ANY TRANSLATION requires a compromise between the imperative to retain, as much as possible, the literal meaning along with the characteristic peculiarities of the original, and the need to render it in idiomatic English and avoid “translationese.” There always remain cases of doubt, however, in which I have opted for a translation close to the German original rather than for fluency in contemporary English.
A case in point would be Einfühlung, a perfectly common and ordinary term in German, for which there is no exact equivalent in English. Rather than using “empathy” to translate it, for example, I have decided on “feeling-into,” unusual as it may sound. This is not only a literal translation but also the term chosen by H. Godwin Baynes in the first English translation of Jung’s Psychological Types (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1923). Since Baynes, who lived in Zurich at the time, was assisted in the translation by Jung himself, who listened “to my translation week by week … offering invaluable suggestions” (Baynes, in Jung, 1921[1923], p. xxi), we may be certain that the choice of this word met with the latter’s approval, or might even have been suggested by him. Moreover, “feeling-into” also preserves the associative closeness this term has in Jung’s theory with the psychological function of Fühlen or “feeling.”
In another instance, a term that was and still is commonplace in German vernacular speech, Persönlichkeit (which can mean character, figure, identity, individual, personage, personality, personhood), has taken on, in its literal translation “personality,” further specific meanings, particularly in psychology, that it would be hard to assume Jung and Schmid had in mind in 1915. Even so, I have chosen “personality” because the alternatives would probably have been even more open to misunderstandings. I should add that this was also the choice of James Strachey et al. in their translation of Sigmund Freud’s works, thus setting a precedent in translations in depth psychology.
The way the term “object” is used in this correspondence is, so to speak, a residue of the psychoanalytic vocabulary, where it stands for the object of a desire or drive, hence not necessarily for an inanimate thing, but most often for another person—rather in the manner of such everyday English expressions as “love object” or “the object of my affection.”
A word might be appropriate regarding both writers’ usage of terms that today are regarded by many as insensitive if not incorrect, such as “Negro,” or “he,” “his,” “man,” “mankind,” etc., when used as generic terms for both sexes. Nevertheless, I found it important to leave that usage—which the writers and their contemporaries took for granted—unchanged, lest ending up “doctoring” the original. Any text bears the hallmarks of the era in which it was written. So instead of rewriting a text that is almost one hundred years old according to Western standards of the second decade of the twenty-first century, I ask the reader to bear in mind its historical context.
Although these letters may have been written with an eye on a possible future publication, they are still personal, handwritten letters, and not a text that has been repeatedly gone through, checked, proofread, and so forth, for print. Occasionally, phrases are obscure even in the original German, there are stylistic slip-ups, reiterations of words, grammatical mistakes, and so on. Here, too, I have not tried to “improve” on the original by correcting these inaccuracies but rather have sought to render them faithfully in the translation, thereby preserving the atmosphere of this epistolary exchange.
Many of Jung’s terms—from the archetypes to the collective unconscious, from the midlife crisis to his theory of complexes, and of course his typology of introverts and extraverts—have become household names. In the process of being absorbed into everyday language, however, some of these terms and concepts have been garbled or distorted, including their correct spelling. Contemporary spell-checking programs, for instance, autocorrect Jung’s etymologically correct expression “extraversion” into “extroversion.” All authoritative English dictionaries I consulted, in print or online, give “extrovert(ed)” as the standard form (both for American and British English), while listing “extravert(ed)” only as a variant. Still, I have stubbornly retained the term as coined by Jung, who himself underlined that “extrovert is bad Latin and should not be used” (in McGuire & Hull, 1977, p. 213).
Contrary to modern American usage, by the way, I have also retained the original full spelling of words such as “acknowledgement” or “judgement.” Whether or not one agrees with Sir James Murray’s opinion that dropping the e “is against all analogy, etymology, and orthoepy,” and that one “ought to set a scholarly example, instead of following the ignorant to do ill” (Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press Oxford, 39th ed., 1983, p. 86), keeping the e in used to be the standard form, and certainly was in the era of this correspondence.
It remains to gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance in preparing this translation of my coeditor John Beebe, John Burnham, Esther Moises, and Sonu Shamdasani, as well as of the community of the translators’ forum at http://dict.leo.org/forum. Special thanks go to Tony Woolfson for yet another excellent and fruitful collaboration on bringing out more of the “unknown Jung” in the English language.
Ernst Falzeder Salzburg, August 2011