Hölderlin? Read it with Google translator

Hölderlin was both a poet and a philosopher as well as Schelling's and Hegel's best 
friend during their College days. And if there is a perceivable difference between Hegel's 
"Phenomenology" (1807) and his later “Logic” (1812/1816), this may be partially due to 
the lasting influence of the greater poet who, in the meantime, had been declared crazy 
and closed away in a famous tower at Tübingen that you can (and should) still visit today.

Hölderlin, though half forgotten for decades, was an inspirational writer for man
philosophers in the late 19th (Nietzsche) and the 20th century. 
Heidegger pretended to be his true reader.

Hölderlin's so-called river poems may be understood philosophically as the representation
of a philosophy of history and of beauty. The poem “Der Ister” has been interpreted by the
philosopher from the Black Forest in a famous essay. 

For a reader who does not know the German language, it might be difficult to 
understand the greatness of Hölderlin's works. Translators tend to normalize the 
language into which they translate.
This happens not only with philosophical texts (usually translated by newly 
graduated students afraid of writing "strange things”), but with poetry as well. “The Ister” 
is a good example of this inclination. 

You could try yourself! With a dictionary and a grammar book at hand, you could probably 
understand the opening verse on your own: “Jetzt komme, Feuer!” 

Yes, komme is the imperative of kommen, to come. The narrator is talking to the fire. 
Whether he means the sun (dawn) or Greek divinity or both, is not clear. If we take a look at 
an important translation in English, we read instead: “Now is the time for fire!” obviously, 
the strangeness of talking directly to the fire – or a God! – has been eliminated. In this 
English version, someone is shouting out, we don't know to whom.
The second and the third verse in this translation are instead condensed in one: “Begierig 
sind wir, / Zu schauen den Tag” becomes “Impatient for the daylight”. At this point it may not
seem too strange if we tried to make Google Translator do the job. For the first three verses 
we get: “Now come, fire! / We are eager, / To look the day”. Much better. 

Going on with this Internet experiment, for the next verses we obtain: “And if the test / Has
gone through the knees, / One can feel the forest cries“. Does it sound weird? Yes, but it does 
so in German as well: “Und wenn die Prüfung / Ist durch die Knie gegangen, / Mag einer 
spüren das Waldgeschrei.” Doubt will arise at the word “test”, which is out of place stylistically. 
We could try an Internet dictionary for the translation of “Prüfung”. Among others, this will 
give “trial” (from God, for example). “And if the trial / has gone through the knees”: we could
imagine something horrible that weakens our knees, that makes them tremble. And that is 
exactly what the poet's German words evoke. The published translation instead gives: “We’re
on our knees”. Again, this sounds reasonable, but it's not what the poem says. 
The authors go on: “It’s then, in that silence, / We hear the woods’ strange call”. No. In the 
German original, nobody talked about silence. And the Waldgeschrei are just cries from the
(or of the) forest. If we imagine sunrise, the poet is probably talking about the noises the 
animals make in the woods early in the morning. He certainly does not say “strange”, though 
he does indeed use a strange word, as if the woods were shouting or crying. 
Translators transform. These ones do it in a harmful way. By additions like “in that silence”
the translators transform poetry into prose, and with “strange” they seemingly want to explain
how the poem is written. So reflective prose, rather than poetry, is what we get. Try Google 
Translator. When you notice something strange, use an extra dictionary. 
Never trust translators. 

(Two poems by Friedrich Hölderlin” Translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover
http://jacketmagazine.com/27/hold-trans-2.html or http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-ister/comments/)

Weber: “Soziologie soll heißen” – “Sociology is”? Translating speech acts 

Translating a text from one language to the other may be more difficult than you would expect. It is not only about words and meanings and sentences and texts. We also have to consider the pragmatic aspect of language. By talking and writing we always do something, and the difficulty arises from the fact that every language has different ways of acting by words. If you want to buy a sausage, in southern Germany you might say: “Ich kriege eine Wurst!” (I get a sausage). In the Northern part of the country, with this kind of order, this would be considered quite rude and you might get an irritated answer. There you should try: “Ich hätte gerne ..” (I would like to have). In the Netherlands and in France the same thing is usually expressed with “I take a sausage, if you'd like to (give one to me)”. Such differences in everyday formulas are easily overcome. We just learn them by heart. But with philosophical or other theoretical texts, things are more complicated. When thinkers write or say something, they are acting too.

Take the traditional English translation of Max Weber´s definition of sociology in “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft” (Economy and Society):

“Sociology [...] is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences“.

Sounds easy. With the verb “to be” this is an assertive statement. But in German it sounds different:

“Soziologie [...] soll heißen: eine Wissenschaft, welche soziales Handeln deutend verstehen und dadurch in seinem Ablauf und seinen Wirkungen ursächlich erklären will“.

Why “soll heißen”? The German verb “sollen” is a modal verb; it defines the way a second, infinite verb is to be understood. This “sollen” indicates that the action of the verb is an order from somebody, a command deriving from the sphere of intersubjectivity: someone is saying so - your mother or humanity or God (in the latter cases, “sollen” indicates a moral dictate. Think of the Ten Commandments in the Bible: “Thou shalt not...”.

A proper translation of Weber´s definition could be “Sociology shall mean” in the moral sense. It is a kind of moral self obligation, or better: a declarative statement. The point is: for declarative statements you need a kind of authority, be that God or mother. Providing himself with the necessary authority is what Weber does in the Introductory notes. There he criticizes other authors as unclear (Gottl), as ambiguous and morally untrustworthy (Stammler and Simmel) – unlike himself, of course - and he refers to his own works on the topic.

What Weber is doing here is founding a new Sociology and doing so by his own right, as a righteous man and writer. That is the pragmatic sense of “Soziologie soll heißen”.