Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Piper, Andrew

Titel

Paraphrasis: Goethe, the Novella, and Forms of Translational Knowledge

Ist Teil von

• Goethe yearbook, 2010, Vol.17 (1), p.179-201

Ort / Verlag

Rochester: North American Goethe Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2010

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Erasmus was of course drawing on a long, if somewhat eclectic, tradition of biblical and literary paraphrase, including Juvencus' fourth-century metrical version of the gospels, Arator's sixth-century epic on the Acts of Apostles, or Peter Comestor's twelfth-century biblical abridgment, Historia scolastica, to name but a few. Since Quintilian, with whom Erasmus was deeply familiar, paraphrase had been understood as an important type of critical writing and thus critical thinking.3 And paraphrase would live a vibrant afterlife, from the rise of the genre of biblical paraphrase in the early modern period to its important role in facilitating the translation of vernacular texts, exemplified in John Dryden's praise of paraphrase as one important type of translation in his preface to Ovid's Epistles.4 But by the end of the eighteenth century, paraphrase would fall into disrepute. [...]where paraphrase asked early-nineteenth-century readers to reconsider their reading practices and the media-technological conditions that underwrote such practices, it also proposed new formal principles of composition as well. [...]like Ottilie's diary, Lenardo's diary will be grounded in a similar practice of the incorporation of foreign speech (Meyer's description of the textile industry), a foreignness that will eventually be registered at a narratological level as well, as the "diary" gradually shifts to a heterodiegetic narrator at its close, transforming itself generically back into a novella (FA 10:717).35 By the time of the mid 1820s, when Goethe is at work completing his novel of novellas (Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre),the identity of the novella as a space of both generic and medial translation would assume a programmatic character, no more indicatively on display than in his final novella, Novelle (1828). Identifying the significance of the paraphrastic in Goethe's late thought can, on the one hand, help us rewrite important aspects of the reception history surrounding his relationship to translation and translational practices, a reception that has been shaped in no small measure by Benjamin's influential reading of the notes to the West-östlicher Divan and the significance accorded to the interlinear version in that essay37 This Goethean inspired view of translation, which implies an essential telos and which always seems to conclude for critics with Hölderlin 's Sophocles translations, does little justice to the variety of actual translational practices that we find in Goethe's late work.