[lit-ideas] Re: Help with Novalis?
- From: Henninge@xxxxxxxxxxx (Richard Henninge)
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 04:54:44 +0200
Michael Chase writes from Paris seeking help with Novalis:
> Just sitting around on a stormy evening in Gai Paris, I something got
> to translating Novalis' Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (hey, I don't have a TV,
>
> so I have to amuse myself somehow, OK?). Anyhow, there's a couple of
> lines I'm not sure of, and I wonder if I could submit them to the
> steely, critical gaze of the List.
>
> The original goes like this:
Mannichfache Wege gehen die Menschen.
Wer sie verfolgt und vergleicht, wird wunderliche Figuren entstehen sehen;
Figuren, die zu jener großen Chiffernschrift zu gehören scheinen, die man
überall, auf Flügeln,
Eierschalen, in Wolken, im Schnee, in Krystallen und in Steinbildungen, auf
gefrierenden Wassern, im Innern und Äußern der Gebirge, der Pflanzen, der
Thiere, der Menschen, in den Lichtern des Himmels, auf berührten und
gestrichenen Scheiben von Pech und Glas, in den Feilspänen um den Magnet
her, und sonderbaren Conjunkturen des Zufalls, erblickt.
In ihnen ahndet man den Schlüssel dieser Wunderschrift, die Sprachlehre
derselben; allein die Ahndung will sich selbst in keine feste Formen fügen,
und scheint kein höherer Schlüssel werden zu wollen.
>
> Which I've tentatively rendered as:
>
Diverse are the paths of men.
Who follows and compares them, witnesses the birth of wondrous figures,
which seem to belong to that great coded writing we find everywhere: on
wings and eggshells; in clouds, snow, crystals and rock-formations; in
freezing waters; in the internal and external forms of mountains, plants,
animals, human beings; in the
celestial luminaries; in buffed or polished disks of resin or glass; in
filings round a magnet, and in the strange circumstances of chance.
In all this, we sense the key of that wondrous script and its grammar, but
this premonition refuses to fix itself in definite forms, and seems not to
want to become the key to anything higher.
>
> It's especially the last phrase I'm unsure about. Literally it seems
> to mean " and seems to want to become no higher key, but I've
> interpreted a wee bit.
>
> Go for it, critics.
>
> TIA, Mike
>
Tja, Mike, I think some problems arise with the three words, "in all this,"
in the last--unsure--sentence. By translating "in ihnen" as "in all this," I
believe you think you're referring to all those wonderful signs in nature,
but I believe "in them" refers all the way back to the "diverse ways of
men." I would guess that one of the "wondrous figures" is human language,
including all the cultural achievements describable in that language. The
trick of the tragedy expressed in these first lines of _Die Lehrlinge zu
Sais_ is that all of the human knowledge, all of the experiences of men,
"going" their "multiple ways," when "traced" in language, nevertheless
resists explaining the higher language of nature, resists becoming the "key"
to that higher code. In other words, the language of man is not
automatically applicable to nature. There is a disconnect. The premonition,
the sense that the one mirrors the other or provides some natural key to it,
remains (leider, leider) an amorphous feeling that resists codification--ask
any poet, any scientist.
Richard Henninge
University of Mainz
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