oh god
The new 27 volume collected edition of Knut Hamsun from Gyldendal Norsk Forlag.
HNGH.
Moon
“Affected by the moon – One group of words for insanity owes its origin to the belief that the moon affects the mind. The periodic recurrence of certain forms of insanity and frequent instances of somnambulism that seemed to be brought on by the bright light of the full moon gave rise to this belief. The great variety of derivative expressions and analogical formations in early dialects (see 1.05) make it probable that such expressions developed in Germanic independently of similiar words in Latin and Greek. Lat. lunaticus, however, has given NE. lunatic, MDu. lunaet, Du. hinatiek; Swiss lunig, Swab. ^?«w’5r insane ; lunatisch \exw\vvi, verriickt, NLG. luns (sc. zucht) Mondsucht. (NE. loony, luny ‘crazy, daft, foolish’ has been associated with loon the bird.) Compare also Du. lunamhnlisme lunacy, sleepwalking, and NE. seleniasis mental derangement, formerly thot to be caused by sleeping in the light of a tropical moon. 1.01. MHG. manic, MHG. Jel. nienig, Swiss monig, Tyrol, maenec, Swab, monig mondsiichtig, NE. moony simpleton, noodle; NE. mooned lunatic ; MHG. mcenisch, mondisch mondsiichtig, Hess, moendisch verriickt, albern, gewissermassen mondsiichtig ; NE. mooting {moon ling) simpleton,
From The Semantic Development of Words for Mental Aberration in Germanic Hartie Emil Zabel, Doctoral Thesis, Chicago, 1922
From Ernst Toller’s Hinkemann
“My life has never belonged to me. I was always waiting for it when I was small. Later I saw it from afar. But when the desire awakened in me to reach out and grab for it, I stopped and at once considered my hands, raw and dirty, and the silken garments that life seemed to wear… and I dared not move those hands from my lap. Why should anyone see them? Life now looks to be soiled like they are, and hardly worth reaching for.”
(Grete Hinkemann) (Act II, Scene iii).
“Mein Leben gehörte niemals mir. Als ich klein war, habe ich immer auf das Leben gewartet. Später sah ich es von weitem. Aber wenn ich danach greifen woltte, dachte ich auf einmal daran, daß ich grobe, shmutzige Hände hätte, und das Leben sah so aus, als ob es immer in seidenen Kleidern ginge… und das wagte ich nicht mehr die Hände unter der Schürze vorzuziehen. Warum sollte jedermann meine Hände sehen! Heut ist es mir, als ob das Leben auch schmutzig wär und es sich nicht lohnte, danach zu greifen.”
Phantom Limbs
Language has unequivocally indicated that memory is not the instrument for the exploration of the past, but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as soil is the medium in which lost cities lie entombed. Whoever endeavours to personally approach the past must act like a man who digs. This defines the clay in which true memories are held. They mustn’t be afraid of returning ever and again to the same scenes and circumstances, of scattering them like one scatters earth, rooting through them as through soil. Because these are just storehouses, sedimentary layers, which first deliver to the most careful searching those entities of true value tucked within the earth: the images, broken loose from all context, which stand as treasures in the sober chambers of our late insight, like ruins or torsos in a collector’s gallery (…)
From Berliner Chronik
Benjamin builds the comparison between memory and soil, and following idea of remembering as digging, from the commonalities between the German words Erinnern (to remember, remembrance) and Erdinnern (literally Earth+within in plural form, the Earth’s innards).
I love his metaphor of the collector’s gallery as the exhibition space for our memory images, because through it he defines the most meaningful sort of memory, that of images, as Sammlung, a gathering together again, as a recollection. But it’s here I think that the line becomes really blurred between visual memory and imagination – both are recollections of memory images, one is just aimed more towards representation, the other toward creation. Though visual memory and imagination are always inexorably bound to one another, since our memories are not perfect and contain fictions, and since every consituent of every imagined image must be a memory image, since every image that we retain must have been impressed upon our eyes at one time. In that way visual memory is representative, consisting in the ability to construct a likeness of believable authenticity. Imagination on the other hand consists in the ability to scatter bits of our memories in new combinations which render them unrecognizable. But Benjamin says that those memory images are ‘broken free from all context’ – which means that they do not essentially belong to imagination or memory, as both are just different kinds of recontextualisations. Maybe Benjamin is tracing both memory and imagination back to their most basic shared commonality, to a simple substance, image. I can’t figure it out.
‘Die Sprache hat es unmißverständlich bedeutet, daß das Gedächtnis nicht ein Instrument zur Erkundung der Vergangenheit ist sondern deren Schauplatz. Es ist das Medium des Erlebten wie das Erdreich das Medium ist, in dem die toten Städte verschüttet liegen. Wer sich der eigenen verschütteten Vergangenheit zu nähern trachtet, muß sich verhalten wie ein Mann, der gräbt. Das bestimmt den Ton, die Haltung echter Erinnerungen. Sie dürfen sich nicht scheuen, immer wieder auf einen und denselben Sachverhalt zurückzukommen, ihn auszustreuen wie man Erde ausstreut, ihn umzuwühlen wie man Erdrecih umwühlt. Denn Sachverhalte sind nur Lagerungen, Schichten, die erst der sorgsamsten Durchforschung das ausliefern, was die wahren Werte, die im Erinnern stecken, ausmacht: die Bilder, die aus allen früheren Zusammenhängen losgebrochen als Kostbarkeiten in den nüchternen Gemächern unserer späten Einsicht – wie Trümmer oder Torsi in der Galerie des Sammlers – stehen.’
Umständlich and imstande
The word in german for circumstance is one of those coincidences of a nearly one to one correspondence between the German and the English. The word is Umstand, pl. Umstände, made up of the prefix um, meaning ‘around’ (for example the latin circum, like circumference, circumnavigate, circumscribe), and stand, meaning something like ‘stand’ or ‘stance’. And the word for ‘capable (of)’ or ‘able (to)’, imstande (adj), means something like ‘in the stance (to)’, for example, like how one must be in a certain braced physical position if they are to sustain a hit, a punch, and remain standing. So circumstances are the ‘around standings’ by which one measures one’s own condition and capabilities. Makes me think of gauls surrounded by roman legions.
Today I came across the word umständlich, and first thought it to be just an adjective form of ‘surroundings’ – but it actually means ‘long winded’ – literally, something like ‘surroundingly’. And this I think illustrates exactly what longwindedness often results from: too much time spent attending to circumstances and context. So the reason why certain people (me included) have trouble telling stories or explaining things is because they spend too much time setting the stage, that is, the context and the circumstances and implications, of what they’re going to say.
Disappointment
I’m English, and as such I crave disappointment – I actively seek it out.
Bill Bailey
Disappointment is a feeling that the German language expresses in a nicely clear and subtle way. The word is enttäuschen, to disappoint, made up of the inseperable prefix ent, the ‘distancing prefix’ meaning roughly a sort of undoing or negating (like the english prefixes ‘de’ and ‘dis’), and täuschen, meaning to delude, mislead, deceive. So disappointment, in German, is primarily a sort of disillusionment, a feeling of sadness not resulting from frustrated expectations so much as from being informed of the actual state of things, and from understanding suddenly that one’s expectations were imaginary. Maybe every disappointment is just a happy assurance that we don’t live in a constant state of delusion.
Einklang and Flower Picking
Half of Life by Friedrich Hölderlin
With yellow pears hangs
full with wild roses
the land in the sea,
You lovely swans,
and drunken from kisses,
you dunk your heads
into holy sober waters.
Woe to me, from where will I take,
when it’s winter, the flowers, and where
the sunshine,
and shadowed earth?
The walls stand
voiceless and cold, in the winds
weathervanes clatter.
We pluck the sunshine and the shade in the same way that we pluck flowers, until winter comes and plucks the sunshine, shade, and flowers away from us.
It seems like the biggest problem of translating Hölderlin is that of conveying in English how he is simultaneously so stark and so comforting in the German, how each word he writes seems absolutely lonely and the same time bound by a certain vital force to each other word on the page. We can see this in the image of the stars in the night sky which Hölderlin uses to describe a forest of oaks in Die Eichenbäume (The Oak Trees).
Each of you is a world, like the stars in the heavens
you live, each one a god, in free union together
Eine Welt is jeder von euch, wie die Sterne des Himmels
lebt ihr, jeder ein Gott, in freiem Bunde zusammen
In this way, the affect (not effect) of his writing is Einklang, or unison (literal. Ein, one/Klang, sound). The poetic techniques of rhyme and fixed meter very much strive in their essence towards this ideal of Einklang – To stay with the stars though, I think Hölderlin’s technique of finding Einklang is a cosmologically inspired one, where poetry is not simply the writing of words but the writing (or narration) of bodies, orbits, and gravitational fields.
But isn’t this ideal of Einklang also the ideal of translation? There seem to be just as many points of convergence between translation and original poetic creation as divergences.
Addendum: Romanticism and Spinoza
In Hölderlin I see a lonely Spinoza, a Spinoza who suddenly and vividly perceived the unending loneliness of being which the unity of Substance implies – in this way the Romantic fascination with Spinoza was not a yearning towards the absolute (Spinoza had already done that as far as he could in his Ethics) – but it was rather a product of their intuition that if a finite being were to achieve perfection, it would simply be confronted with its own infinite solitude in the absence of something other than it (and a product of the further realization that this fact renders us, as imperfect beings, no less alone than the absolutely perfect being which consumes us). We can see in this loneliness of the absolute the ultimate Romanticisation – the longing for something that lies outside of that which is all consuming, in other words the impossible flight from life and the world. The essence of Romanticism is conceptualized in term of exactly that which does not belong to its essence. Its a unique manifestation of inbetweenness, a beautiful contradiction in which one ideally sets oneself on a halfway point between being and non-being, hence the title, Hälfte des Lebens, Half of Life, Middle of Life. In that way I think that Spinoza and the Romantic movement form a whole with regard to the nature of their conceptual foundations – Spinoza finds his starting point in necessity, Romanticism in contradiction.
Hälfte des Lebens von Friedrich Hölderlin
Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
Ihr holden Schwäne,
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.
Weh mir, wo nehm ich, wenn
Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo
Den Sonnenschein,
Und Schatten der Erde?
Die Mauern stehn
Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde
Klirren die Fahnen.
From ‘Werther’
That the happiest ones are those who live in the moment, as children do, carrying their little dolls around, continually undressing and dressing them; they creep timidly towards the drawer where Mother has hidden the sugar bread and, finally grasping the desired treat, they stuff it into their bursting cheeks, crying: More! – Those are happy creatures.
Dass diejenigen die glücklichsten sind, die, gleich den Kindern, in den Tag hinein leben, ihre Puppen herumschleppen, aus- und anziehen, und mit großem Respekt um die Schublade umherschleichen, wo Mama das Zuckerbrot hinein geschlossen hat, und wenn sie das gewünschte endlich erhaschen, es mit vollen Backen verzehren, und rufen: Mehr! – Das sind glückliche Geschöpfe.
A Translation and some thoughts on Kafka’s ‘Great Noise’
Great Noise
I sit in my room in the Noise Headquarters of the entire apartment. I hear every door slam, and by these noises I am spared only the feet falling continuously between them – yet I still hear the stove doors snapping shut in the kitchen. Father barges through the doors of my room and crosses through, his nightgown trailing behind him; the ashes are being scraped from the oven in the next room; Valli, bellowing each word through the hall, asks if father’s hat has been cleaned. A hiss that wishes to befriend me lifts the cry of a responding voice. The apartment doors become unlatched and are blown open, and like the walls of a swollen throat open wider still with the singing of a female voice, and finally shut with a thudding, manly and most thoughtless jolt. Father has gone; now a gentler, scattered, helpless noise is invoked in the voices of two canaries. I had considered earlier, and now with the canaries I consider anew, if I shouldn’t open the door a crack and slither snakelike into the neighboring room to beg my sisters and their governess, from the floor, for quiet.
(German Text Below)
Interessante Kleinigkeiten (Interesting tidbits):
The German verb lärmen means both to make noise and to bluster or gust (i.e. wind); Kafka exploits this here:
“Die Wohnungstüre wird aufgeklinkt und lärmt, wie aus katarralischem Hals, öffnet sich dann weiterhin mit dem Singen einer Frauenstimme…”
“The apartment doors become unlatched and blown open, and like the walls of a swollen throat open wider still with the singing of a female voice…”
The noise from the rooms is so great that it causes the doors to become unlatched, and as the noise persists it blows them open wider, just as our windpipe grows wider, the louder we speak (or sing, in the case of the female voice with which this metaphor of throat, wind and sound is fused). To me, this moment is the key to one reading of the text: Kafka is uniting these senses of noise and air with an idea of the apartment (along with its internal mechanisms and the humans interacting with them) as a mirror of human bodily structures and functions, specifically that of respiration. Sharing the apartment with others is stifling for the narrator because to do so is to be forced to share his own lungs and windpipe – and if the apartment and its rooms form such a bodily metaphor it must be a problem of sharing one collective body, since there is no border of sanctity to be found between the narrator’s room and the outside of it. This seen on one level when the narrator’s father barges through his door, but more importantly when one remembers that these doors do not shut out noise, even when they are closed. The presence of the noises of others leaves the narrator fighting for air; ergo when he begs the others for quiet, he is begging only to breathe. This dilemma eventually forces the narrator into a paradoxically predatory role, framed in the image of the snake creeping toward the canaries (the young women): to ask his sisters for quiet is to threaten them with or condemn them to suffocation, to suffocate them himself by using a larger portion of their collective windpipe.
Kafka tends to offer in his texts neither morals nor meanings but instead descriptions and diagnoses. The grim diagnosis here? To breathe freely is to strangle another.
German Text:
Großer Lärm
Ich sitze in meinem Zimmer im Hauptquartier des Lärms der ganzen Wohnung. Alle Türen höre ich schlagen, durch ihren Lärm bleiben mir nur die Schritte der zwischen ihnen Laufenden erspart, noch das Zuklappen der Herdtüre in der Küche höre ich. Der Vater durchbricht die Türen meines Zimmers und zieht im nachschleppenden Schlafrock durch, aus dem Ofen im Nebenzimmer wird die Asche gekratzt, Valli fragt, durch das Vorzimmer Wort für Wort rufend, ob des Vaters Hut schon geputzt ist, ein Zischen, das mir befreundet sein will, erhebt noch das Geschrei einer antwortenden Stimme. Die Wohnungstüre wird aufgeklinkt und lärmt, wie aus katarralischem Hals, öffnet sich dann weiterhin mit dem Singen einer Frauenstimme und schließt sich endlich mit einem dumpfen, männlichen Ruck, der sich am rücksichtslosesten anhört. Der Vater ist weg, jetzt beginnt der zartere, zerstreutere, hoffnungslosere Lärm, von den Stimmen der zwei Kanarienvögel angeführt. Schon früher dachte ich daran, bei den Kanarienvögeln fällt es mir von neuem ein, ob ich nicht die Türe bis zu einer kleinen Spalte öffnen, schlangengleich ins Nebenzimmer kriechen und so auf dem Boden meine Schwestern und ihr Fräulein um Ruhe bitten sollte. (Reclam Edition)
