Nineteenth Century Spiders
Back when I was
translating Friedrich Schleiermacher‘s
great essay on translation, which dates from 1813/15, I spent a lot of time
reading around in Samuel Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.
Coleridge is such a wonderful prose stylist, and I used him as a resource for
my translation. In particular, I looked at how he put his sentences together,
what sorts of opening gambits he used to introduce ideas, and I borrowed a
phrase here, a structure there, just enough to mark my translation of
Schleiermacher as belonging to an earlier period. I wasn’t trying to “fake” an
older text, but to keep the reader aware that this text belonged to the early
19th century. I was inspired to do this after reading an earlier translation of
the same essay by Douglas Robinson that throws around 20th century translation
theory terminology like “source language” and “target language,” with the
result that Schleiermacher winds up sounding hideously naive. Reading
Schleiermacher in this translation, I found myself wondering why he was writing
as if he’d never heard of Saussure.
So now I’m just
starting work on a wonderful horror story from the 19th century, Jeremias
Gotthelf’s «Die schwarze Spinne» (The Black Spider), which will be published
next year by New York Review Books Classics. This is
one of the most frightening stories I’ve ever read. In it, a young woman
brings calamity to her community by accidentally – oops – promising a newborn
to the Devil. Gotthelf was a minister, and I get the feeling he wrote the story
to frighten his congregation into keeping the faith. The spider of the title is
like Freddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies – it’s
everywhere at once, it can be as big as a cottage or disintegrate into a swarm
of infinitesimally tiny beasties. It is the embodiment of everything in us that
is wicked or weak. Did I mention than I am pretty severely arachnophobic? I
still remember the giant-spider nightmares I had as a child. So this is the
worst possible, i.e. the perfect book for me to translate. I’m hoping that my
fear will make the descriptions of the spider particularly graphic. We shall
see. Meanwhile, I’m priming myself for the project by reading up on some period
literature. I started with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto,
which is gothic in all the worst ways but quite nicely written on the sentence
level, which makes it a good model for me. And now I am rereading one of my
favorite books of all time, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and
keeping a log of useful phrases that might help me with Gotthelf. Here are some
of them: “the want of,” “repair the faults of,” “he is remarkable for,” “made
me desirous to,” “unallied to the dross of human nature,” “madly desirous of,”
“compassed round by,” “body forth,” “obliged us to the inclemency,” “I might
have X but that Y,” “yet he might [=could] not have X, had she not Y.”
It’s astonishing to me
how much the English language has changed in the last 200 years. These phrases
now seem so quaint by contemporary standards. And I’ll have to be careful not
to use too many of them in the translation – just enough to signal to the
reader that the story she is reading comes to us from another age.
