Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On Wed, 11 Dec 2024 11:03:28 +0100, D wrote:

Haha. Yes, Kaufmann is the name I've seen pop up the most when I checked
Nietzsche translations. On the other hand, I am fairly fluent in german
when it comes to reading, so maybe I should aim higher and actually read
the original? =)

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7205/pg7205-images.html

Du grosses Gestirn! Was wäre dein Glück, wenn du nicht Die hättest,
welchen du leuchtest!

Common has

"Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for
whom thou shinest!"

Kaufmann has

"You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom
you shine?"

One criticism of Kaufmann is he rearranges Nietzsche's idiosyncratic
punctuation. The newer translations mostly follow Kaufmann, some with
slightly different sentence structure or wording. After all when you're
doing the 15th translation you need to do something differently.

The real question is what effect was Nietzsche striving for? His father
was a Lutheran minister so he had plenty of exposure to Luther's bible
translation. Was he trying to adopt the tone or parody it?

While the archaic language can put people off Common does capture the feel
of du/sie and behind that the attempt by bible translators to capture the
original singular/plural pronoun distinctions.

Personally, I'll go for the readable versions. I'd never read the New
Testament due to the traditional two column layout and the somewhat
stilted language. Oddly one of the things issued in boot camp was "Good
News for Modern Man", and I finally got around to reading it. Bible people
will argue about the dynamic translation but at least I read it. Of course
there wasn't much else to read besides the green book with its wisdom
about which side of a Claymore gets pointed to whoever you're trying to
kill.

 

The question is if anything more complicated than Schwedenkrimi can
really be translated. In one of Heidegger's more accessible essays he
questions if we can adequately translate Greek with the nuances and
associations the words had in the original.

 
This is very commonly thought and communicated in russian and chinese
culture. The conclusion is of course, the russiand and/or chinese
culture is so sublime it can never be translated or understood by
western barbarians.