NEGATIVE DIALECTICS (1)

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 4 Mar 1998 bj.mail@earthling.net wrote:

> I don't also know to which seedy scholars Goethe referred, but I'm wondering
> if the translation of the last part is accurate. In original, it sounds:
> 
> "... wie Goethe schon vor hundertfuenfzig Jahren die kuemmerlichen
> Kandidaten empfand, die subjektiv an der Spekulation sich guetlich taten."
> 
> So, Adorno didn't say: "scholars speaking on subjective isolation" but:
> "scholars subjectively making use of [or profiting by] speculation" (sorry
> for the grammar, eventually).
 
Yes, this is the problem with the Ashton translation, it's not just off,
or markedly off, it's an unbelievable mess. My own, somewhat
idiosyncratic translation of the original German passage,
from page one of ND, would be as follows:

"What once, as opposed to the surface appearance of the senses and every
sort of externally directed experience, felt itself to be the purely
unnaive, has for its part objectively become so naive as Goethe's 
miserable doctoral candidates a hundred fifty years ago, who subjectively
feasted on speculation."

Ok, so it ain't Shakespeare. But even this crude translation at least gets
the philosophic points across. Ashton's first howler is his translation of
Adorno's "Schein der Sinne und jeglicher nach aussen gewandten Erfahrung",
which becomes, bizarrely, "sense perception and every kind of external
experience". Sense perception would be Empfindung or something like that;
Adorno uses the word Schein, one of the trickiest, most subtle words in
the German language, which can mean appearance, light, glimmer and even
paper money (e.g. "bill"). What ought to be a subtle point, the delicate
balancing of an appearance which is subjectively mediated and yet
seemingly as natural as opening one's eyes, turns into
hamfisted Anglo-Saxon empiricism. Even "external experience" is wrong:
Adorno says, an experience which is "nach aussen gewandten", i.e.
externally directed, mobile, in transit. And the upstanding German noun
"Kandidaten", which I somewhat playfully translated as "doctoral
candidates", ends up as the unforgiveable "seedy scholars". Ashton's whole
book is like this: whenever Adorno's language moves, yowls, crackles,
leaps, turns, pivots, or does ANYTHING dynamic, Ashton stolidly turns the
thing into a ponderous medieval Teutonicism, lightly dashed with Locke and
Empson. Maybe he was just out of his league, or maybe he just didn't get
the ideas; it's one of the biggest problems facing Critical Theory
scholarship today, that we lack a decent English version of ND.

Oh, well, we'll just have to make do and struggle through as best we can.
Anyone else out there have those German language skills polished enough to
help out with this? Macht Ihr mobil, Genossen!

-- Dennis