Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Number 48: September 2004

Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Number 48: September 2004

… only translating Kierkegaard

By Adrian Arsinevici,

Cand. Mag, Romanian translator

Risskov, Denmark

In 1947, 103 years after Kierkegaard published his Frygt og Bæven, the French Algerian existential writer Albert Camus (1913-1960) published The Plague. One of the characters in the novel, the meek public servant Joseph Grand, discloses that he is a closet writer. He confides that he spends agonising evenings trying to find the most appropriate word or conjunction for his work. Monsieur Grand excitedly shows his manuscript to a friend and asks his opinion. The manuscript contains one sentence: “One glorious morning in the month of May, an elegant Amazon came riding on a superb fawn-coloured mare, along the flowery paths of the Forest of Boulogne.” Grand confesses that he wrote and re-wrote the same sentence time and again and was prepared to continue doing so until it was perfect and conveyed both the picturesqueness of the Gallic weald and the rhythmic clip-clop of the equestrienne’s noble animal.

Grand’s writer’s block, his Hamlet-like endless brooding over his first and only sentence on the blank manuscript, is something all writers fear, and so do translators of Kierkegaard. Indeed, Grand reminds me of someone who dreams of doing the first complete translation of some literary masterpiece but cannot get started. His endless polishing of phrases will ring familiar to many translators who perhaps get stuck on the first page with one of SK's quaint Danish, German or Latin mottoes.

How many translators of Kierkegaard have begun by studying Danish language and literature and then moved on to advanced courses in philosophy, linguistics, theology, graphology, German, psychology, history – and then perhaps rounded off their studies with a degree in translation theory? Very few, I presume. Translation seems to be a trade one learns by doing. The enthusiastic self-made translator skips the preliminaries and jumps into the task and the text. However, shortly after having translated the first pages, or chapters, of a Kierkegaard text, a species of doubt and anxiety creeps into the soul of our ambitious apprentice. He begins to worry that he does not have the intellectual capacity to translate Kierkegaard. He decides that before beginning to translate he must broaden his philosophical, theological, and linguistic knowledge. We could ask whether it is necessary to become a universal scholar in order translate SK.

In truth, in the annals of European history there are few records of erudite individuals itching to translate. Unlike in the East, where translation is a highly esteemed occupation, our culture concentrates almost exclusively on creativity and original thinking. Translators, who, at their best, merely pass on the originality of others, never seem to play a prominent role. But this fact does not deter our ambitious translator, nor does the low esteem in which translators are held quell the enthusiasm – of contemporary possessors of good heads and oceans of time – from taking the encyclopaedic path. (And, to paraphrase SK: “I invoke everything good for them and for other knowledge holders in that omnibus.”) It is still hard to tell what kind of stock the good SK translator is made of. Experience shows that few gatherers of such comprehensive knowledge are similarly interested in popularising other people’s thinking and writings. Fewer still, willingly choose the low-status and modestly remunerated art of translation.

A solid educational background is a necessary but not sufficient condition for doing a successful translation. Sooner or later the ambitious SK translator will also wish to learn a technique to mould his formless knowledge to make it fit the structured needs of translation per se. He will seek a proper theory and method of translation. As these cannot be acquired through the orthodox machinery of the academy, he will attend translation seminars and listen to learned philosophers, linguists, and philologists who disclose and make it easy to comprehend new and unknown facets of the text. Methodologists of translation will present him with interesting approaches and deconstruct the alchemy of translation. The variety and versatility of the approaches may make the ambitious translator waver and falter between the semantic, comprehensive, literal and communicative methods introduced to him.

The task of finding and following a creed for translation turns out to be time and life consuming. Its pattern feels Procrustean and the results of its application not very rewarding. The idea of a perfect objective translation, “untouched by human hand,” proves to be a Fata Morgana. This self-inflicted puritanical hygiene may turn him into a translator of words; beautiful meanings will be sacrificed on the altar of ugly literal objectivity.

In contrast, the resigned SK translator, as we could call him, is a connoisseur of language who accepts his limitations and resists the grandiose temptation to become a new Pico della Mirandola. He also eschews belief in the panacea of translation theories. He understands that his life is short and SK’s art is long. As a result, he will not possess much encyclopaedic knowledge, but he will possess many encyclopaedias, dictionaries and reference books. He will spend less time than his ambitious counterpart preparing and perusing neo-intellectual commentaries, updated secondary literature, books on semiotics, psychiatry, anthropology and other contemporary sciences that only marginally relate to his humble task. He does not compete with philosophers, but takes advantage of the conclusions of their quarrels. He does not mind Kierkegaard’s alleged egocentricity and narcissism, but appreciates the positive impact that SK has had on the world. Thus he reads more of the corpus and scours the texts for parallel passages. He approaches the text itself with resignation and pays greater attention to it.

He smiles in amusement and exasperation at his constant efforts to resist reading himself into the text and he humbly acknowledges his unavoidable subjectivity. The resigned translator notices that often an apparently insignificant aside that he has overheard may turn out to be more helpful than a theory of translation. Slowly he learns that a hint, a corny motto, a maxim, a – seemingly – unrelated line of poetry, may help him more in his task than mastering a new field of study. He notices that certain words and maxims – which he may have heard incidentally and discarded as irrelevant – remain imbedded wisely in his subconscious, ready for use at the right moment.

In relation to this last point about the role of "irrelevant facts" and the synchronicity of subconscious revelations, I would like to dust off two often quoted and influential Italian maxims. Even though they are frowned on by many and dismissed as alliterative word plays, they have endured – solid as pyramids – the trial of time. These sayings speak in the introduction to many translations and resound many learned discussions on this subject of translation. The two maxims are: traduttore – traditore (“translator – traitor”, to translate is to betray) and bella e infedele, brutta e fedele (a translation is either “beautiful and unfaithful”, or “ugly and faithful”).

These expressions have long terrorised translators, with the implication that no translator will be able to coerce the immune system of a target language into accepting the structure of a foreign (source) language. On close inspection, one could say that the maxims echo a clear bias in favour of the source text and its author. Further, the scepticism they express regarding the possibility of a fair translation indicates their overt mimetic preference. Judging from the maxims, translations are doomed to be inferior copies of the original source text; which in our case means that no translator could succeed in capturing the meaning, atmosphere, and beauty of the original work of a genius such as SK. As the translators we have in mind deal mainly with masterpieces of universal value, it does not take much psychological insight to grasp that beginning a translation of SK with the qualification of “traitor” does not have a congenial influence on one’s work capacity, performance, and state of mind.

After years of labouring under these Italian adages, a new and more sanguine saying came out of South America. Its Spanish reads as a pastiche of our first quoted Italian maxim: traductor-recreador, (“translator - re-creator”). The present hermeneutical maxim elevates the translator-imitator to the rank of translator - re-creator, and perhaps even co-creator. One of the implications of this adage is that it is easier to create something original than to translate!

Not surprisingly, the father of this maxim is the Argentine writer, and scholar, Jorge Louis Borges (1899-1986). For Borges, best known for his creative writing, translation was (as for Alexander Pope and Baudelaire) a violon d’Ingres. As a Joyce translator he was content to render the last page of Ulysses. He shows his interest for translation in general in his essays: “Joyce’s Ulysses”, “The Homeric Versions” and “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights”, the latter being a comparative analysis of different translations of the Arabian Nights. In these texts, his entirely subjective ruminations on translation speak to the person trying to transform Kierkegaard’s Danish into another language. In the following I will sketch some of Borges’ points that Waisman found pertinent.[i]

§ In both theory and practice, Borges establishes that there is no reason to believe that a translation is inferior to the original, he problematises issues of “authority”, “originality”, and “fidelity”, and negates the concept of a “definitive text”.

§ “Joyce dilates (expands) and reforms the English idiom; his translator must try to take the same kind of liberties.”

§ The source text is: “a temporary object, that can be re-written continuously, therefore the idea of a definitive text constitutes a fallacy. One can always find new readings of the text.”

§ When we realize that every translation, every text, is a re-writing of – dialoguing with – a previous version, what does fidelity mean?

§ Of greatest importance are the “creative infidelities” of the translator, his capability to manipulate the language and the “syntactic movement”. He must be willing to take risks, to omit, change and exercise his preferences as needed.

§ The belief that a translation should be literal (Newman’s), and that it should eliminate any details that distract or interrupt the text (Arnold’s) are both valid. The translator’s “creative infidelities” make him able to be both literal and free.

§ A literal translation is never faithful to the original, sometimes the least literal version can be the most loyal.

§ A literal translation misses the idiomatic meaning of the original.

§ To read a text is not a matter of changing the original, but of elucidating the new context in such a way as to make the text referred to glow with new meanings.

§ The relationship between reading and translation is equivalent to the relationship between reading and writing.

§ “There is nothing that cannot be translated.”

SK’s philosophy, theology, and psychology are wrapped in a language specific only to him. Translating Kierkegaard does not require literally imitating his way of writing but, rather, trying to achieve the same difference of expression, to make the same effort to express things as subjectively and idiomatically as he did in relationship to his native language. But what do SK's fellow citizens think about his language?[ii]

[EL1] Kierkegaard er vel periodens største stilkunstner, efter de første forsøg en lidenskabeligt og bevidst arbejdende virtuos, med mange og villede tilnærmelser til talesproget og det hørlige, rytmiske, men dog overalt i et retorisk leje, præget af vidtløftighed, fremmedelementer (især tyske) og en abstraktion, der ikke vandt ham mange læsere i samtiden og næppe heller – bortset fra en del orddannelser – satte direkte spor i sprogets norm, hvorimod stilpåvirkninger nok kan skimtes hos senere skribenter. [iii]

The musicality and rhythm of Kierkegaard’s sentences demand a translator with an ear for musical texts. The length of some sentences (sometimes as long as 350 words, in Lovsang til Modersmaale [Panegyric to the Mother Tongue]) with many subordinate clauses, and clauses subordinated to previously subordinated ones, are a well known challenge to all translators. It is, nevertheless, a pity when some of these translators avoid this challenge by “ironing out” and “normalising” SK’s syntax. A long sentence is chopped into several more palatable short ones. Subordinate clauses are locked in parentheses. SK's idiosyncratic German word order is reconstructed in easy listening sentences. For an example of taking this easy way out, Sygdommen til Døden (The Sickness unto Death) has been rendered in Romanian translations as Maladia Mortala, ("Mortal Malady") and Boala de Moarte, ("Terminal Illness").

Leaving the mine field of syntax, I would like to register some difficulties specific to a Romanian translator. Romanian is a flexible language in that it has a rich case inflection. In Danish, the word order is quite strict [EL2] and noun declension is virtually extinct. There are three genders in Romanian: masculine, feminine and neuter. Danish nouns have two forms. Let us take the example of Danish demonstrative pronouns den and det (denne, dette), which stand for both animate and inanimate nouns and have no declination. As a result a “faithful”, literal translation, of the Danish text will be prolix to the Romanian ear. It will therefore have to be over-translated. Consider, for example, the following quotation:

[EL3] ”…Gud... dannede Helten og Digteren eller Taleren. Denne kan Intet gjøre af hvad hiin gjør, han kan kun beundre, elske, glæde sig ved Helten. Dog er også han lykkelig, ikke mindre end denne; thi Helten er ligesom hans bedre Væsen, ...”[iv][EL4]

It is not easy to decide whether denne is the hero, the poet, or the speaker; or a duo consisting of the hero and the poet.

Translating SK’s concepts into Romanian demands even more care. You have to strike a balance between translating terms qua concepts and qua ordinary words. For instance, angest qua concept must be translated consistently as anxiety. But considered as an ordinary word, angest exists within a context and should therefore be translated accordingly either as fear, worry, fright or dread. As a result of the tension between concept and word orientation, it is difficult to standardise translation terminology. Still, such guidelines would be useful. Here I must also mention the attention demanded by the established Romanian SK terminology, heavily tainted by the intermediate French, Italian, and German vehicles, that transported SK’s words to the country in the course of history. SK’s concepts have, one could say, different degrees of translatability. Hence, a concept such as Øieblikket (“eye-blink” or blink of the eye) can be translated relatively easily as clipă, (“a clipi”, “to blink”) points to the eye [EL5] . (Not as “moment”, which points to the watch.)

A polysemantic word such as Bestemmelse can/ought to be translated as: definition (definiţie), qualification (categorie), determination (determinare), character (calitate), determinant (expresie), trait (caracterizare), according to the context. Such polysemanticity brings across SK’s “semantic intention” to the reader, but, alas, rules out concordance – the consistent use of a single foreign word for rendering a Kierkegaardian term. I would like to give a couple of examples from Begrebet Angest. I will first list a brief quotation in Danish and then follow this with the English given in the Lowrie and Thomte translations.

1) B.A. p. 110, 1-7
Når man saaledes I Dogmatikken kalder Tro det Umiddelbare uden nogen nærmere Bestemmelse...

2) CD p. 10, 1. 12 Thus when in dogmatics a person says that faith is the immediate, without a more precise definition…

3) CA p. 10, 1. 11
Thus when in dogmatics faith is called the immediate without any other qualification…

4) p. 206, 1. 39
…det Indesluttede og det ufrivilligt Aabenbare. Disse tvende Bestemmelser betegne, hvad de og skulle, de samme.

5) 110, 1 7
…shut-upness unfreely revealed. These two traits denote, as they should, the same thing.

6) p. 123, 1 20
…inclosing reserve and the unfreely disclosed. The two definitions indicate, as intended, the same thing.[v]

For an additional example, the difficulty of translating a concept such as Anfægtelse (as employed in Frygt og Bæven) seems to have been underrated. Since the word has no direct equivalent in languages other than German and Scandinavian, one has to settle, in this text, for synonyms. As a result it has been rendered as “temptation” and/or “trial”. The problem is that “temptation” (ispita) and “trial” (ordalie) are, rather, (semantic) equivalents of two other Kierkegaardian concepts: “fristelse” and respectively “prøvelse”.

Similar problems must have been posed in the history of translation by the initial adoption of (untranslated) philosophical concepts: Greek (catharsis), Latin (fatum), German (Dasein), Sanskrit (dharma) etc. which must have been totally unfamiliar to begin with. In the future, thanks to a substantially increased body of translations a consensus regarding the translation of such terms will emerge, and the interest in SK’s writings will familiarise the public with his original terminology. A possible drawback may be an increase in the bulk of commentaries.

To make Kierkegaard sound as delightful in English, French, and Romanian as he sounds in his Danish does not require that the translator succeed in coming up with something that equals or surpasses the original. The translator only needs to tap into the deep structure of SK’s writings. By doing this he will naturally find a happy way of recasting Kierkegaard words into his own contemporary language.