Individuality. And idiots.

I have no particularly strong feelings about Jonathan Franzen's novels (I read The Corrections but can't remember much other than one couch-sniffing scene and some kind of Lithuanian political unrest), but I found Joshua Cohen's review (at the LRB) of Franzen's latest book, The Kraus Project, to be not only readable but also informative.

The subject of the novel (and much of the review) is the Viennese journalist and writer Karl Kraus.

But Cohen at a few points turns to the finer points of translation:

‘The masses’ [in Kraus's view] are the by-product of the mass production of language: the linotype machine – the internet of the fin de siècle – ensured the fast and cheap dissemination of more periodicals, and so of more fast and cheap rhetoric, than ever before. In the first Heine essay, Kraus fixates on the industrial capacities of the logos, in a German masterly in its truncations: ‘Glaubt mir, ihr Farbenfrohen, in Kulturen, in denen jeder Trottel Individualität besitzt, vertrotteln die Individualitäten.’

A version of this characteristically untranslatable sentence might be: ‘Believe me, you multicoloured multiculturalists, turning every idiot into an individual turns individuality itself idiotic.’ Franzen has: ‘Believe me, you colour-happy people, in cultures where every blockhead has individuality, individuality becomes a thing for blockheads.’ He skips the neurotic beauty of Farbenfrohen, and the economical swerve of the noun Trottel becoming the verb vertrotteln; and though both omissions are forgivable, a culture where prominent American novelists can use the word ‘blockhead’ will itself become a blockheaded culture.

But the most important element lost in this passage, which follows a condemnation of the Frenchification of German, is Kraus’s paradoxical use of Individualität, a noun that had come to German from the French only a half-century earlier. In the 1760s Rousseau redefined individuel from meaning ‘indivisible’, or ‘numerically distinct’, to meaning ‘a single person’, but it was only with the second volume of Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique in 1840 that individualisme took on the positive connotation of a heroic severance of personality from the herd, and was opposed by negative, greedy égoïsme; both terms were soon shepherded into German.

The rest is also worth your time.

Cantankerous, prosy and full of mutual hatred

As a quick update from the British Library, I thought I'd share a couple of things that I've run across.

I'm spending part of this trip researching a project relating to ethnicity and the criminal justice system that I'm working on with a colleague. I've been scanning through a variety of books on immigration, identity and racism for the last few days. Some of them have been quite good, others rather dreary.

So, par for the course.

But there's a lot of interesting stuff that you skim over while more-or-less frantically trying to find what you need in the short time that you have available.

For examle, I found the following, from an essay by V. G. Kiernan, to be a remarkable opening sentence:

‘Wherever homo sapiens [sic] made his first and on the whole regrettable appearance, it was not in Britain; all our ancestral stocks came from somewhere else.'

-- ‘Britons Old and New’, in Colin Holmes, ed., Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978) p. 23

Stating the obvious well while also adding a dash of probably unnecessary misanthropy is a skill I admire.

The other quote, which I found in a book by Rosemary Ashton on German emigrants in London, comes from Alexander Herzen.

Herzen, a Russian writer and political thinker (whose mother was German), provides a less than kind description of the German emigrant community in London in the second half of the nineteenth century:

‘The German emigrants were distinguished from the others by their ponderous, prosy and cantankerous nature. There were no enthusiasts among them, as there were among the Italians, no hotheads nor sharp tongues, as among the French.

The other emigrants had little to do with them; the difference of manners, of habitus, kept them at a certain distance: French arrogance has nothing in common with German boorishness. The absence of a commonly accepted notion of good manners, the heavy scholastic doctrinairism, the excessive familiarity, the excessive naiveté of the Germans hampered their relationships with people who were not used to them. They did not make many advances themselves … considering, on the one hand, that they greatly excelled others in their scientific development and, on the other, feeling in the presence of others the awkwardness of a provincial in a salon at the capital and of a civil service clerk in a coterie of aristocrats.

Internally the German emigrants displayed the same friability as their country did. They had no common plan; their unity was supported by mutual hatred and malicious persecution of each other.'

--Rosemary Ashton, Little Germany: German Refugees in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 25

As Ashton notes, Herzen’s depiction is ‘probably exaggerated’.