A Note or rather a Question Mark. Kierkegaard

The book title from 1844 could have been Romantic: “Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy”. But the English translation is misleading. The Dane is taking up the term so very dear to Schlegel and Novalis, but he does so in an ironic way: Philosophiske Smuler eller En Smule Philosophi, “Philosophical crumbs”. Not fragments, rather pieces of them. That means: being ironic with who is ironic.

This may be considered strange, because Kierkegaard does never refer to the more philosophical writings of our German Romantiker, not to their Fragmente. At least in his doctoral thesis he only writes about Schlegel's Lucinde... not about philosophy, but about literature. 

Jean Paul Richter and incontinence

Jean Paul Richter always writes too much. The texts he publishes are a continuous overflow of images, sensations, ideas. This may be a reason why Jean Paul, very popular until about 1810, was nearly forgotten in Germany after his death in 1825. Not so in the rest of Europe.

Jean Paul deeply influenced Italian modernist Carlo Dossi, whom Italians do not care about, and the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, of whom Danes think he were a theologist. You do not need to be translated in order to be misunderstood.

Both the Dane and the Italian read Jean Paul, an author hard to understand for a native speaker, in German. Probably these men did not study our language at a German cultural institute.

Nowadays studying German beyond the Bratwurst and Heidi Klums seems to be unzumutbar. That is the reason we have translations even of Jean Paul´s most particular work, the Vorschule der Ästhetik. In English this “preschool” becomes a “school”. I understand, you want to avoid indirect routes. But what if this being indirect was part of Jean Paul´s game? Who cares! Here Jean Paul talks about aesthetics, that is philosophy, a field where only the contents counts. But the publishers add two new elements to the title. “Jean Paul Richter´s School of Aesthetics”, okay, like XY´s tomato soup, and “Horn of Oberon”. The modest “preschool of aesthetics”, transformed into “Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter´s School of Aesthetics”. Find the difference. Or, rather imagine the consequences: “What are you reading?” – “Horn of ...”. 

But in the translation of the text, normalization rules. This is Jean Paul without Jean Paul. 

Unless he writes plain sentences, everything moves smoothly.

Der Verstand und die Objekten-Welt kennen nur Endlichkeit.

"The understanding and the object-world know only finitude”. Ja. 

Hier finden wir nur jenen unendlichen Kontrast zwischen den Ideen (der Vernunft) und der ganzen Endlichkeit selber.

"In the romantic we find only the infinite contrast between the ideas (or reason) and all finitude itself”.

Clearer for the reader, not hurting anybody, “in the romantic” instead of “here”.

Now, Jean Paul soars into the air: 

Wie aber, wenn man eben diese Endlichkeit als subjektiven Kontrast jetzo der Idee (Unendlichkeit) als objektivem unterschöbe und liehe und statt des Erhabenen als eines angewandten Unendlichen jetzo ein auf das Unendliche angewandte Endliche, also bloß Unendlichkeit des Kontrastes gebäre, d.h. eine negative? Dann hätten wir den Humor oder das romantische Komische.

"But suppose just this finitude were imputed as subjective contrast to the idea as objective contrast, and instead of the sublime as an applied infinity, now produced a finitude applied to the infinite, and thus simply infinity of contrast, that is a negative infinity. Then we should have humour or the romantic comic”.

Well, the rhetorical question is transformed. Fine. But what happened to the verbs unterschöbe und liehe? “were imputed”? Jemandem etwas unterschieben (simple infinitive instead of the hypothetical form used by Jean Paul), for example a murder, means “to pin a murder on somebody”. This is not a simple imputation. We could call it irony, but only in the German version.