In the ‘Gutenberg’-Project, you will not only find Mark Twain’s famous speech on the horrors of the German language, but also a recording of its being read: a good training ground for translating German phrases!
Module Summary
Saget mir ieman, waz ist minne? (Can anybody tell me what love really is?) asks Walther von der Vogelweide around 1200. He was not the first and certainly not the last to look for a lyrical solution to this question. Poets have tried to answer it by singing songs about all the different phases of loving: falling in love, desire for the loved one, the pain of separation, the distress of lost love, the agony of jealousy. We will look at selected periods in the history of German love poetry, sampling and tracing the evolution of love poetry and songs.
Part I: Medieval Concepts of Love and the Minnesang (Andreas Capellanus, Walther von der Vogelweide, Heinrich von Morungen)
Part II: Changes in the concept of Love in Lyrics and Songs up to 1800 (romantic love, Heinrich Heine)
And this is the inofficial version;-)
Singing and sighing about love is a cultural constant from the earliest records of humanity to rather more modern forms likes texting or spraying walls. We will look at the changing attitutedes between these extremes: what difference does it make if a medieval singer expresses the wish to be loved on behalf of a noble patron to a romantic poet like Heine who uses basically the same phrases and topics but clearly with an ironic undertone? And what happens if Schumann gets hold of Heine’s poems and composes Lieder to it which do not want to be taken ironically at all? We will look at selected periods in the history of German love poetry, sampling and tracing the evolution of love poetry and songs along the phases of loving: falling in love, desire for the loved one, the pain of separation, the distress of lost love, the agony of jealousy.
This is the official module outline:-|
When in 1897, Mark Twain complained to the Vienna Press Club about ‘Die Schrecken der deutschen Sprache’, he drew on a long tradition of bemoaning the difficulties of translating into German. We will look into the history behind this discussion on the theory of translation as well as into practical examples of how poets dealt with literary models from other languages. The repeated translation of the Bible into German, most notably by Martin Luther, provides us with excellent comparative material for analysing how translators have set about their task and what the issues were that they had to resolve. From this base we will move on to look at how the poets of the that period of literature known as Weimar Classicism (Goethe, Schiller) combined translation theory and practice in their lyric poetry by drawing on the literature of other cultures
Part I: Historical overview about translation theory, following extracts from dedications and introductory letters like Luther’s: Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen
Part II: Theory and Practice of Translation in Weimar Classicism: The effects of enthusiasm for Ossian and Shakespeare (early translations and the ‘Ossian-Manie’ of Herder and Goethe), the fascination of foreign ‘folk’ lyrics (Herder’s collection ‘Stimmen der Völker’ with translations of poetry from all over the world) and the orient fashion (Goethe’s ‘West-östlicher Divan’ and his notes on adopting poetry).
And this is the inofficial version;-)
Translation is not only a linguistic task but a cultural challenge: when ‘bringing over’ the words from one language into the other, the concepts behind the sounds must be taken into account. This is a basic fact which gave headaches from antiquity through to modern times: is a ‘word-to-word’-rendering more faithful to the ‘original’ than a ‘sense-to-sense’-reworking which tries to capture the spirit? We will look into some of the answers authors tried to formulate – and into their own translations and whether they hold true to what they proclaimed. Did Luther really manage to create a German bible-language which would be understood by ‘the woman on the street’? Is Goethe a good messenger for oriental poetry when he creates his ‘West-östlicher Divan’ mixing translations of Persian poems between his own lyrics without making explicit which was which? A pathway through the periods of German literature and their attitude towards foreign languages is to compare translations of ever popular English poems like Shakespeare’s sonnets: we will look into attempts to poetically render ‘Shall I compare thee’ – and compare the translations one might, but providing a judgement on the quality could prove to be difficult!
The Conference ‘Deutsche Texte der Salierzeit’ is an interesting off-spring of the successful exhibition: »Canossa 1077 – the convulsion of the World. History, Art and Culture at the dawn of the Romanic Age«. It focuses on the beginnings and continuities of German text production in the 11th century (“Neuanfänge und Kontinuitäten im 11. Jahrhundert”).
Veranstalter: Prof. Dr. Ernst Bremer, Prof. Dr. Stephan Müller, Jens Schneider
15.–16. September 2006 in Paderborn
Since only an preliminary programme is available on the web, here comes the full programme of the papers (which are due to be published next year):
Freitag, 15. September 2006
Samstag, 16. September 2006
Sonntag, 17. September 2006
Gemeinsamer Museumsbesuch