The Perils and Power of Translating Steiner

by Walter Alexander

Dizzy Gillespie, the pioneering bebop trumpeter and jazz ambassador, was known to have responded to the question “How do you improvise?” by saying words to the effect—“I intentionally make a mistake and then I work my way out of it”—and “If you make a mistake, repeat it, and then try to find your way back.” Well, for those of us who hope to be moving forward along what is called “the path of error” or the Parsifal path—it is an interesting statement—although it seems I actually make errors often enough quite spontaneously that I don’t have to invent them. But the statement does confirm the experience that errors can be portals to new possibilities.

For my own part, I can say unequivocally that my decades long relationship to “The Foundation Stone Meditation” was impelled by an error—a translation error. I do not speak German fluently or understand conversational German, but I did take four years of German in high school (because my older brother took French) and completed a year of German Lit as an undergraduate. So Steiner’s verses, with their limited vocabulary, and with the aid of a German-English dictionary, are not unapproachable for me. When I first read the widely used translation by the venerable Ernst Katz (1913-2009) and saw in the first panel: Practice spirit-recalling/ In depths of soul,/ Where in the wielding/ World Creator Being/Your own “I”/ Comes into being/ Within the I of God” —I wondered what a “wielding world creator being” was, and consulted the German text. There I saw the word waltenden. I have a personal connection to this word through the fact that it and my first name share the same root. And, though I know embarrassingly little Yiddish for a New York Jew, Oy gewalt! (Oh, you Powers!) was probably the first Yiddish expression I ever heard.

For walten, the dictionary says “prevail, rule, reign, control, govern,” so the choices would seem to be in this context “reigning, ruling or governing.” Wield, in English, has to take a direct object. You wield something: an axe, a knife, authority, power. But you can’t just wield. So how odd, even decades later, to see recently a marvelous eurythmy performance of this truly momentous set of meditative verses—one in which a phrase is repeated by a speaker, and moved to by an entire troupe—despite the possibility that neither the speaker nor the movers are grasping the phrase’s meaning.

When we recite, hear, or watch a performance of a meditative verse like “The Foundation Stone,” we strive to reach the realms of meaning out of which the words/ movements descend (as Georg Kühlewind described it). But when we come to something that our understanding can’t embrace and merge into, there is—let’s call it—a cognitive dead spot. Most of us have the good sense not to die there, and move on as best we can, making a mental note and leaving a question mark for follow-up. The worst in us pretends to understand and affects a knowing mask.

So I am grateful for that error, because my discomfort with wielding led me to go and look at the “Foundation Stone” more deeply. I have read books and pamphlets on it, and given workshops myself on it—all of which have been helpful, but nothing more so than personally engaging and wrestling in and with its rhythms and depths, again and again.

Recently, a second bothersome translation issue has led me into fruitful engagement—with the wonderful Steiner verse: “Quiet I bear within me”—Ich trage Ruhe in mir. At a Holy Nights event this last year at Anthroposophy NYC, a friend and fellow member recited the verse as follows:

Quiet I bear within me

I bear within me forces to make me strong

Now will I be imbued with their glowing warmth

Now will I fill myself with my own will’s resolve

And I will feel the quiet pouring through all my being

When by my steadfast striving I become strong

To find within myself the source of strength

The strength of inner stillness, quiet, and peace

Here’s the German:

Ich trage Ruhe in mir,

Ich trage in mir selbst

Die Kräfte, die mich stärken.

Ich will mich erfüllen

Mit dieser Kräfte Wärme,

Ich will mich durchdringen

Mit meines Willens Macht.

Und fühlen will ich

Wie Ruhe sich ergiesst

Durch all mein Sein,

Wenn ich mich stärke,

Die Ruhe als Kraft

In mir zu finden

Durch meines Strebens Macht.

I was moved by it and when later I was sitting in our bookstore and looked across to the shelf opposite me, I saw Rudolf Steiner’s 'Verses and Meditations'. I found the verse and a very similar translation with the German on the facing page. I was puzzled to find the German verb will, meaning “want” or “desire,” translated as “will” with respect to a future action. Also, I noticed immediately that the original has nothing in it about finding the source of strength. Rather, the entire verse seemed principally to equate the capacity for stillness with strength of will and striving.

Well, soon after that I mentioned to the member who had recited the verse that I had seen some aspects of the translation that seemed “off.” The member/friend “went ballistic”—and I emphatically and boorishly insisted that I was right. In retrospect, I explained to myself that my excessive multitasking had exhausted me—resulting in a really inexcusable outburst towards a friend. The friend, in turn, spoke to other friends who gave reassurances that the translation that said friend had been using for decades was the best “American” version, and that soulless intellectuals are always nitpicking over translations. A day or so later the abused friend came up to me still distressed but gave a hug, and I offered a note and apologies, and went about thinking about improving both the friendship and the verse.

By this time, I hope readers are duly “charmed” by the notion of a verse on “inner stillness, quiet and peace” precipitating a pathetically pedestrian squabble between longtime students of anthroposophy. In studying the verse more closely, I could see that the translation was not overtly “wrong.” I reminded myself of Owen Barfield’s 'The Year Participated', his translation of Steiner’s 'The Calendar of the Soul', in which he explicitly set out to avoid the disastrously repeated habit of trying to make translations of German into German-like English. The underlying rationale goes like this. When I speak or write, I have an intended meaning in service of which I employ language, assembling signs (words) according to rules of syntax. The listener/reader hears/reads the signs and if they have been successfully assembled and attended to, the listener/reader ascends to the very same realm of meaning accessed by my (the speaker’s/writer’s) intention.

Translation is an interesting case. The fact that it can be accomplished at all, Georg pointed out, proves the existence of the meaning realm, lying above the particulars of specific languages, but accessible through languages by human understanding. This post-Babel passage through the individual language region is hardly a neutral one. The contribution of the folk-language genius to the “original” language is essential cognitive feeling (Georg’s brilliant term), highly communicative flavors and nuances that the translator can’t lightly ignore. But these are often hard or impossible to capture, and translators often err in a variety of directions.

Owen Barfield was a great student of the evolution of consciousness, especially as evidenced in language changes over time. He said that he had, in 'The Year Participated', “paraphrased” Steiner’s 'Calendar of the Soul' “for an English ear.” He was recognizing and attempting to call into alliance the legitimate differences between English and German in service of the original meaning intention. In his introduction, he wrote appreciatively about other attempts (including his own) to translate the soul calendar into English, but stopped short of endorsing them:

On the basis of a familiarity with the text extending over more than half a century I have been forced to the conclusion that there is one thing about these verses that no English rendering, literal or near-literal enough to be dubbed simply a translation, can hope to convey.

And that is what I can only call their ‘thrust’.

While I can’t say that Barfield always succeeded to present day American ears, (1) I think this example below showing the Ruth and Hans Pusch (1961) and Owen Barfield (1985) translations of the Steiner verse in 'Calendar of the Soul' for the eleventh week (16-22 June) is telling.

Pusch:

In this the sun’s high hour it rests

With you to understand these words of wisdom:

Surrendered to the beauty of the world,

Be stirred with new-enlivened feeling;

The human I can lose itself

And find itself within the cosmic I.

Barfield:

This warm and sun-drenched hour

a sermon holds if thou hast ears to hear:

Absorbed into the world’s fair show

Live thou thy feeling through and through,

Within thee say, “I lose myself as man

And find myself to be the World I am.”

Attempts at preserving the “thrust” of a verse may well justify wide departures from what a literal translation would allow. But why set oneself up as judge and jury over what is a creative fling at capturing the spirit of a verse and what is simply a bad translator’s pedantry? And remember, too, that a translation truly capturing one aspect of a work may miss another in doing so. The answer has to be: Only if something worthwhile is at stake.

Here’s a fairly literal translation, but aimed at preserving the ‘thrust,” of Quiet I bear within me, for comparison with the one commonly used. See the German above and a translation guide in the footnote.(2)

I bear quiet within me

I bear in myself

Forces that strengthen me.

I wish to imbue myself

With the warmth of these forces,

I wish to permeate myself

With the strength of my will.

-

And I wish to feel

How peace flows

Through all my being,

If I strengthen myself,

To find in myself

Stillness as a force,

Stillness as a force,

Through the power of my striving.

It’s still possible to look at these two (and the translation in Rudolf Steiner’s Verses and Meditations which is very close to the first one above) and say the differences are inconsequential, the meaning is clearly there, just alternately phrased. What about the thrust of the original? A few statements are worth considering.

In German, the noun Wille, while still associated with the English will as in will power, is closer to desire and want than it is in English. Again, will does not occur in German as a verb indicating the future, but rather as to want, wish or desire. Wenn means if. Also, in German, unlike English, the end of the sentence bears special significance. I’m aware of two personages as divergent as Mark Twain and the mystic George Gurdjieff who have commented on that. Mark Twain in a speech on “The Disappearance of Literature” said of the Germans, “They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.” Gurdjieff, in 'Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson', in a chapter entitled “Just a wee bit more about the Germans,” complained about German grammar that allows expectations to arise in the listener until at the end of the sentence “they pronounce their famous ‘nicht.’” (3)

Comparing the two translated verse endings, there is a definite shift when we move from finding “the strength of inner stillness, quiet, and peace” in the former to finding “stillness as a force through the power of my striving” in the latter. This is the essence of the variance perceptible overall—a shift to a more active—you could say, a more masculine stance. Something less about peace and more about how peace and inner quiet can only come through strength and striving.

If that’s the case, a further question is—why did two translations (George and Mary Adams and the unidentified translator of the first) end up choosing a more placid tone? The answer, I suspect, has to do with the date of the translations, both of which are of similar vintage (the 'Verses and Meditations' volume is from 1961). To imagine the mood of that time in America you may note that Bob Dylan’s first album came out the next year with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and in the next two years came Peter, Paul and Mary’s “If I Had a Hammer” (“I’d hammer out freedom…justice, love between my brothers and sisters,” etc.) and “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

What sense of the German language did non-German speaking Americans have at that time? Most likely they had heard of 'Mein Kampf' (my battle), the Wehrmacht (defense force), the Luftwaffe (air weapon), and Blitzkrieg (lightning war). And seen endless footage from documentarian Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (triumph of the will) about the 1934 Nazi party congress in Nuremberg attended by 700,000 with ranks of goose-stepping soldiers, adoring masses, Heil Hitlers! and the rantings of Der Führer. And beyond that newsreels of the desecrated, hollow-eyed human forms of the camps, and of the Auschwitz gates, inscribed with their hymn to death mocking all values, Arbeit macht frei: work sets you free.(4)

The picture is of an idealism gone mad, of a melding of head and limb, a shortcircuiting of the middle feeling realm, which itself has been gouged out entirely and replaced by fanaticism and self-inflation so fevered that they cross borders into the sexual and even pornographic. It is all about strength and force and will and purity and triumph—and certainly, at least in part, about obliterating, without ever mentioning it, the German national memory of the humiliations and degradations of the years following the Great War.

The effect for many of these often reinforced associations in films, television, and print, is forever to associate the German language, especially as expressed with clipped, precise, northern diction, with arrogance and cruelty. To imagine that from this the being of the language has received a deep wound does not take imagination too far. To overcome this widespread and deep recoiling there have been attempts to remind us of the more gemütlich moods and tones of the language—Volkswagen’s Fahrvergnügen (driving pleasure) ad campaign, for instance—but as far as I can tell these have not been able to budge the common consciousness.

Let’s say simply that in 1961 the West was about to undergo upheavals and radical abandonings of the seemingly failed values and top-down social structures of the 20th century’s first half—towards what seemed to promise freedom, brotherhood, naturalness and creativity. It is easy to believe that shading a verse heavy on Macht and Kraft and Streben (power and force and striving) toward quiet, peace and stillness did not seem like a bad idea, not that it’s likely that the notion was ever entertained consciously. There may well have been an element of justifiable political correctness working then that has now outlived its rationale.

To make some effort of rescue towards that language being, and at the same time sparing the great liberal movements of the 1960s and 1970s from the pitch black brush of their failures and excesses, it will be good and necessary for us to extricate strength and power from their dark and complex linkages with domination, violence and abuse. Instead, we can reconnect them with the willed strivings that this verse speaks of—as prerequisites for love and freedom—the true goals and sense, according to Rudolf Steiner, of earth evolution.

For the postwar generations of the self-indulgent, distraction-seeking, materialistic West, the notion that we can find strength and peace in ourselves implies a reality to our being that the science and culture of our time would deny us. If the saying “a word to the wise is sufficient” is a true one, then for the rest of us the 6,000 lectures, 65 books and fistfuls of inthe-world initiatives of anthroposophy may be what it takes to convince us finally to give up on waiting for the world to draw our wills out comfortably.

In the Prologue to Faust, Part I, Goethe has the Lord say to Mephistofeles, “Man errs so long as he strives.” And here we have Rudolf Steiner saying that we find peace only through the power of our striving. Well, long before, Shakespeare had the head witch Hecate say in Macbeth (Act III, scene v) “Security is mortals’ chiefest enemy.”

I guess, with Dizzy, we have to risk it then. And along the way, with grace, we may find and create each other— and our own translation.

And yes, there’s a final question, directed to Dizzy and us? An elephant in the room kind of question:

How do you know when you’ve made an error? The answer to that is a mystery—or the mystery—pointing us to the source of our knowing and our being.

Notes:

1 In reading Barfield’s essays, because of the gift of his stunningly crystalline elucidations of anthroposophical concepts, one often finds oneself forgiving him for assuming that we all went to English grammar schools and have Greek and Latin under our belts.

2 VERBS: tragen: carry, bear; will (willen): want, desire; stärken: strengthen; durchdringen: imbue, permeate, infiltrate; fühlen: feel; ergiessen: pour; finden: find. NOUNS: ich: I; Ruhe: quiet, stillness, peace; Kräfte: forces, powers, strengths; Wärme: warmth, heat; Will: want, desire, will; Macht: power, strength, might; Sein: being; Streben: striving, ambition. OTHER: mir, mich: me, myself; selbst: self; sich: oneself; durch: through; zu: to; dieser: these.

3 Undocumented accounts have it that Gurdjieff met or wanted to meet Rudolf Steiner and was rebuffed. David Eyes related as apocryphal the story that Steiner ejected Gurdjieff from the Goetheanum, mentioning also a suggestion that they met more amicably, but with a recognition that their missions were divergent. http://www.awakenings.com/jcms/anthroposophy-and-goethean/39- steiner-gurdjieff-connections/49-steiner-gurdjieff-notes.html

4 An anthroposophical conference sponsored by SteinerBooks with Chris Bamford, Michael Lipson, and Peter Selg at Auschwitz planned for mid-November 2013 is important, and even long overdue.