Tuesday, April 18, 2006
(12:49 AM) | Anonymous:
Tuesday Hatred: adde parvo parvum magnus acervus erit
In his preface to his translation of The Trial, Breon Mitchell says of George Steiner that he suggested "that a translation that improves upon the original is the greatest betrayal of all". I was reminded of this maxim when reading the Critique of Judgment (as Werner Pluhar translates the title of the third critique; the other translation of it I have calls it the Critique of the Power of Judgment). In addition to rendering "Vorstellung" as "presentation" instead of "representation" (as, in my understanding, it is more or less always rendered), he inserts numerous words and phrases into the translation, presumably to make it easier to follow. At one point he inserts a whole sentence, as in this bit from §4:But in order to say that health is good, we must also use reason and direct this health toward purposes: we must say that health is a state that disposes us to [attend to] all our tasks. [Perhaps in the case of happiness, at least, the agreeable and the good are the same?] Surely everyone believes that happiness, the greatest sum (in number as well as duration) of what is agreeable in life, may be called a true good, indeed the highest good[?]This is outrageous! Not only is the "[attend to]" wholly superfluous (elsewhere, he inserts "[meant]" in expressions using an obviously purposive "to be", or an obviously purposive "for", as in (from §16) "if only the building were not [meant] to be a church"—the "[meant]" adds nothing), but, if the transition between the first quoted sentence and the last is not obvious in the German, then perhaps it just shouldn't be obvious in the English. If Kant turns out to be a less than perfectly graceful writer, well, few people will be surprised. Another passage that roused my not inconsiderable ire, from §7 (I stopped noting them after the Analytic of the Beautiful):
Thus we will say that someone has taste if he knows how to entertain his guests [at a party] with agreeable things (that they can enjoy by all the senses) in such a way that everyone likes [the party].Now, again, the first addition seems, to the extent that it's harmless, superfluous, but the second one clearly changes the meaning of the sentence. Without that addition, it would mean that everyone likes the way in which they're entertained; with it, it means that they like the party. Maybe there's some textual evidence that Kant meant the latter. If so, though, why not just translate it that way? There are all sorts of slightly meaning-changing additions of this sort; it's quite annoying. More than that: it's hateful. (Oddly, in one case where there is apparent textual or philosophical evidence that Kant meant something and wrote another, Pluhar doesn't make the change: footnote 29, on page 59, indicates that Kant meant "universal" where he actually had written "general". Textual emendation is an inexact science, of course, but I'm surprised that such restraint was exhibited here, when the rule seems to have been profligacy elsewhere.) In sum: hatred!
Here are some other things I hate: I hate being single. I hate Craig Segall for having suggested that I'm single at least in part because I am, as he put it, an "insufferable pedant". I hate that shockwave's email chess program is broken.
I leave you with the following quotation from the third critique in, yes, Pluhar's translation, from the "General Comment" following the Analytic of the Sublime:
…to shun people either from misanthropy because we are hostile toward them or from anthropophobia (fear of people) because we are afraid they might be our enemies is partly odious and partly contemptible. There is, however, a different (very improperly so-called) misanthropy, the predisposition to which tends to appear in the minds of many well-meaning people as they grow older. This latter misanthropy is philanthropic enough as regards benevolence [Wohlwollen], but as the result of a long and sad experience it has veered far away from a liking [Wohlgefallen] for people. We find evidence of this in a person's propensity toward reclusiveness, in his fanciful wish that he could spend the rest of his life on a remote country estate, or for that matter (in the case of young people) in their dream of happily spending their lives with a small family, on some island unkown to the rest of the world—all of which novelists and writers of Robinsonades use so cleverly. Falseness, ingratitude, injustice, whatever is childish in the purposes that we ourselves consider important and great and in the pursuit of which people inflict all conceivable evils on one another, these so contradict the idea of what people could be if they wanted to, and so conflict with our fervent wish to see them improved, that, given that we cannot love them, it seems but a slight sacrifice to forgo all social joys to avoid hating them.
