originals and translations

I’ve always been amused by the report of Jorge Luis Borges that he first happened to read Don Quixote in English (I don’t remember why). Later, when he finally read the Spanish original, he said that it seemed to him like a bad translation of the English.

I don’t think I’ve ever first read an Anglophone author in a foreign language, though maybe it would be an interesting experiment. But I do often have the experience with Nietzsche of thinking he’s better in English than German. Surely that can’t be objectively true. It’s probably just that Nietzsche is the sort of author who isn’t just a content you remember… He launches sentences that burn into your memory, especially if you read him young as most people do. In such cases the exact wording matters, and for me that exact wording is in English.

In any event, Nietzsche in German does feel like a translation to me. I’m still browsing Jenseits von Gut und Böse, and am about halfway through. Five years ago, I read Zarathustra cover-to-cover in German for the first time, and also thought it felt like a translation of an English original.

When I was in Leipzig in the summer of 1994, our German hosts were kind enough to throw a 4th of July party for the American students. Someone even read aloud the Declaration of Independence, another nice gesture toward their American guests. But when he read: “Wir halten diese Wahrheiten für selbstverständlich…” (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”) we all burst out laughing, and the poor guy took it the wrong way. It was simply funny to hear that ancient bit of Americana in a different language, that’s all.