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Tuesday, September 12, 2006
You say ‘white mountain’, I say ‘white fountain’
I’m posting some Nietzsche translations at Crooked Timber - more tonight! - but I’ll lodge an amusing note here. I’m translating bits of “Schopenhauer As Educator”. A bit from Hollingdale translation reads - hmmm, I left the Hollindale at home, but something like “And yet this [recovery of a distinctive brand of feeling] must be done if we are to understand what, after Kant, Schopenhauer can be to us—namely the leader who leads us from the heights of skeptical gloom or criticizing renunciation up to the heights of tragic contemplation, to the nocturnal sky and its stars extended endlessly above us, and who was himself the first to take his path.” It’s a passage I have long been familiar with, and I have been struck by the odd peak-to-peak progress - out of the heavens of skepticism up to the heights of contemplation. I was thinking about trying to make something of the irony, so I went back to the German and, sure enough, ‘aus der Höhe ... hinauf zur Höhe.’ Weird. But today I was working from a web page and got different German: “der Führer nämlich, welcher aus der Höhle des skeptischen Unmuths oder der kritisirenden Entsagung hinauf zur Höhe der tragischen Betrachtung leitet.” ‘Höhle’ means cave - ‘out of the cave of skepticism ... up to the heights’ - so now we’ve got a stock inversion of a classically Platonic figure. The German spelling of my Ullstein, Karl Schlechta edited edition - the ‘Höhe’ version - has been modernized. For example, ‘Unmuths’ has been scrubbed of its ‘h’. The web edition is clearly based on an older text. So, off the cuff, I suspect scribal error during the spelling modernization, in which case I should go with ‘Höhle’. But it is a basic law of scribal errors that they tend to accentuate the intelligible. Editors don’t just up and assume something that makes obvious sense must secretly be something odd, but they sometimes do the opposite. So I’m torn. On the one hand, I’d like to justify my translation efforts with the discovery of a clear error in the standard English translation, due to an error that crept into the German. On the other hand, I sort of like that good old peak-to-peak imagery I know so well because - as Nietzsche would scold me - I have a sweet tooth for incomprehensibility.
Anyway, I am feeling very Nabokovian about my little puzzle.
UPDATE: Curses. Foiled by Amazon search-inside. The new edition of the Hollingdale has changed it to ‘from the depths of skepticism’. I guess someone must have determined which German edition is the correct one.
Comments
"Editors don’t just up and assume something that makes obvious sense must secretly be something odd ...”
Unless, perhaps, they’re dealing with an author famed for deliberate oddity? Oddity in the strong sense, I mean. “Niezsche ... yeah, he’s all woo look at me, you slave-sheep-people! Hey, I’m on the MOUNTAIN-TOP! Woo! aint he. Better correct that hole to a summit ...”
Yes, I have often felt that Friedrich’s theme song should be that old standard:
Heaven, I’m in heaven
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak
And I seem to find the happiness I seek
When we’re out together dancing peak to peak
Heaven, I’m in heaven
And the cares that hung around me through the week
Seem to vanish like a gambler’s lucky streak
When we’re out together dancing (swinging) peak to peak
Oh I love to climb a mountain
And reach the highest peak ...
Hey, that can’t be right.
Funnily enough, I’m reading “Schopenhauer as Erzieher”, and did find that
passage puzzling.
From a brief glance, it seems that the web version you refer to uses the
new Rechtschreibung (Grösse in place of Größe, dass in place of daß, etc,
e.g. “Das ist seine Größe, daß...” from the same page of the Schlechta
edition that you cite). I suppose then it must be taken from the Colli &
Montinari Kritische Studienausgabe, which would make the Höhle version
definitive?
Hmm, I wonder what else Schlecta got wrong?
Thanks for the editorial info. And especially thanks for telling me I actually saved a soul from confusing bad orthography with inscrutable ethico-metaphysico-epistemology.
In British place names, “low” means “hill”.