “some of its sources are the Black Volta, White Volta and Red Volta.” It’s interesting that “river-head” seems to be “source”, which would go well with the mouth of the river being its “foot.”
(Also interesting that the Volta seems to have no specific name, but is just Mɔɣili “River”; it’s the same in Kusaal, though in Kusaal, “river” is kɔlig, while the cognate of Dagbani mɔɣili is mu’ar “lake, pool, reservoir.” Kɔlig is cognate with the Gulmancema kpénú “river.”)
Nasal vowels really used to be spelled with ff in Breton.
Absolutely right. I had no idea. Per fr.wp, the ff was abandoned in the 18th century orthography reform. That instance is from 1633; the ones with ñ are from the 1700s or later.
Norw. tryne n. “snout” is an old and very common mild dysphemism for face. It’s part of everyday idioms about facing harsh realities like the fighting metaphor få seg en på trynet, lit. “being hit in the face”, the weather metaphor få [noe] rett i trynet, lit. “get [something] right in the face”, and the ski metaphor gå på trynet, lit. “go (= fall) on the face”.
Norw. os “rivermouth” is the Germanic reflex of the IE “mouth” word preserved in Latin.
Biblical Hebrew אַף ʾap̄ ‘nose’ (< *ʔanp), with the body-part dual, viz. אַפַּיִם ʾapayim, also took on the secondary meaning of ‘face’, though only in the sense of ‘front’, not of facial expression.
I wondered about “nose” as a metonym for “face”, but had forgotten (if I ever knew) about Hebrew.
So we’ve got “mouth”, “lip”. “eye” and “nose” … anyone know of a language which uses “ear”?
Norw. tryne n. “snout” is an old and very common mild dysphemism for face.
Similar with German Schnauze “snout”, although it’s not so mild; calling someone’s face that is an insult, and Halt die Schnauze! “shut up!” is rather impolite.
Most biblical uses of ʾap̄, are either in the context of ‘to bow face/nose to the ground’, i.e. to prostrate oneself, or in that of ‘hot face/nose’, meaning ‘angry’, e.g. חָרָה אַפִּי ḥārâ apî ‘hot.impv nose/face.1sg’, i.e. ‘I be.impv angry’ (Ex. 22:23). Later on, ʾap̄ alone has come to mean ‘anger’ (e.g. Jer. 44:6, and many others).
(The semantic chain ‘anger’ = ‘burning’ > ‘burning face’ > ‘face’ is interesting. Is there a name for that phenomenon, in which A > AB > B?)