Steppenwolf & Friends

It's hard to get much done in this setting. For me at least, limited privacy and limited mobility mean limited productivity. I haven't done much recently beyond yardwork and Aikido. But I have translated a little more of Steppenwolf:

It pleased clever people to argue over whether he was really a wolf, or if he had once, perhaps before his birth, been magically transformed from a wolf into a person, or if he was born a person imbued and still possessed with the soul of a wolf from the steppes, or whether perhaps this belief that he was truly a wolf was merely a conceit or sickness. For example, it was of course possible that this man was in childhood wild, unruly, and disorderly, that his teachers had tried to slay the beast in him but that the best faith and imagination could do was to lay a thick coating of education and humanity over his true, bestial self.

The process of translation is fascinating to me. It's not at all like simply reading a book, in your first or second language. That goes considerably faster, and if there are words you can't define, you generally get them from context and keep going, sometimes looking up the essential words. In translation, that doesn't work, because you need to follow each sentence to completion, rather than gaining an overall knowledge and comprehension of the work. In addition, even a little foreign language study will tell you that one-to-one translation is generally a myth. In this passage, the phrase "in der Tat", which literally translates to "in the deed" but colloquially and contextually means "in truth" becomes the modifier "true" in the phrase "his true, bestial self". This phrase is in itself two phrase sewn together to shorten the sentence without sacrificing meaning. Why did I do this? Because a reasonable sentence length in German comes off as Thomas Pynchon on a bad day in English.

I get the feeling my current opinions will amuse me in the future. I'm so new at all of this...

German Practice

...can be quite fun, if you do it right. I didn't want to lose my ability over the summer, so I've been trying to consume media in German whenever possible. Der Spiegel is online, which is a huge help. Youtube is another great resource. I've been watching Disney movies in German. Aschenputtel (Cinderella) is well suited to it, Die Schöne und der Biest (Beauty and the Beast) is equally good...and not even German can help Mulan II. It's a little harder to find originally German television/movies on Youtube, mostly because I don't know what to search for.

But it's not just speaking I need to practice. Reading and lit crit will be important as well. And since I already have ein Tractat vom Steppenwolf, von Hermann Hesse, that will be my starting place.

Es fangt an mit "Nur für Verrückte" als Einsatz. Ein gute Anfang, finde ich. Ein Übersetzung, so weit wie ich kann...

Only for crazy people

There was once a man named Harry, called the wolf of the steppes. He walked on two legs, wore clothing and was a person, but at the same time he was obviously a wolf. He had learned much from that which people of good understanding could, and he was quite a clever man. And yet there was something which he had not learned: how to be satisfied with himself and his life. This he could not do. He was an unsatisfied person. This was probably because he knew, at all times and from the bottom of his heart (or at least thought he knew) that he was not really a human being, but a wolf from the steppes.

Thank you, Hermann Hesse, for using relatively simple language. We'll see if I've bitten off more than I can chew, but I'm interested to see what happens with Harry. It will probably be very humbling to read a professional translation-which is why I'll be avoiding it, so as not to get discouraged.