Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

One imagines Die Zauberfloete and its ubiquitous "The Magic Flute" had some effect on the word choice.

Nah "Magic Mountain" I think fits Mann's more subtle style of irony and allusion. I read the book twice without knowing or seeing the mythic parallelism. On the other hand, it was "Doctor Faustus", a very clear marker.

Is this part of Gutenburg? Trying to grab some stuff off there myself.

I hate that book.

On the other hand, translating the title as "Olympus" would have made the irony too strong. "The Magic Mountain" is, at least, neutral in that regard.

I was interested to see two references to the Magic Mountain in your blog recently. I read it last summer, in the newer English translation, and thought that, in addition to whatever else was going on in the book, it was the funniest thing I had ever read--sort of Catch 22 with TB instead of anti-aircraft guns. The humor (which, of course, was very black and was entwined with other emotions, analyses, etc.) ranged from exquisite irony to slapstick (the teenaged patient making (what I assume to be) farting sounds through a medical incision in her lung) to stuff I can't even characterize (the love interest leaving Hans a framed chest X-Ray as a momemto).

I read somewhere that Mann originally intended the book as a fairly straightforward satire on the medical profession, inspired by his wife's relatively brief experience at a TB sanatorium, and expanded it into the present work after the experience of World War I.

Well, "Magic Mountain" is about as literal a translation as they come. But then again, had a less literal translation been used, there'd have been holy wars aplenty today along those we get with Proust's "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu" - "Remembrance of Things Past" (which I frankly prefer) or "In Search of Lost Time?"

On second thought, maybe it would have been a good idea for a different name to have been used. Petty squabbles about an interesting book are better than no discussion of it at all.

German certainly has adjectival forms at its disposal -- e.g., "der verzauberte Berg", yet Mann chooses to go with the compound noun. Lacking other arguments, I'd have to trust him; I'm sure he gave it some thought.

"I read it last summer, in the newer English translation"

Ach du lieber Gott! I have a strong preference for the H.T. Lowe-Porter translation. Then again, I also prefer the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation of Proust's novel; an esoteric vocabulary, a formal tone, and convoluted sentences abounding with subordinate clauses, only add to a book's charm in my view.

Me too, Abiola. Classic books should have an elevated style. I prefer most of the 19th century translations of the Greeks and Romans.

Always preferred the MacLeish translation of Rilke too.

"Always preferred the MacLeish translation of Rilke too."

MacLeish puts so much effort into the obvious formal elements (meter, rhyme) that he ends up with verse, not poetry. I recommend Edward Snow, especially for the New Poems.

I like Arrowsmith's colloquial translation of Pavese's (even more colloquial) Hard Labor.

But Richard Wilbur is the best translator I know of - his Moliere is exquisite.

The formulation "Der Zauberberg" ascribes magic power (over peoples' thoughts etc.) to the mountain itself and IMO the translation "The Magic Mountain" captures that connotation quite accurately meanwhile "The Enchanted Mountain" doesn't.
I don't have much trust in my feeling for the subtleties of the English language though.

So it's the same in english?

French is "montagne magique", same vaguely disturbing traduction, while the zauberflöte is a regular, predictable "flûte enchantée".

In other long-german-book-titles news, i just googled that the "Mann ohne Eigenschaften" is a "man without qualities" in english -the french version is along these same lines "homme sans qualités".

Aha!

We have again that same weirdness here : two translations avoiding the simplest option "man without particularities" or so) and converging to another -slightly unsettling- one.

I'm thinking Vast Translator Conspiration here. Meetings at full moon. Secret handshakes. Agendas.

Yabonn,

it may happen that since the first translation and nowadays the letter sequences qualité/quality have seen the meaning we give them altered. The title may have remained, however. In Castilian there is the pair calidad/cualidad, the title is translated as "El hombre sin cualidades".

DSW

Antoni,

In spanish too? Damn they're good.

A successful attempt to reproduce the flavour of the original title is always a virtue. Zauberberg has three syllables. Magic Mountain has four, Enchanted Mountain and Ensorcelled Mountain five . In addition Ensorcelled Mountain is awkward to pronounce. By the way, Der Zauberberg as a whole is a masterpiece of the use of the German language. Even the best translation can be only a weak attempt to reproduce the magic (no pun intended) of the original.

I assure you, it's a damned good novel in English. Whatever the translation.

Babel Fish Translation

In English:
The charm mountain

wasn't thomas mann fluent in english? he lived in america for a while. i think "frei," as in "frieschutz," means enchanted.

wasn't thomas mann fluent in english? he lived in america for a while. i think "frei," as in "frieschutz," means enchanted.

From a morphological point of view, the construction "Zauberberg" conveys to the mountain the ability of doing magic (in my interpretation, that is). While I'm quite good with my native language and its constructions, I'm not a linguistic expert and don't know a lot of the linguistic terminology. Having said that, I'm more inclined to interpret the prefix "Zauber" in this word as deriving from the verb "zaubern" (do magic), not the noun "Zauber" ((result of doing) magic; enchantment), although I cannot rule it out on linguistic grounds.

"[The] Magic mountain" comes as close as it gets, and it also nicely covers it both ways. The other two options, enchanted/ensorcelled mountain, definitely not. "The enchanted mountain" would be "der verzauberte Berg", with a positive connotation. "The ensorcelled mountain" would be "der verwunschene Berg" (in literary language), with a negative connotation (ensorcelled in the sense of "cursed").

Analogies with other words: Zauberflöte -- magic flute, Zauberstab -- magic wand, Zauberwort -- magic word. All three have the ability to do magic. But then those analogies are always dicey, especially in German.

dave: "frei" means "free" (as in freedom)

Postscriptum: Yes, it does set up the expectation of fairy tale or fantasy stuff (or at least establishes the connotation.) But maybe not for somebody who knows the other quite down-to-earth work of the author.

The first and probably the best humanities class I took at Berkeley was a German Literature freshman/sophomore seminar with Kenneth Weisinger, and Thomas Woods' translation of The Magic Mountain featured prominently. I really wish I remembered what Professor Weisinger's opinion on the title translation was; I know that he vastly prefered Woods to Lowe-Porter. Despite my extreme intellectual distance from the world of literary theory and analysis, may I be so bold as to point out this companion to The Magic Mountain just because of his "stand-out essay." He was a wonderful professor.
The Companion
http://rmmla.wsu.edu/ereview/54.2/reviews/scaff.asp

Weisinger's Obituary
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/08/05_weisinger.shtml

Great to see that people who make a living by teaching macroeconomics still are willing (and happy) to discuss things like Boris Godunow, or Zauberberg, or Proust. So there is still some hope... Except that your Prezident (and his staff) probably can't tell Thomas Mann from Walt Disney.

To enter into the merits of the thread: Linguistic theory poses an interesting question: How come certain words "mean" (denote) certain things or concepts? Is the connection purely "conventional" or is there a "reason", a sort of "interior" relation between meaning and concept? One might also ask if the "concept" of a thing is "linguistically" determined - meaning that we learn to "organize" the world (a practically unlimited number of meaningsless "facts") according to the way we are taught to speak of the world. (We "create" "meaning" by speaking of the world.) Which could be the reason why different cultures have different concepts of "facts" (see the Inuit language which has about 100 words for "snow", whereas English or German has about four of five). Which is why translators always have to be "traitors": You cannot fully render the "meaning" of a French text in English, you necessarily lose some subtleties and nuances. Reading Raymond Chandler in German - even in translations by renowned translators published by serious publishing houses - is a pain in the ass, and since I do not know enough Spanish, I'm reading Garcia Marquez in Italian editions and like him much more than in German versions.

In case you ever have the time to get around to it, try reading Umberto Eco's book on "signs" or his recent book on the "original language", which has a very enlightening chapter on the problems of translating.

Garcia Marquez may be better in Italian than in German, but one possible explanation is that the Italian translator was working directly from the original. Often, translators into languages like German or French work from an English translation. I found this is true of the German and (I think) French translations of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. This double-translation is unusual in the case of German, but it's epidemic in Italian.

There is a third interpretation of "Zauberberg" that occurred to me but I was on my way to bed already, which is a mountain that is a place used for performing magic (like in "playground").

Now I should have covered about all meanings.

Gerhard: Good point (about linguistic constructions "creating" concepts). This I think based on empirical personal evidence is what many people don't understand. It is a powerful tool to create notions that support ideologies, for example "Arbeitgeber/Arbeitnehmer" (employer/employee). In German the literal meaning is "work giver/work taker", in English it is active/passive participant.

But this is unavoidable, or arguably even how the human mind operates. That is, if you cannot put some kind of label on something, then maybe it is hard to handle it as a concept? Unfortunately, somebody can create words that give rise to misleading labels, and bring them into circulation.

People more often than not balked at me when asking "what does this word mean" and I request context from them.

Alliteration?

manofsteele / double translations:
no, no, Spanish novelists (at least: the better known ones) are being translated into German directly from the original. No publishing house would ever dare to print a Garcia Marquez novel translated from an English translation.... It is true, however, that Chinese oder Japanese books are re-translated from an English version (this is probably due to a shortage of German sinologists).. My point, however, was - or tried to be - that you can never ever "completely" render the full semiotic value of a phrase in one language into another; all you get is approximations, or - at best - "re-creations". Otherwise, why should we have new German translations of Shakespeare plays (after Fried!, my goodness) every five years?

manofsteele / double translations:
no, no, Spanish novelists (at least: the better known ones) are being translated into German directly from the original. No publishing house would ever dare to print a Garcia Marquez novel translated from an English translation.... It is true, however, that Chinese oder Japanese books are re-translated from an English version (this is probably due to a shortage of German sinologists).. My point, however, was - or tried to be - that you can never ever "completely" render the full semiotic value of a phrase in one language into another; all you get is approximations, or - at best - "re-creations". Otherwise, why should we have new German translations of Shakespeare plays (after Fried!, my goodness) every five years?

cm: thanks for your pertinent example: I think, Marxists have been complaining about the employer/Arbeitgeber - in German - apparently "giving" labour (i.e. providing a job) to the employee instead of "taking the (surplus) value away from him", and they have been complaining for 15o years since the first volume of "Das Kapital".

Only I think, we are not (always, merely) talking about ideology (or language - supposedly, depending on your own perspectice, deliberately - "hiding" facts) - at least not in the sense of "ideology" = "false consciousness"; I'd be very careful with such labels; claiming to know what is "correct" consciousness can lead to terrible consequences (see the earlier thread sstarted by Brad DeLong on Leon Trotsky, or on Bert Brecht).

What I was saying is that by learning a language, we learn a lot of cultural context and, in the end, our world as we experience it is shaped (organized, given meaning) by the way we have been taught to speak about it. An Inuit who uses different shades of meaning for "snow" (where we can't even notice the difference between the kinds of snow he is naming) certainly is no "ideologue".

Or to use examples from the political sphere, that could not entirely be explained away as "ideological distortions": "Liberal", to an educated American audience, means something different from what "liberal" means in the context of the average western European party system. "Populism" (as explained in, say, Schlesingers history of Jacksonian Democracy) is different from what "populism" would mean in a European context (i.e.: a right-wing, proto-fascist movement). "Republican" in French certainly has a meaning very far from the GOP. (The difference beeing 200 years of history, i.e. "culture".)

I am not sure if I am being sufficiently clear; so I just repeat: Read Umberto Eco. He certainly can explain much better than me.

Gerhard: Of course you are right, and establishing systems of concepts and notions via language does not in itself have anything to do with ideology. It is the basic approach of (individually and collectively) organizing human thought and discourse. The individual aspect can be observed in children when they create seemingly nonsensical words of their own to denote concepts that they have discovered for themselves, or in "chidren's language".

I was just emphasizing the aspect of how this can be used by ideologues to shape the way how other people think. It can be used both ways -- positively as well as negatively. But there is ample evidence of how rhetorical "trendsetters" have framed controversies in certain ways, and how those controversies have since been going on within those frameworks. It is not necessarily always a matter of single words, but phrases and implied concepts. I think this is pretty much what is meant by the word "meme".

Newness is relative.

A solved puzzle is just a picture.

I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them.

Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal.

Morality by consensus is frequently morality by convenience.

We are the master of