Max's Frisch's Don Juan

A Study in Translation: Max's Frisch's Don Juan Author: Teresa Marie Behr Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/409 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2006 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. A Study in Translation: By Teresa M. Behr Thesis Directors: Professor Michael Resler, German Department and Associate Professor Paul Doherty, Department of English April 2006 A STUDY IN TRANSLATION: MAX FRISCH’S DON JUAN Introduction 1 I. Overview of Theories of Translation A. Translation Theory before the Twentieth Century 5 B. Translation in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 17 C. The Practical Application of Translation Theory by Modern Translators 25 II. Background for and Tradition of Don Juan A. Introduction to the Life and Work of Max Frisch 29 B. German-Language Swiss Literature after World War II 31 C. Introduction to Max Frisch’s Don Juan: the Origin of the Myth and Frisch’s Sources 38 III. Max Frisch’s Don Juan A. Summary of the Action 46 B. Don Juan: Or, the Love of Geometry 48 IV. Notes on the Translation and Difficulties Encountered A. Textual Notes 149 B. Difficulties with the Text of Don Juan 153 C. Difficulties Peculiar to German-English Translation 156 Bibliography 165 INTRODUCTION I like languages. It has always made me somewhat sad that I could not simply devote my life to learning one after the other (not that I haven’t thus far made an effort to do so). It is hardly surprising, then, that I also love literature – the expression of language at its best. As my goal of learning all of the world’s languages is still incomplete, many of my favorite works of literature are things that I would never have been able to read, were they not translated for me. Both ancient and modern classics, like The Brothers Karamazov or the Aeneid, would be entirely inaccessible to most of the world (including myself) had not someone taken the time to translate them into other languages. Even stories as simple as the Grimms’ fairy tales, which have permeated countless cultures apart from the one from which they sprang, would be incapable of reaching the audience that they do without the aid of a translator. In light of all this, it is not surprising that I have a very high regard for translation as a profession, and that I appreciate both the work that goes into it and the new avenues of culture it opens for a reader. I had never, however, paid any particular attention to it until my sophomore year in college, when I decided to take a course on Cervantes’s Don Quijote – a class that entailed reading the book in its entirety in Spanish. I didn’t take the class because I had particularly liked Don Quixote in English – I had tried to read it once or twice before and had given up after a hundred pages or so – but rather because I wanted a challenging Spanish class and I assumed that this would be one. As it turned out, I was right. But, more importantly, I found that I loved the text we were reading. I was curious why I had never been this interested in it before; surely I had missed something when I had read it in English. The humor that kept surprising me at odd moments, the 1 poignant descriptions, the scenes that were so anti-climactic that they took on their own mock- importance – none of this had affected me when I had attempted to read the novel before. Coincidentally, another of my professors informed us that we would read the novel that same semester for her class – in English. And I discovered why none of the qualities that delighted me had been apparent the first time I had tried to read the novel in English: they weren’t there. I was intrigued by the discrepancy between how I had understood a passage and how my classmates had understood it, and it didn’t take me long to realize that, while the translation they were reading (and which I also at least referenced in class) was more or less literally accurate, all of the sparkle that Cervantes infused into his narrative was missing, and the tone was entirely different. I was saddened that everything that I loved about the novel was not there for them to read – and naturally, I blamed the translator. As I read the Spanish, I started pondering how I would have translated certain phrases to capture them the way Cervantes did. I realized that it was not nearly as easy as I might have thought, and began to mitigate some of the harsh criticism I had mentally been heaping upon the unfortunate man who had provided the English text to my classmates. As we continued to read and I continued to turn over possibilities, I was further drawn into the way one could translate a sentence directly, with every word matching its counterpart, seemingly perfect, and still manage to entirely miss the sense and the tone of the original. And thus began my fascination with translation. During the year I spent in Germany, I took two seminars on the subject and began to study the practical side of the discipline – a more organized version of what I had been doing in my head with the Spanish text of Don Quijote. The more I studied the subject, the more I realized that there were few hard-and-fast rules for translation. I realized that, although there were certainly techniques that one could apply, much 2 of translation was in the end simply a gut reaction and a personal decision that one way of translating a sentence was “just better” than another. After returning to Boston and beginning to study some of the theory behind the practice (this study forms Chapter One of this thesis), this conviction was only solidified. Translation is a case-by-case practical affair, and being able to do it well depends not only upon a near-perfect knowledge of the two languages involved, but also a knowledge of literature and of the effects that different types of texts produce. A play, for example, is different to translate than a fairy tale; either is different than a novel, and two novels may differ because one is a Romantic novel while the other is a modernist one. The original text, of course, is usually well aware of these constrictions and will conform to the standards set by its genre – unless the author deliberately chooses to play with the confines of a particular type of text, and then a translator must be conscious of that also. And all of this is primarily applicable in relation to prose literature, and before one even begins to consider either more technical texts such as a scientific treatise, or less structured texts such as poetry. In addition to giving me an introduction to the practical side of translation, my year in Germany also yielded me a second new interest: the twentieth century Swiss author Max Frisch. As Frisch is an important modern author, I was somewhat surprised that I had never heard of him. When I began to read his work, starting with his novel Homo Faber, I was captivated – made into a devotee by two hundred pages of prose. When I began to look at the text from a translator’s point of view, though, I suspected why I had never heard of Frisch in the United States. His work is terse, the sentiments therein concisely expressed, and what appears minimalist, stark, and beautiful in the German often appears simply lacking when expressed 3 literally in English. Frisch would be quite a challenge for a translator – and, as I have already intimated, I do so enjoy a challenge. I selected and translated a play by Frisch: Don Juan, oder die Liebe zur Geometrie. This play caught my attention from among Frisch’s other work because it is, in some ways, an anomaly when compared to his more famous works. Much of Frisch’s writing focuses on twentieth century Swiss characters and the challenges they face when creating or accepting their identity in a modern world. His Don Juan is a reinvention of a five-hundred-year-old legend, set in Spain at the end of the Middle Ages. Yet the seeming anomaly is more superficial than real, as many of the themes that the play treats are the same modern questions about identity and society as are found in his other works. After doing some research into Swiss literature of the twentieth century and into Max Frisch’s œuvre in particular, I have made an attempt to situate the work into its larger socio-historical context. After translating the play, I also took a critical look at the difficulties peculiar to translation from German into English. Given that the focus of my studies has been both of these subjects, I enjoyed looking at the way the two languages interact with one another, and exactly what sort of restrictions exist in that interaction. Doing so within the context of the play provided a useful, real-world foundation for what would otherwise be a theoretical exercise. Over the course of this study, I have come to realize that translation involves both skill and natural aptitude, and that there is far more involved in the process than a simple transmuting of one language into another. It is a discipline whose foundations reach as far back as the Tower of Babel, and it is a vocation that can change the shape of the world.

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