Tel qu’en Lui-même enfin l’éternité le change

Changed by eternity into himself at last 

Such as into Himself at last eternity changes him

— Mallarmé, “Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe”

(Translations by Richard Wilbur and Peter Manson)

Past and present and future are not disjoined but joined. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet. . . . he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you. He learns the lesson. . . . he places himself where the future becomes present. 

— Walt Whitman,

Preface to Leaves of Grass

Friedrich Nietzsche’s name doesn’t often come up in discussions of translation theory, and for good reason. He didn’t devote much attention to the issue. When he does mention translation, he usually employs it as metaphor. You would expect the thinker of the Übermensch and Überwindung to have more to say about Übersetzung. The notable exception to this neglect is a passage from Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, where Nietzsche muses:

The degree of the historical sense of any age may be inferred from the manner in which this age makes translations and tries to absorb former ages and books. In the age of Corneille and even of the Revolution, the French took possession of Roman antiquity in a way for which we would no longer have courage enough — thanks to our more highly developed historical sense. And Roman antiquity itself: how forcibly and at the same time how naively it took hold of everything good and lofty of Greek antiquity, which was more ancient! How they translated things into the Roman present! How deliberately and recklessly they brushed the dust off the wings of the butterfly that is called moment! Thus Horace now and then translated Alcaeus or Archilochus; and Propertius did the same with Callimachus and Philetas (poets of the same rank as Theocritus, if we may judge). What was it to them that the real creator had experienced this and that and written the signs of it into his poem? As poets, they had no sympathy for the antiquarian inquisitiveness that precedes the historical sense; as poets, they had no time for all those very personal things and names and whatever might be considered the costume and mask of a city, a coast, or a century: quickly, they replaced it with what was contemporary and Roman. They seem to ask us: “Should we not make new for ourselves what is old and find ourselves in it? Should we not have the right to breathe our own soul into this dead body? For it is dead after all; how ugly is everything dead!” They did not know the delights of the historical sense; what was past and alien was an embarrassment for them; and being Romans, they saw it as an incentive for a Roman conquest. Indeed, translation was a form of conquest. Not only did one omit what was historical; one also added allusions to the present and, above all, struck out the name of the poet and replaced it with one’s own — not with any sense of theft but with the very best conscience of the imperium Romanum. [1]

Nietzsche’s first sentence already puts us on our toes. He invites us to diagnose our moment, to read the translations that we produce symptomatically. Nietzsche’s critique of his time still applies the extent to which we have failed to overcome the social pathology of the 19th century. What is most significant about Nietzsche’s treatment of translation is his positing the realm of history as its proper purview. Unintuitively, language and languages are secondary. That doesn’t mean the words themselves are of no account, but in this light the postmodern golden calf of irreducible difference and otherness appears irrelevant, if not wholly illusory. Transformation is the order of the day — at least potentially. We must ask: do today’s translations pursue this business of absorption? Nietzsche’s verb in German is sich einzuverleiben, which opens up an entire lexical field of physical introjection. Think: merge, annex, or swallow up. He says the French “took possession of Roman antiquity.” What he’s talking about is appropriation — a dirty word in today’s parlance. Expropriation, if you prefer. The reflexive (again) verb he uses is bemächtigten sich, which itself swallows up the word for power. We blush at this brash usurpation. The audacity! “Our more highly developed historical sense” prevents us from looking at our own lack of this particular “courage” with anything but a sense of pride and moral superiority. We pay our respects, which is always cheaper than reflecting on that for which we pay. What would it really mean to translate any past into our present? 

To follow Nietzsche in doing that, we would need to forgo the responsible “antiquarian inquisitiveness that precedes the historical sense.” We cannot look on the past as a specimen, not even one we want to pickle and preserve. It still squirms faintly under our microscope. We let the dead bury the dead aesthetic labor congealed in stories and poems we gingerly carry over into our moment. The sclerotic posture of overtly signaling a work’s foreignness is an easy way to let it rest in peace. Conquest would require us to rise to the challenge encoded in Nietzsche’s phrase “as poets.” If you do not write the poem in English, you will never translate it successfully. Gestures of humility and deference may have value as ritual, but do they do the trick for literature? After all: 

There are more important things than art or the esthetic. Art is autonomous; it’s there for its own human sake, sufficient to its own human self, but this doesn’t seal it off from society or history. What its autonomy does mean is that it serves humanity on its own terms, i.e., by providing esthetic value or quality. Art may provide other things as well, but if it does so at the cost of esthetic value, it deprives humanity of what is uniquely art’s to give. Art that does this is not forgiven in the end, and the refusal to forgive asserts and confirms the autonomy of art — or, as it’s time to say, the autonomy of esthetic value. [2]

The translator — as a poet, as a reader, as someone who experiences the work of art in a way that is somehow different from how we read a woke tweet — has to make sure the translation discovers and delivers what is uniquely art’s to give. The nonbinding translations of today, those which attain a specious success (those we are too afraid to judge as bad — bad as translations, as poems) will not be forgiven. When they nestle into the dust of the archive, it will be as well-intentioned messages that exhaust themselves in what they say, not as artworks that continue to unfold in time. 

 But is it really the fault of today’s translators for not being able to find themselves in what is old? How can you blame them for seeing only foreclosed possibilities in the past rather than unfinished and abandoned tasks? Tasks that need us to take them up to even become tasks in the first place. To breathe our own soul into these dead bodies requires the translator/historical conquistador to “brush history against the grain — even if he needs a barge pole to do it.” [3] Becoming a historical bodysnatcher risks profanation in the interest of establishing a new sacredness. And there is no guarantee that the second nature will be stronger than the first. In Nietzsche’s second “untimely meditation,” On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, he elaborates the destructive side of the constructive moment that might point beyond the ways of relating to history that affirm the present in light of the past (monumental) or see the present as merely inadequate to the past (antiquarian):

Here it becomes clear how badly man needs, often enough, in addition to the monumental and antiquarian ways of seeing the past, a third kind, the critical: and this again the service of life as well. He must have the strength, and use it from time to time, to shatter and dissolve something to enable him to live: this he achieves by dragging it to the bar of judgment, interrogating it meticulously and finally condemning it; every past, however, is worth condemning — for that is how matters happen to stand with human affairs: human violence and weakness have always contributed strongly to shaping them. It is not justice which here sits in judgment; even less is it mercy which here pronounces judgment: but life alone, that dark, driving, insatiably self-desiring power. [4]

Shattering and dissolving the past can only occur in confrontation with it. It means bringing that ongoing confrontation to consciousness. Letting the past rest in peace, in the end, is not an option. Leaving it undisturbed and unconquered ensures it will continue to weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. We and everything around us, all that is given (nature), are the result of actions initiated in the past, actions that are ongoing. Translation as conquest is only the decision to become the subject of past action, in addition to the object that we already are. The past already overcomes the present. Can the present overcome itself by conquering the past? //

 * * *

In Part II of this essay, I think through the potential meaning of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the Jetztzeit for translation. Parts III and IV consider the paradigmatic case of Baudelaire’s translations of Poe and the historical conquest of the present by the present.

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann. (Vintage, 1974), 136-8.

[2] Clement Greenberg, “The Language of Esthetic Discourse,” in Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste. (Oxford University Press, 1999), 65. 

[3] Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 4, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. (Harvard, 2004), 407.

[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Translated by Peter Preuss. (Hackett, 1980), 21-2.