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”. 

Zweckrational?

In our wonderful German language, we may spontaneously form compounds of all kinds. We may walk around traumverloren or, for philosophers, even better: gedankenverloren. For the English translation you must choose between “absentmindedly” (but absent where? In dreams or in thoughts?) or “lost in dreams”, “lost in thoughts”.

Our actions may be zweckrational, as Weber believed: "rational regarding a purpose", you will have to translate. The noun, then, would be Zweckrationalität: rationality of purpose. Some suggest “instrumental rationality” – but this would presuppose critical thoughts expressed by Lukàcs and the Franfurt School after Weber's death: it's a bad translation.

In Weber's eyes, or words, this rationality of purpose was the dominating kind of rationality in today's Western world. He thought even the omnipresent bureaucracy could be described as zweckrational. Today we don't believe this to be true. To be zweckrational you need to be able to choose freely between the means you can employ in order to achieve your purpose. Once you have a bureaucratic organization with its directorates and departments and offices, you cannot do this; rather, you have to choose between the options provided by your organization. Well, it took us 40 years before Niklas Luhmann pointed out Weber's faulty re-use of a word applying to the behavior of individuals for organizations.

Maybe in English this would not have happened? Is Zweckrationalität “rationality of purpose” - or "of purposes”? One or many? Would this expression - ambiguous and cumbersome - have become the central metaphor of certain sociological and philosophical schools for describing modern society? In any case, we could be considered sprachverloren.

This is Europe

When I was a boy, the US was in our films and in our dreams: Kennedy, Muhammed Ali, Lassie, a small step for a man … oh, how long is the list of American gods! We even ate American food – which is, to say the least, crazy.

But one thing we were told by our teachers, would forever limit American supremacy. “They are superficial!“ And we, that is: we Europeans, we were always ready to consider stacks of books, metaphysical abysses in every question of our lives.

If this is a correct opposition, or at least was one before things like “Bologna“ crushed our universities, then it is clear why the translators of the famous “System-Fragment”, written by Hegel and/or by Schelling and/or by Hölderlin ... or most probably by all the three of them, why in its American translation they write about being »clever«:

»One cannot be clever in anything, one cannot even reason cleverly in history – without aesthetic sense.« (philosophyproject.org)

Quite obscure, so far. »Aesthetic sense« and »cleverness« – what might be the connection?

»Clever« in German would be something like schlau, maybe schnell und schlau? In a text from our young idealists a word like this simply could not have appeared. Cleverness concerns something they regarded as meaningless everyday activities. They might have written about being reasonable (not in the practical sense!), about being rational, and they most definitely would not have protested against »thinking beautifully« – seeing as they proclaim the importance of »aesthetic sense«, but »clever«? Never.

Indeed they wrote:

Man kann in nichts geistreich sein, selbst über Geschichte kann man nicht geistreich raisonnieren – ohne ästhetischen Sinn.

This is not easy to translate. Nowadays geistreich is something near to what we consider British humour, say: »witty«. But if we take the word geistreich literally, we get nearer to what those invincible three philosophers may have meant: »rich/full of spirit« – »spirit« taken as the (more or less) human faculty of reasoning – reasoning »about«, not »in« history. And if they use raisonnieren please leave it like that in your translation: At that time, that was still French stuff and you could hear it.

German! British? French! Just do not forget that he is from Europe when you make Hegel (and/or …) speak American.

Words, strutting around ...

Benjamin's »Origin of the German Mourning Play«, we are told, is »esoteric«. It is not. The thing Benjamin does is quite common among German authors between 1890 and 1930. With his writing he follows two ideals, not respecting academic divisions of fields like »Philosophy« or »Literature«: these ideals are beauty and truth. He does so because, in ancient Greece as well as in the modern world, someone taught that expression of thought has to be carefully considered, and that a thinker and writer should pay attention to the words he chooses. The words do not transport, as psychologists say, a meaning, so that you may choose one or the other synonym without consequence – words are the meaning, or at least part of it. Do not ignore the sound and the images they give.

When Benjamin writes das Wort stolziert, we can see »the word strutting around«: walking stiffly and arrogantly, apparently proud of itself. The entire sentence: 

Hier stolziert das Wort, die Silbe und der Laut, emanzipiert von jeder hergebrachten Sinnverbindung, als Ding, das allegorisch ausgebeutet werden darf. 

The English translation gives: 

Here the »word, syllable, and sound are emancipated from any context of traditional meaning and are flaunted as objects which can be exploited for allegorical purposes«. 

No strutting, no pride. And on it goes:

»The language of the baroque is constantly convulsed by rebellion by the part of the elements which make it up«. (p. 207)

»Convulsed«? No. Benjamin had written: 

Die Sprache des Barock ist allezeit erschüttert von Rebellionen ihrer Elemente.

»Shaken« may be a good translation ... shaken as we are by earthquakes, shaken: broken things are on the floor, chaotic pieces, a mess. No »convulsions«. The translator obviously just looked up erschüttern in a dictionary and thought the direct translation of the word would be okay. He did not see the picture.  

Headquarters of the army of concepts?

One episode of the famous American cartoon »Southpark« is entitled »The Stick of Truth«. In German, this becomes Stab, Stab der Wahrheit. Of course Benjamin, when in his unfortunate »Origin of the German Mourning Play« he writes about a Stab von Begriffen, he does not mean a »stick of concepts«, which could also be nice and efficient as a weapon. He makes use of the second meaning of Stab: the commanding group of officers in an army. This makes the reader rightly think of conceptual war, underlined by the verb dienen: »which serves to the representation«.

The English translation (John Osborne, 2003) proposes »a set of concepts which assist«: which is both: correct as a translation and totally wrong.

If we read on, we will encounter sentences as

»If ideas do not incorporate phenomena, and if they do not become functions of the law of phenomena, the "hypothesis", then ...«

But Benjamin does not say »phenomena become …« –

Wenn sie die Phänomene weder durch Einverleibung in sich enthalten, noch sich in Funktionen, in das Gesetz der Phänomene, in die »Hypothesis« verflüchtigen, so …

Benjamin says: verflüchtigen sich, they »evaporate«, vanish into the hypothesis, like perfumes do into the air, becoming barely perceptible.

Today we are used to consider philosophy part of the university teaching. But the period when great philosophers were also university professors has been very short, it starts with Wolff (1706) and ends with Hegel (1831) – not very much compared to nearly 3000 years of philosophical activities. Do not ask university lecturers if you need the translation of thoughts, ask poets.

Allegorical Tractatus

In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein makes use of several terms he takes from classical philosophy: not only “Welt”, but also “Substanz” (which is, as he says, independent from the world!). It may seem he is only playing with high brow concepts of the Geistesgeschichte. In this way also his thoughts about God or “a god” could be read. But maybe the contrary is true.

Just have a look at:

4.012 Offenbar ist, dass wir einen Satz von der Form „aRb“ als Bild empfinden. Hier ist das Zeichen offenbar ein Gleichnis des Bezeichneten.

“Gleichnis” is a word that in German usually only Christ would use – or whoever thinks to speak for him. Jesus, young Christians learn, “spricht in Gleichnissen” – He speaks in parables, He allegorizes, His heirs pontificate. To talk in parables, we may add, is not to be considered the clearest of all possible manners of expressing yourself.

To translate it as “likeness”, as Pears and Ogden do, may give a wrong idea.

Ogden: “Here the sign is obviously a likeness of the signified.”

Well, “obviously”, offensichtlich, but offenbar: here this must mean “apparently”. There is nothing obvious in what Wittgenstein says. For Christians, in addition, this offenbar is linked to the Offenbarung, revelation.

Why not translate as follows:

"It is apparent (“obvious” in the sense of revealed!) that we sense a sentence of the form “aRb” as a picture. Here the sign apparently is a parable (allegory) of the signified."

What if the Tractatus said: all our signifying and indicating “facts” is very mysterious? Something near religion?