FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER, a great theorist of translation, once claimed that the experience of reading a translation should be like that of reading in a language in which you are fluent, but of which you are not a native speaker. In other words, a translation should seem a little foreign. How, then, to translate a text that already seems a little foreign in the original language? Should you accentuate its foreignness so that readers of the translation, who might expect some foreignness from a translation, will understand that in this case, there is a foreignness even in the original? But when the foreignness we are talking about isn’t, say, some kind of dialect, marked as such by context, are readers likely to keep the original’s foreignness in mind from line to line? Might not the translation wind up coming across as ponderous, rather than as purposively non-colloquial? Furthermore, non-dialect foreignness is a broad category. How to produce echoes of the particular foreignness in question?
I thought a lot about these issues as I rendered Maimon’s autobiography into English. For while Maimon’s German prose is grammatical, and often elevated in its selection of words and expressions, it isn’t quite colloquial. Its proficiency is due in part to the editorial efforts of Maimon’s friend Karl Phillip Moritz: As has often been noted, the autobiographical fragments that Maimon published in the Magazine of Empirical Psychology (Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde) are much rougher—much more clearly marked by the syntax of his native language: “a grammatically deficient mix of Hebrew, Yiddish-German, Polish, and Russian,” as he describes it in his autobiography (109). But in the fragments Maimon was going for a different effect—that of an authentic case study as opposed to the perspective of the autobiography, which is that of a man who has overcome the intellectual and material privation of his youth to develop into an accomplished, if erratic, person of letters. It’s unclear how much he relied on Moritz in his attempt to create a style consistent with the latter aim.
In truth, Maimon was a linguistic shape-shifter whose level of German proficiency changed according to the occasion and who was very aware of the sort of scrutiny to which his German was subjected, especially from German Jews. Indeed, one of the most famous scenes in the Autobiography involves Maimon recounting how, upon reaching Berlin for the first time, his broken speech, unpolished manners, and wild gesticulations resulted in his cutting a bizarre figure, like a “starling” that “has learned to say a few words.” What breathes out of Maimon’s evocation of the scene isn’t so much resentment as an air of superiority and passive-aggressive delight. Having slyly alluded to Aristotle’s definition of man (i.e., the “talking animal”), Maimon tells of how he, the underdog, bested Markus Herz, his cultivated and thoroughly stunned Jewish partner in debate. For Maimon himself, though, the outcome should not have been surprising. While his outsider status caused him no small measure of hardship, and while the Autobiography frequently ridicules the Eastern European Jewish culture into which its author was born, Maimon was also critical of the Jewish acculturation he encountered in Berlin, seeing it as intellectually limiting. It may be in part for this reason that there can be something mocking in Maimon’s use of German colloquialisms and formal expressions. Language was the key vehicle of acculturation, and Maimon’s, as Hannah Arendt suggested, was a pariah’s acculturation. One could even say that it has elements of what other theorists would call colonial mimicry.
In the translation, I have tried to convey this. I have also tried to avoid the great temptation that attends retranslation. Or more specifically, I have tried to avoid the temptation that attends retranslation when, as is the case here, a key text has been translated into English just once and without as much accuracy as one might reasonably hope for: to write in reaction to the existing translation. Whether I have succeeded, or to what degree, is of course for readers to judge.