Translating Ecce Homo

Duncan Large's new translation of Ecce Homo for the Oxford World Classics series is excellent. It lends an entirely different flavor to the German, exactly what a new translation should do. Though Roger Hollingdale's version is the most solid, in my view, and Walter Kaufmann's the most forceful, this translation seems to get at the precariousness, the grotesqueness of the German, and particularly the tension it establishes with the tradition of autobiography.
The biggest change Large adopted was to use the second person singular pronoun much more for the German "Man." Thus, for "Wie man wird, was man ist," the famous subtitle of the little volume, we do not get the more traditional translation with the impersonal "one," as in Hollingdale's rendition "How One Becomes What One Is," but the much more interesting and simple "How To Become What You Are."
The effect is remarkable when it is dispersed across the entire book. It is an entirely different--and I think more interesting--experience of reading. Take, for example, the following on curing oneself when ill with ressentiment, in first the German and then in Hollingdale's rendition:

Wenn irgend Etwas überhaupt gegen Kranksein, gegen Schwachsein geltend gemacht werden muss, so ist es, dass in ihm der eigentliche Heilinstinkt, das ist der Wehr- und Waffen-Instinkt im Menschen mürbe wird. Man weiss von Nichts loszukommen, man weiss mit Nichts fertig zu werden, man weiss Nichts zurückzustossen,—Alles verletzt. Mensch und Ding kommen zudringlich nahe, die Erlebnisse treffen zu tief, die Erinnerung ist eine eiternde Wunde. [...] Hiergegen hat der Kranke nur Ein grosses Heilmittel— [...] Weil man zu schnell sich verbrauchen würde, wenn man überhaupt reagirte, reagirt man gar nicht mehr: dies ist die Logik. Und mit Nichts brennt man rascher ab, als mit den Ressentiments-Affekten. Der Ärger, die krankhafte Verletzlichkeit, die Ohnmacht zur Rache, die Lust, der Durst nach der Rache, das Giftmischen in jedem Sinne—das ist für Erschöpfte sicherlich die nachtheiligste Art zu reagiren: ein rapider Verbrauch von Nervenkraft, eine krankhafte Steigerung schädlicher Ausleerungen, zum Beispiel der Galle in den Magen, ist damit bedingt. Das Ressentiment ist das Verbotene an sich für den Kranken—sein Böses: leider auch sein natürlichster Hang.
-"Warum Ich So Weise Bin," 6

Its a long quote, but I think with it you can get some of the sense of what its like to read Large's translation. Here is Hollingdale:

If anything whatever has to be admitted against being sick, being weak, it is that in these conditions the actual curative instinct, that is to say the defensive and offensive instinct in man becomes soft. One does not know how to get free of anything, one does not know how to have done with anything, one does not know how to thrust back—everything hurts. Men and things come importunately close, events strike too deep, the memory is a festering wound. [...] Against this the invalid has only one great means of cure— [...] Because one would use oneself up too quickly if one reacted at all, one no longer reacts: this is the logic. And nothing burns one up quicker than the affects of ressentiment. Vexation, morbid suceptibility, incapacity for revenge, the desire, the thirst for revenge, poison-brewing in any sense—for one who is exhausted this is certainly the most disadvantageous kind of reaction: it causes a rapid expenditure of energy, an morbid accretion of excretions, for example of gall into the stomach. Ressentiment is the forbidden in itself for the invalid—his evil: unfortunately also his most natural inclination.
-"Why I Am So Wise," 6, Hollingdale's translation.

Now look at Duncan Large's rendering:

If anything at all needs to be counted against being ill, being weak, then it is the fact that in that state the true healing instinct, in other words the instinct for defence and weapons in man, is worn down. You cannot get rid of anything, you cannot cope with anything, you cannot fend anything off—everything hurts you. People and things get intrusively close, experiences affect you too deply, memory is a festering wound. [...] The invalid has only one great remedy for it— [...] Since you would exhaust yourself too quickly if you reacted at all, you no longer react in any way: such is the logic. And nothing burns you up faster then the emotions of resentment. Anger, sickly vulnerability, powerlessness to take revenge, the lust, the thirst for revenge, every kind of poisonous troublemaking—for the exhausted this is certainly the most detrimental way of reacting: it brings on a rapid consumption of nervous strength, a sickly intensification of harmful excretions, for example of bile in the somach. For the invalid, resentment is the absolute forbidden—his evil: unfortunately his most natural inclination, too.
"Why I Am So Wise," 6, Large's translation.

Though some crucial things are lost (the forbidden "an sich," though of course it could mean "absolute," I think is preserved better by Hollingdale's "in itself"), Large's translation, I think, benefits in the end for being so very bold. Hollingdale saves some key words better perhaps than Large, who interprets them more, it could be said--and precisely by going back to the roots of the German words, which should not in itself be seen as an act of fidelity to the source text's meaning, as is so often taken to be the case in philosophical translations of German. But it should be noted that Large is often more close to the sentence structure than Hollingdale, which, in Nietzsche, as well as in most German and French, is often more crucial than we think it is (just pick up Barbara Harlow's unbelievably horrible rendering of Derrida's Spurs, which absolutely decimates this fact about Derrida's text, if you want a good example of what this produces: a translation that is nearly unreadable). Usually, though, any of these deviations with respect to the accepted translation as represented by Kaufmann and Hollingdale is done with a lot of thought on Large's part--it is only thus that it could be so bold in the first place. Take, for example, his refusal to leave Nietzsche's "Ressentiment" in the French--that is, translate it by "resentment:" at its first appearance he appends a note, saying

The standard English translation "ressentiment," characterizes it as a loan-word from the French, but Nietzsche spells it with an initial capital [this is true in fact always, mj], stressing that he considers it to have been successfully adopted into the German language (which gives all nouns initial capitals)--by contrast with "décadence," [another frequent word that is French in origin], for instance.
-Ecce Homo, Note to page 13, 101.

Few would have the guts, I think, to do this to such a well known and oft quoted concept (even though I thoroughly agree with Large here, out of habit I myself used the French when referring to it above), but Large both does it and shows that it is right.
The fundamental boldness of this translation, though, lies in that basic gesture I am circling around above, which uses "you" instead of "one." Why this is so bold is that it fundamentally increases the danger of intimacy, of the cancellation of distance--which anyone who knows Nietzsche will tell you is absolutely crucial to him (cf. the famous passages on the "pathos of distance" in the Genealogy). Not only does it increase the danger for us, but also for Nietzsche himself: if it is true that this book is Nietzsche telling himself his life--the various "you's" in the text, which can be interpreted as Nietzsche somewhat referring to himself, show how constantly the pressure is there to maintain some coherence, to will the relation of himself into some economy, some shape, and yet at the same time not have it collapse into self-identification. Giving us some sense of this danger might, by itself, be Large's translation's greatest triumph.

News, death, speed

There is a semi-interesting little article in the business section of today's Times about NBC's attempt to try and delay the news of Tim Russert's death for about three hours until the family could be contacted and news pieces could be assembled for the network to air. And, of course, about the failure of these attempts: some low, low level NBC employee posted it upon Wikipedia about 45 minutes before NBC could make the announcement, and news outlets like the Times reported it shortly thereafter.
Now, the article laments this, of course: a new agency "traditionally" are allowed to announce the death of one of their staff before other agencies report or cover it. But besides the assumption that there is anything like a tradition in the media (in the sense of tradition that the article conjures up), or that there is only substantial grieving through something like a tradition, it implies that the speed with which information is disseminated now along something like the internet and its new, flexible social networks (like Wikipedia and MySpace) makes this substantial grieving less possible. It doesn't deny that there is grief able to be disseminated along these paths of information--to its credit, though it seems to do this only reluctantly. But what is crucial is that it assumes that the dissemination itself is not an act of grieving, which I think makes it impossible for it to think of a grief moving fast.
This is part of a larger assumption about the human registration of anything in general--let's call it an assumption about thought (though of course this thought is open to affects or attunements, as Heidegger would put it): thought only occurs when it moves over something slowly. Meditation, pondering--these words conjure up images of slowing down, of checking the haste with which we are going to grasp something.
But perhaps the quick registration of a fact on Wikipedia is precisely an act of thinking about the bereaved? People set up candles on their window or wear a pin, but the relative swiftness with which these acts are to be accomplished doesn't mean they aren't acts coming from a thinking about loss. This labeling, this noting, this marking is not necessarily disrespect. I would suggest it is merely another extension of technical thought--that is, thought thinking as technology, which means primarily as speed, haste, mere marking or registration. To deny it the status simply because of this speed does not seem to me to be either moral or accurate.
But this does not mean every registration of a bit of information (here, about the lost) is thinking (and, here, grieving). To be more precise, it means that the registration of something itself, even if it makes its way slowly through a process of what we normally call "pondering," is commensurate with thinking. Thinking, therefore, would be not commensurate with the act of thought, of a registering, a developing, a transforming, even, of what is registered. It is neither an internal process of complication and unravelling, or an external sort of epiphany, something commensurate with perception, a striking, a sudden grasping. A thought, for me, seems to take years, in which many other things happen. This does not mean that a thought like this is slow, precisely because it can be each time a return to something, to a mark, if only for a moment.
The development of a thought would be more like acquiring a habit, in this view, but it could be something achieved remarkably quickly as thinking. In this way, the efforts of people to spread this information would be beginnings in the process of grieving: not in the sense that the registrations have no meaning in themselves or are not themselves thoughts about the lost person, but in the sense that a full thought about the dead might require many quick actions of thinking, actions that do not make the thought itself take a long time but which develop its texture and its uniqueness. If he thought of grief this way--and it has an affinity with ritual, but not ritual as "what needs to be simply undergone" in order for grief to occur--there would not be such a lament here on the part of the writer of the story. The way we grieve now can be quick--and without being shallow.
I'll elaborate on this somewhat hastily written post perhaps later when I talk of close reading as something that can be done fast.

Derrida on film

Derrida probably has to be one of the worst missed opportunities of film, ever. Not that any movie about Derrida could be a great movie, or fully capitalize upon its subject himself. But filming someone who thought specifically about film philosophically and at length, as well as genre, narration, light--all sorts of things that make up what film is or is supposed to be--how often can one actually submit a thinker to what he thinks, merely by turning on this device (the camera, for example)? Probably more often than we ourselves think, but still--to generate a record of a thinker thinking this record, this is what the film could have done.
Instead, it sits Derrida in front of a TV, where he watches himself being filmed, and narrates unintelligible sentences from all over his corpus in a profound-sounding voice with dark dreary music. The sentences are unintelligible because they are taken out of context--and if one retorts that this is what film does, and especially film that subjects itself to certain elements of Derrida's thought, well, this one has completely misunderstood Derrida. Or only understood about one half of what he says. For this means one thinks it is proper to film to deconstruct--which one interprets by "take out of context," juxtapose, etc., but "affirmatively," no doubt, which means even less here than "deconstruct"--and this completely evades the problem of what is proper in general simply by reduplicating it, by achieving or trying to achieve some ironic distance with respect to it. Along with these unintelligible sentences is the music, which would be good by itself, but placed to the film merely makes one wish the parts where anyone is speaking were cut out and all we got was simply Derrida walking to music. Then there are the interlocutors: asking only the most banal questions, except for a few ("do you get nervous about writing," which of course was actually deleted from the main film). Even "which philosopher would you like to be your mother" is boring, even though Derrida himself likes it. It is boring because it is a puzzle, a puzzle only, and Derrida simply gives you back the answer to the puzzle, without thinking--his granddaughter--because he frankly loves puzzles and loves confusing puzzles with thinking. Now the film could document this confusion, even reflect it--which by another name we could call dissemination, or the calculation of the incalculable--but instead it remains content with the fact that it has asked Derrida a neat, smart, ironic question: the interlocutors are simply that pretentious. There is no reflection: and that is the only way anything filmic could actually come close to thinking in the manner of Derrida--that is, by reflecting on and on about itself in such a way that it becomes confused with mere mechanism. Instead, the film savors every repetition, acts as if with each one it is getting closer to the real thing, what its all about... this is as far from going through reflection to Derridian thought (the being-shoved-back, the blockage or breakdown that does not admit one through), as we could get.
And Derrida himself: I recommend that everyone listen to a 2002 discussion on religion, if one wants to hear what Derrida is like. Here he is bored, annoyed at the camera crew, impatient as he sits and waits for them to film... tired from a day actually thinking. The film we have here is a document of his relaxation time taken away from him... with this the case, how great of a film, how accurate, how interesting could it be? Within it, the only parts that we see an approximation of Derrida are when he is speaking in public or taking a tour in South Africa--like in the discussion on religion, here he is charming, interested, and brilliant, because he is talking to people who want to think with him, even if they oppose or even hate him. In the end, I think I would trade this two minute clip of Foucault talking about Bachelard for the entire movie Derrida, because, quite frankly, here we see a thinker on or in (and this is what Derrida was all about, perhaps both in and on) film:


Engaged, entertaining--here is a philosopher with a body. With teeth, with eyes. A mind with hands, as an image--the camera has trouble tracking it as it moves, meanders, gestures... This is something you don't get with the angelic white light background throughout Derrida. This is not to say that Foucault was more bodily than Derrida... it could easily be asserted the other way around (and I think it is, from most reports I read, at least regarding how they talk). It is only to say that here we have an interesting film, a film that does something with the thought that it shows us. And it's merely a documentary. Derrida, which is supposed to do so much more than this, horribly fails in comparison: it only has the intelligence to look at Derrida's hands when he speaks of the hands, like it is taking orders but executing them sloppily, too slowly, with dumb, clumsy fumbling. Indeed, these close ups of hands, precisely when the hand is spoken of, tell us something: the entire thing is a fetishization, even a worship of Derrida's thinking... showing us not what Derrida says or what would question what Derrida says, but what it thinks it sees Derrida say--and not even an in interesting way... only in a way that is too satisfied that this is the only way to depict Derrida--that is, by showing his hands when he talks of hands. How boring! It doesn't even disgust, it is that banal. That is, it isn't voyeuristic, it isn't risky--it couldn't be horrible in this way, it is too weak, to stupidly confident in itself to do that. Derrida pushed the filmmakers to get rid of footage of him choking on the bagel that we see him make in one scene--like his stupid servant, they of course did not push back but complied... this would have been the most interesting part of the film, indeed--Derrida choking a little on his bagel! Embarrassing, funny, cruel... it just might make the film as interesting as the Foucault piece. Evidently this required too much effort on the part of the filmmakers, too much questioning of what they thought: that Derrida should always be obeyed, for he has figured it all out. The horror is that one can have a two hour film that wastes itself and its situation--and not even interestingly. That Derrida might get the seven or so hours of time required of him by the filmmakers--we might have gotten something actually thought by him instead of the attempts he so graciously makes at thinking, at responding to the unbelievably boring questions of the interlocutors, to the unbelievably boring, banal task of the whole film in general. "Whatever you want to say about love..." we see in the clip above--what the hell is that? It's outrageous: frankly I can't believe Derrida didn't explode at them, kick them out of the house. And the movie has the gall to show this utter stupidity as if it were all part of the glory that is Derrida: that he gets a little annoyed at a stupid question! Unbelievable! These are the types of people who think The Work of Mourning is Derrida's most authentic, touching, and genuinely sad book... as if a book that collects all his works on the deaths of his friends wouldn't be so!! The idiocy is unbelievable! And it prevents the possibility of happiness, even joy occurring in them--and excludes mourning, sadness, melancholy from his other works.
In the end, we must assert that this film is not representative of Derrida, even though it represents Derrida. And though that might be consistent with one part of what he has to say about representation--that we of course cannot have a film that is representative of anyone, fully--well, that is to only willfully distort what he says to only include half... and the most boring, most banal half, even if it is asserted affirmatively, hopefully, excitedly, as it sometimes is in this film. The task is to try and represent, to indeed integrate the impossibility of this full representation, and as impossible--this horrible, utterly boring film can't even make an attempt to try and think that this might be possible.