A thought-provoking Facebook post by Michael Rosen:
There are two German words which people who write about literature and culture get very interested in: ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ and ‘unheimlich’. The first one was made popular by Brecht and is mostly translated these days as ‘alienation effect’ and the second was used by Freud and is mostly translated as ‘uncanny’.
They both express ideas of being unfamiliar or ‘distanced’ or ‘alienated’ from the piece of literature or or spectacle (film, play, drama) that you’re watching. In Brecht’s case, he was talking about something he tried to achieve in his plays in which one moment the audience would be ‘involved’ or ‘in’ the drama and the next, reflecting, debating about what they had just seen. He and his ‘dramaturg’ (theatre expert, if you like) Erwin Piscator, discussed how ‘Epic Theatre’ as they called it, did that as with the Chorus in Greek Tragedy or Shakespeare did it with characters discussing the whys and wherefores of their actions, often through soliloquies.
In Freud’s case, ‘unheimlich’ is a feeling that you get in dreams, or in literature – particularly of the ‘horror’ genre, where you feel strange, (literally un-at-home-like). In his essay on the ‘uncanny’ he linked it with other horror features like the ‘labyrinth’, being buried alive.
Now let’s jump to speaking a language that you’ve been taught at school. I’m 76, so languages I was taught at school happened 60 years ago. I speak French pretty fluently and when I’m in France, I find that I can often talk without knowing that I’m talking. Stuff just surfaces and I don’t have to think through phrases, grammar, vocabulary. I just say it. Every now and then, though, of course, I stop and grope in my mind for something. Where do I go? Sometimes, I find myself going to a lesson or even a teacher in my mind for the way of saying a ‘difficult phrase’ like, say, , ‘I should have done that’ or the word for an ash tree.
I’m also learning Yiddish. I’ve never been taught it before, so some of the time, what I’m hearing and reading feels new, other times though there are similar ‘groping’ moments. Sometimes, as I’ve said before, they feel more like ‘echoes’ from my parents, from German lessons and from my short (very short) time going to ‘kheder’ (Hebrew classes) at Pinner shul (synagogue) when I was 7. So, in the lesson, I might hear a word and one moment, I hear my mother, father or grandparents or might hear my German teacher, Miss Joseph (a very strange person), or specifically my father speaking German.
What’s this got to do with verfremdungseffekt and unheimlich? Well, to my mind, there is a funny paradox. When I do this ‘groping’ thing or whizzing back 60 years or more to these ‘situations’ or moments of language from the past, I feel like I travel outside of the situation of language-use in the present, and I’m reflecting, at a distance, on these moments from the past. Other translations of verfremdungseffekt have called it ‘defamiliarisation’, ‘distancing’ or ‘making strange’ and ‘uncanny’ is a pretty feeble translation of the sense of not being at home. I can’t do any better but I have a sense of this removal of myself from the immediacy of what’s going on in the now, to these strong memories of home and school….and ….whoa…I’m with the ‘madeleine effect’ of Marcel Proust thinking about his mother when he ate the little cake called a ‘madeleine’.
All of which reminds me that quite often we don’t think in straight lines. We zip back and forth from present to past, mingling sensations, time frames, concepts. There have been moments in the Yiddish classes where I feel that I am sitting next to my mother or father or in the classroom at school doing German or in the kheyder staring at the Hebrew letters. . It’s a really strong feeling tugging me out of the present and yet I am right there in the present! And I haven’t even begun to describe what those feelings are…sometimes the opposite of unheimlich (with my parents of course) and sometimes in the often miserable, ink-smelling rooms of a suburban grammar school, while the strange Miss Joseph giggled and tutted her way through ‘zusammen’ and ‘und so weiter’…
As a postscript. When Eddie died (my son), a Jewish friend gave me a ‘Yahrzeit candle’ (literally ‘year time’) and told me to light it on the one year anniversary of his death. In fact, I haven’t. I’ve kept it. Yesterday, I looked at it, and found that I could read the Yiddish on the side of it, which tells me that the candle is made of wax. Nice moment.
(There was some discussion of Verfremdungseffekt and its Russian equivalent, остранение, in 2016.) Thanks, Trevor!
That post is a wonderful executive summary of epistemology.
All of which reminds me that quite often we don’t think in straight lines. We zip back and forth from present to past, mingling sensations, time frames, concepts.
Yes, and put in such a way it makes you wonder how anything gets done. The last sentences show how:
Yesterday, I looked at it [a Jahrzeit candle], and found that I could read the Yiddish on the side of it, which tells me that the candle is made of wax. Nice moment.
Ground contact reestablished !
Beyond Numeracy, by John Allen Paulos, has a chapter on “human consciousness [and] its fractal nature.”
Shtil is Yiddish for a candle.
A propos of nothing in particular I bring to your attention the fact that the word dramaturg, which Berklee college of music (which is not, as you might have thought, is Berkley putting on a Gilbert and Sullivan show, but a conservatory in Boston) defines as
has undergone semantic shift in Russian, where драматург is a mildly fancy word for “playwright” either of the kind who writes plays ab initio or de nuovo (my Latin is limited to the occasional perusal of a Dictionary of foreign words some decades back. If memory doesn’t fail me, the first entry was ab ovo, which also sort of fits) as well as those who prefer to (or were hired to) reuse existing literary sources.
Dramaturg in Russian is завлит, which is short for заведующий литературной частью, in word-for-word translation “head of the literary section” (GT says “head of literature”), one of those expressions that are well formed grammatically and have an unambiguous referent, but no semantic meaning.
Apparently, Berklee had used up all their letter e‘s, so they couldn’t spell it “dramaturge.” (Actually, the two spellings appear to be roughly equally common. However, I can’t think of another word with that suffix that is commonly spelled without the “e.” “Thaumaturg” is apparently out there and appears in three of the OED‘s pre-1900 cites, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it otherwise, and I would consider it a misspelling.)
The main Berklee campus is located right across from MIT. (The bridge connecting their two neighborhoods in Boston and Cambridge is misleadingly called the “Harvard Bridge.”) When I was there, there was a known problem with Berklee students (who were generally aspiring professional musicians) trying to sneak into MIT’s very nice music practice suites, since there were not enough spaces for all the students on their own campus.
Shtil is Yiddish for a candle.
Ha!
the word dramaturg […] has undergone semantic shift in Russian, where драматург is a mildly fancy word for “playwright”
Au contraire, that is the original meaning. It is (as one might have guessed from first principles) the fancy “expert in the study of plays, musicals, or operas” sense that is the innovation.
What are these “first principles” of which you speak ? That meanings start out simple, but may later get more complex ? Are these not the reconstructor’s current notions of simple and complex, projected into the past ?
At the very least, one should be wary of equating “complex” with “needs more words to explain”.
These thoughts are brought to you by A Priori, a leading manufacturer of Guff For The Home™.
If you’ll reflect for a moment about the likely historical priority of “playwright” vis-à-vis “expert in the study of plays, musicals, or operas,” you may grasp my intended meaning.
Ah! Ok. Greeks!
Russian word probably still underwent semantic shift because it was most likely borrowed from German.
@hat
This requires the knowledge that plays are purely artefacts produced by homo dramaturg and not found, so to speak, in the wild. Perhaps Stu is suggesting otherwise. Another possibility, which may even be supported by fact, is that the earliest plays were a collective effort, so the producer could have been the dramaturg, and this term could have later applied to authors of single-authored plays, when these became the norm.
‘uncanny’ is a pretty feeble translation of the sense of not being at home
this is slightly odd to me from someone who’s studying yiddish, where the positive cognate is alive and productive in a way that it isn’t in (non-scots-inflected?) english. though i suppose with “umheymlekh” right there, the mind might not go so quickly to “kenen” or “umbakant” [‘unrecognizable’].
@PP: your second possibility is exactly what I was thinking, succintly expressed !! I didn’t try to elaborate in the original comment, being all tuckered out from a recent exchange here.
I have the impression that the Greek playwrights knew/studied each other’s works, given that some works contain sly references to others. It’s been decades since I studied anything of the kind.
Classical Greeks, modern Russians, science fiction writers …. It’s a meta-trope.
Candle in Yiddish : likht ליכט
ליכט
די/דאָס
light
דאָס/די (—)
candle
© 2013 Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary
“It’s a really strong feeling tugging me out of the present….”
Not exactly Heimlich maneuver.
@abshl: The link in languagehat’s comment explains the joke you missed there.
“When Eddie died (my son), a Jewish friend gave me a ‘Yahrzeit candle’ (literally ‘year time’) and told me to light it on the one year anniversary of his death.”
And this is the point, isn’t it? Everything that comes before is altered.