










































A Conversation on Translation
Stanley Corngold

The critic Walter Benjamin wrote a very famous and very 
difficult book-length essay on Goethe’s novel Elective 
Affinities, from which I’ll cite the following passage: 

[Goethe’s] literary composition remains turned toward 
the interior in the veiled light refracted through multi-
colored panes.  Shortly after [the] completion [of the 
novel], [Goethe] wrote to Zelter: “Wherever my new 
novel finds you, accept it in a friendly manner. I am 
convinced that the transparent and opaque veil will 
not prevent you from seeing inside to the form truly 
intended.”1

This imagery of the veil that is at once transparent and opaque—
and which must finally lead to our seeing inside “to the form truly 
intended”—gives us just about everything essential, I think, to a 
conversation about translation.  

The translator of a work means to bring to light “the form truly 
intended”—and here I will gloss the words “truly intended” to 
refer to the intention that informs the work and not, supposing 
it recoverable, something in the mind of the author during the 
act of writing.  The sort of work-based intentionality I have in 
mind responds to the question, “What does the work aim to 
accomplish?” in the sense, even in the humble sense, in which a 
chair aims to be sat upon quite apart from the commotion in the 
mind of the carpenter at the time of its making (as, for example, 
his thinking, “Oh, the limbs of my chair are lovely”; or, “this chair 
is going to bring about a revolution in sitting”; or: “this chair will be 
a commercial success—and will pay for my new loft in Dumbo,” 
and so forth).  

Now the form “truly intended” that Goethe speaks of is, of 
course, a function of the language of the work; it comes to light 
for a reader from his or her reading—and knowing—its words.  
It will not come to light for the reader whose knowledge of that 
language is sub-par the author’s facility.  Here, then, is the task 
of the translator. He or she (henceforth, “he”) is called upon to 
carry over that form, the thrust of that form, into a work in another 

1  Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” originally published in Neue Deutsche 
Beiträge (1924-25), trans. Stanley Corngold in Walter Benjamin, Selected 
Writings: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: 
Harvard UP, 1996), p. 352, alt.



2    A Conversation on Translation

language—in a technical sense, into his, the translator’s, own 
work, since he borrows none of the author’s words; he replaces 
them with words of his own composition.

(Admittedly, it is only a low sort of ownership that the translator 
enjoys: the work is his—but it is a plagiarism—or, less punitively, 
it is “a translation.”)

In another sense, it might be interesting to think of the translation 
as a dream of the original. The translation presents itself with a 
prima facie clarity of feature. I do think this clarity is an overriding 
concern of the translation. And so, in speaking about the clarity 
of the form of things, we are reminded of Nietzsche’s (surprising) 
example of the dream as this very medium of Apollinian plasticity, 
fascinating visibility, precision of feature and form. In the dream, 
he writes, in The Birth of Tragedy, “We enjoy the form with an 
immediate understanding; every shape speaks to us; nothing is 
indifferent and unnecessary.”  The translation must be clear and 
compelling; it is well advised to strive for clarity of presentation 
(“Klarheit der Darstellung”)—or it must strike the reader so, who 
will have a less perfect or imperfect or scant or no knowledge 
of the original at all.  The original will be dark for him, as the 
translation will be light.  

This, at any rate, is the view of Don Paterson, the accomplished 
translator of Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus—although, to be sure, 
he thinks of this very demand for clarity as the drawback of mere 
translation: “A translation,” he writes, “tries to remain true to the 
original words and their relations, and its primary aim is […] one 
of stylistic elegance (meaning, essentially, the smooth elimination 
of syntactic and idiomatic artifacts from the original tongue).”2 It is 
precisely because the result is merely a translation that Paterson 
means to produce a version that will be an original sequence of 
poems.

Paterson’s point will take us later on to a discussion of what 
the translator might do with passages in the original that are dark 
even to him whose knowledge of the language is—in principle—
perfect.

Now even as I adduce some of the aims involved in translation, 
I must confess that I am suspicious of their value in practice—as 
well as of the value of a good deal of the translation theory that 
has circulated in vast quantities on both shores.  Here, theory acts 
on principle; it conjures and addresses situations presumed to be 

2  Don Paterson, Orpheus (London: Faber, 2006), 73.



Stanley Corngold    3

eternally stable (even in their calculable flux). It’s been assumed 
that such a situation exists for the translator, and this assumption 
prompts a general consensus about what translation does—
viz.: it carries over the meanings of words from one language 
to another—from the source language to the target language, 
leaving, in principle, no child of connotation behind.  The source 
house-of-language has been fully emptied out; all the entities 
dwelling there have been brought to safety. 

We have begun to discuss some general principles of 
translation, so consider some additional sub-principles. The 
translator must struggle with competing aims: 1. to make the 
source text speak the target language fluently, quite as if the 
source-author had written in the target language (so that would 
be:  Kafka writing for the New Yorker or Aeschylus, as in the 
hands of Anne Carson, writing for Granta).  Or, on the other 
hand, 2. the translator must make the target language speak 
with an accent—the accent of the original German or French 
or Greek in the sense of conveying something of the material 
flavor, the “feel” of that foreign language—effects of diction, of 
the sound-look of words—odd metaphors—effects of grammar 
(as, for example, in German: transposed word order or extended 
adjectival construction or agglutinated nominatives).  

In an Introduction to his newly edited six-volume translation 
of Proust’s À la Rechereche du temps perdu—a translation by 
various hands—the editor, Christopher Prendergast, discusses 
this competition of ideas as follows:

Although not without precedent (there are already 
team-work translations in both German and Italian), 
the disadvantages of such an arrangement [of the 
various hands] are obvious. At the deepest level they 
concern the management of differences arising not 
just from the interpretation of Proust’s text but from 
philosophical conflicts over the nature and purpose 
of literary translation as such. This, broadly, is the 
conflict between what we might call the naturalizing 
and the foreignizing conceptions. The latter holds that 
we should never be allowed to forget that what we are 
reading is indeed a translation and that it is therefore 
both duty-bound and condemned to bear within it 
some trace of the foreignness in which it has taken 
up abode. Reading À la recherche in English should 
not seek to mask the fact that it was originally written 



4    A Conversation on Translation

in French. Conversely, the former assumes that the 
prime task of the translator is to naturalize the host 
language as far as possible into the terms of the guest 
language, in such a way as to create for the reader the 
sense that he or she is reading a text as if it had been 
‘originally’ written in the guest language. This appears 
to have been Kilmartin’s working hypothesis. “(T)he 
main problem with Scott Moncrieff’s version is a matter 
of tone. A translator ought constantly to be asking 
himself: ‘How would the author put this if he were 
writing in English?’” Yet, if at first glance, this looks 
like a reasonable benchmark, it is in fact demented. 
Perhaps we can make some sense of the notion of 
what À la recherche would have looked like had Proust 
written it in English by recasting it as the question of 
how a roughly contemporaneous English writer might 
have written it. But this counterfactual imagining is also 
a somewhat murky notion. What, from the history of 
English-language fiction, could serve as a comparable 
model of literary prose? The style of Henry James or 
Edith Wharton, for example?  The analogy, if pressed, 
would quite rapidly reach breaking point.3

Well, if there are these two contending strains, now add on 
contending strain number three, if you will follow Walter Benjamin, 
namely:  The task of the (inevitably inept) translation is to conjure 
yet another language—neither the language of the source nor of 
the target text in whatever idiom of choice. This third language 
is the so-called “pure” language that precedes and undergirds 
all particular languages. It is not crystal clear what that language 
is in Benjamin—perhaps it is the lost “language” of intellectual 
intuition.

Finally, to give a last example of such principles, there are 
competing claims as well in the matter of whether the translation 
should strive for the condition of the pony.  This would be a literal, 
a mimetic accuracy so precise that a reader of the target text who 
was also fluent in the source language could, with a few standard 
adjustments, back-translate the translation into the source text, 
which he or she didn’t hitherto know.  On the other hand, there’s 
the question of whether free paraphrase, a bit of fireworks on the 
side, wouldn’t be allowed.

3  Christopher Prendergast, “General Editor’s Introduction” to Marcel Proust, 
The Way by Swann’s, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin, 2003), xiv-xv.



Stanley Corngold    5

 Here is an example: Edwin and Willa Muir, the eminent first 
English translators of Kafka, translated a phrase from Kafka’s 
story “Arabs and Jackals” describing the movements of the 
jackals. The phrase reads “sie gingen” (“they went away”). The 
Muirs’ translation reads: “They turned tail and ran.”  This elegant 
periphrasis will, of course, throw the pony-rider. Riding back to 
German, he would have to wonder whether Kafka had referred to 
these animals as so many “Wendeschwänze.”

I’d like to describe for a moment a few more obstacles to 
the pony principle taken from life.  These arise from the ponies 
produced in conversation with the late German wit and writer 
Reinhard Lettau.  Now, you must understand first that some of 
the motorways in America are called “turnpikes” (the section of 
Highway I-95, for example, which leads from Princeton to New 
York is called the New Jersey Turnpike).  So Lettau would excuse 
himself from late dinners in Princeton by saying he “musste 
leider dem Wendehecht gleich ins Auge gucken.”  It would not be 
difficult for a bilingual listener—or reader—to ride this pony back 
to “looking straightaway into the face of the turncoat pike,” where 
pike now refers to a kind of lake fish: “brochet,” “Hecht”.  But that 
wasn’t what was meant. Homonyms are the bane of ponies. (Put 
that on my gravestone).

But wait—“Turncoat pike?” Honestly, could any bilingual native 
speaker ever have come to that? Well, yes, actually, a reasonably 
cultivated one, who might very well have read the poem by 
Christian Morgenstern titled—“Der Hecht”—a pike that, as a 
converted fish, might very truly be designated a “Wendehecht,” 
to wit: 

Ein Hecht, vom heiligen Anton
bekehrt, beschloss, samt Frau und Sohn,
am vegetarischen Gedanken
moralisch sich emporzuranken.
Er aß seit jenem nur noch dies:
Seegras, Seerose und Seegrieß.
Doch Grieß, Gras, Rose floss, o Graus,
entsetzlich wieder hinten aus.
Der ganze Teich ward angesteckt.
Fünfhundert Fische sind verreckt.
Doch Sankt Anton, gerufen eilig,
sprach nichts als “Heilig! heilig! heilig!”4

4  http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/christian-morgenstern-gedichte-325/46.

http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/christian-morgenstern-gedichte-325/46


6    A Conversation on Translation

A pike, converted by Saint Anthony, resolved, 
together with his wife and son, to raise himself 
morally with vegetarian thoughts.  From that time 
on, he ate only the following:  sea grass, sea roses, 
and sea grits.  But grits, grass, and roses, oh drear, 
flowed in ghastly fashion out the rear.  The entire 
pond became polluted; five hundred fish expired duly; 
but Saint Anthony, hurriedly summoned, could cry but 
“Holy! Holy! Holy!”5 

I return to Lettau and ponies one last time:  Lettau, at generous 
buffets, after consuming the first mountain of vegetables—sea 
grass, sea roses, sea grits—would ask the company whether 
they were inclined “auf Sekunden zu gehen” (“to go for seconds”); 
but ponies of course, as in all the examples above, can produce 
distracting, if lovely, surreal connotations.  As there are no “lake 
fish” in the “turnpike,” so, in returning to the buffet table, one does 
not tread (lightly) on carpets woven of little fractions of time.  

 Now where is this fugue on translation principles heading? It 
means to stress the force that operates against such principles, 
a Tücke der Wörter, a sort of free-floating mischief inside the 
target language that will throw sand in the eyes of the products 
produced by solid-enough-seeming theory.

Here are examples of what I mean, again from real life, as it 
were.

An editor at Norton Critical Editions asked me to vet a sample 
translation of a passage from The Sufferings of Young Werther—a 
translation I did not care for: it was literally “unspeakable.” Here 
are the cruxes. 

On the evening of his very sad, heart-rending suicide, Werther 
steps out of door and looks at the starry sky. 

Ich trete an das Fenster, meine Beste, und sehe, und 
sehe noch durch die stürmenden, vorüberfliehenden 
Wolken einzelne Sterne des ewigen Himmels! Nein, 
ihr werdet nicht fallen! Der Ewige trägt euch an 
seinem Herzen, und mich.  

 The sample translation read (italics mine): 

I step to the window, my dearest, and see, and still 
see, through the rushing clouds flying over me a few 

5   My Translation—SC.



Stanley Corngold    7

stars of the eternal heavens!  No, you will not fall!  the 
Eternal bears you, and me, in his heart.6   

Right from the start, this unsatisfying translation returns us to 
the pony-question, the drive to produce a text that is rigorously 
homologous with the original.  True, this translation does meet 
the standard of word-for-word literalness, but in doing so, raises 
questions once again of miscommunication. The reader will 
surely wonder, on reading the English text: “Who is the ‘you’ here 
borne up by “the Eternal”?  And he or she will of course think 
that it is “my dearest”—i.e., Lotte, Charlotte, to whom the letter 
is addressed—who is sustained by the Eternal One.  But the 
German pronoun “ihr,” unlike the “you” in the English translation, 
makes it clear that a plural antecedent to “you” is required, so this 
soliloquy is not about one’s beloved but about pole stars that do 
not fall.  

A previous translator, the canny Burton Pike (!), rightly adds 
to the English translation a word not in the source text—the word 
“stars,” writing: “Stars, you will not fall!” The English sentence 
demands the extra word in order to translate the German.  But 
that will break the pony.

Of course, the pony-claim persists, on the argument caveat 
lector; the text is what it says, not what it might need to say in 
order to be clear.  

As it happens, the late André Lefevere, in a very good 
article titled “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and 
Refraction in Theory of Literature,” complains about this very 
attempt to supply connections in the case of Brecht’s Mutter 
Courage.  The competent translator Ralph Manheim translated 
Mother Courage’s words to Kattrin: “Du bist selber ein Kreuz: du 
hast ein gutes Herz” as “You’re a cross yourself because you 
have a good heart”—the word “because” is not in the German. 
The addition helps—but isn’t crucial to understanding. The first 
American translator of Mutter Courage, H. R. Hays, bent over 
backwards to be helpful, translating this address to Kattrin as 
follows: “You’re a cross yourself.  What sort of help are you.  And 
all the same what a good heart you have.”  This is funny:  trying 
to get it explicit, he inverts the sense.  It’s not, of course, that you 
also have a good heart, Kattrin: it’s that your good heart is the 
cross—i.e., a source of endless trouble.

6   My italics.



8    A Conversation on Translation

This same H. R. Hays produced an exemplarily bad but 
hilarious translation of Mutter Courage’s inventory of her 
belongings, which appears to have inspired Lefevere’s mordant 
reflections. The German reads:  “Da ist ein ganzes Messbuch 
dabei, aus Altötting, zum Einschlagen von Gurken”: “There’s a 
whole missal (prayer book) there, from Altötting (a town famous 
for its sacred relics), for wrapping cucumbers.” Hays’s translation 
reads:  “There’s a whole ledger from Altötting to the storming of 
Gurken.”  Lefevere explains, “the prayer book Mother Courage 
uses to wrap her cucumbers becomes transformed into a ledger, 
and the innocent cucumbers themselves grow into an imaginary 
town Gurken, supposedly the point at which the last transaction 
was entered into that particular ledger.”7

This needn’t make one despair of the entire enterprise of 
getting things right.  It just might require a bit of fact checking at 
publishers. 

I want to continue with my discussion of the passage from 
The Sufferings of Young Werther to get to my main point.  You 
may recall that our translator in disrepute gives us, for “der Ewige 
trägt...” “No, you will not fall!  the Eternal bears you, and me, 
in his heart.”  The Eternal bears … you.  Oh no, this suggests 
something ursine, hibernating forever. So I thought, in an effort to 
be constructive, about how one might solve this crux and thought 
and thought and saw that the translation must read: “the Eternal 
One holds you up.” Oh, oh: and is this poor thing the outcome of 
all higher reflection?  I’ve produced an “Eternal holdup.”  Chicago 
gangster slang has come in from nowhere to defeat us.

This is what I mean by the dust or mischief in the connotative 
web work of words.  Whatever principled logic guides you to a 
solution, you will still depend on the mercy of the connotative 
texture of the target language, full of spite.  How often has le mot 
juste become impossible because le mot juste has also occurred, 
not especially “juste” at all, yet immovably, in three places in the 
sentence before and after?    

Why this mischief will defeat every principle:  the translator 
must take his or her way through a thicket of accidents. “The 
dogs of connotation bark; the caravan backtracks its weary way.”

7   André Lefevere, “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction 
in a Theory of Literature,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence 
Venuti (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 239, originally published in 
Modern Language Studies 12.4 (1982), pp. 3-20.



Stanley Corngold    9

Now this, finally, is to put the matter entirely negatively. And 
that is one-sided, and would lead to the translator’s despair. To 
cite Kafka’s well-known despair of the metaphorical under layer 
of language,

Metaphors are one among many things which make 
me despair of writing. Writing’s lack of independence 
from the world, its dependence on the maid who 
tends the fire, on the cat warming itself by the 
stove; it is even dependent on the poor old human 
being warming himself by the stove. All these are 
independent activities ruled by their own laws; only 
writing is helpless, cannot live in itself, is a joke and a 
despair.”8

But mischief, as you know, can also have rewarding—unsus-
pected—results. And here is some late proof.

I was asked to translate some unpublished lines of Kafka. 
They are part of the story of the Hunter Gracchus. The German 
reads:

“War kein Seefahrer, wollte es nicht werden, 
Berg und Wald waren meine Freunde und jetzt–
ältester Seefahrer … Jäger Graccus angebetet mit 
gerungenen Händen vom Schiffsjungen, der sich im 
Mastkorb ängstigt in der Sturmnacht. Lache nicht.”9

And my translation:

“Wasn’t a seafarer, didn’t want to be one.  Mountain 
and woods were my friends and now—the oldest 
seafarer, Hunter Gracchus, worshipped with clasped 
hands by the ship boy, trembling with fright in the 
crow’s nest in the stormy night.  Don’t laugh.” 

Oh my, “Crow’s nest”…. That crow isn’t in the German but what 
a marvelous gift.  This is “Kafka” (the word means “jackdaw” in 
Czech, a crow-like bird), Kafka who makes a point of describing 
the swirl of crows above the rooftops of the castle in The Castle, 
Kafka who wrote: “The crows like to insist that it would take but 
a single crow to destroy heaven. This is indisputably true, but it 
says nothing about heaven, because ‘heaven’ is simply another 
way of saying: the impossibility of crows.” 

8   Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914-1923, trans. Martin Greenberg 
(with the assistance of Hannah Arendt) (New York: Schocken, 1949),  200-201
9    Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente I, ed. Malcolm Pasley 
(Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1990), 378. 



10    A Conversation on Translation

In translating “Josefine, the Singer... ” I also ran into a bit of luck. 
The German reads: “Einmal geschah es, daß irgendein törichtes 
kleines Ding während Josefinens Gesang in aller Unschuld auch 
zu pfeifen anfing.” In English (or possibly only American) one 
writes: “Once it happened that during Josefine’s concert some 
silly young pipsqueak began in all innocence to pipe up.”10

Finally, as a codicil, and since Christian Morgenstern might 
still be in the air, I’ll mention another sort of irrational constraint 
in the host language, felicities of sound. The point is famously 
conveyed in Morgenstern’s poem on “the aesthetic weasel,” to 
wit:

Das ästhetische Wiesel 

Ein Wiesel
saß auf einem Kiesel
inmitten Bachgeriesel.

Wißt ihr
weshalb?

Das Mondkalb
verriet es mir

im Stillen:

Das raffinier-
te Tier

tats um des Reimes willen.

We would translate—mellifluously, wittily—if we could. A plain 
prose translation follows, only to have the poem itself declare 
why the poem cannot be translated: “A weasel / sat on a pebble 
/ in the middle of a trickling brook. / Do you know / Why? / The 
mooncalf revealed it to me / privately: / The sophistic / ated beast 
/ did it just for the sake of the rhyme.” We cannot rhyme “weasel” 
with “pebble.” Now there have been versions. Max Knight tries to 
stay close to the matter and the rhyme, to wit: 

10   Franz Kafka, “Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse,” Drucke 
zu Lebzeiten, ed. Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch, and Gerhard Neumann 
(Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1994), 354. Kafka’s Selected Stories, ed. and 
trans. Stanley Corngold (New York: Norton, 2007), 96.



Stanley Corngold    11

The Aesthetic Weasel

A weasel
perched on an easel

within a patch of teasel.

But why
and how?

The Moon Cow
whispered her reply

one time:

The sopheest-
icated beest

did it just for the rhyme.11 

His version needed to tamper with conventional orthography. 
Betsy Hulick gives us a rowdier version:

The Aesthetic Anaconda

An anaconda
sent a Honda
to Jane Fonda

(the motorcycle, not the car)

not because
the creature was

unhinged by passion for the star
(although it happens all the time).

The case was worse.
Mad for verse,

he couldn’t resist the triple rhyme.12

I’d like to introduce a small victory following these grander 
defeats. In Kafka’s story “A Report to an Academy,” we read:  

11  Max Knight, The Gallows Songs:  Christian Morgenstern’s Galgenlieder. 
A Selection. Translated, with an Introduction, by Max Knight (Berkeley: 
University of California Press, 1964), 19.
12   30 Poems by Christian Morgenstern, trans. and illust. by Betsy Hulick 
(Manchester Center, VT.: Shires Press, 2014), 1.



12    A Conversation on Translation

“Komme ich spät nachts von Banketten … erwartet mich eine 
kleine halbdressierte Schimpansin und ich lasse es mir nach 
Affenart bei ihr wohlgehen.”13  I wrote: “If I return late at night from 
banquets … a little half-trained chimpanzee is waiting for me, and 
I have my pleasure of her in the way of all apes.”14 I rhyme, as it 
were, to Samuel Butler.

Now no theory in the world will get you to such happy 
outcomes.  And then again this isn’t to say anything especially 
surprising.  You can find this insight everywhere, of late in J. M. 
Coetzee’s new novel, Summertime, in which a character says:  
“Pragmatism always beats principles; that is just the way things 
are. The universe moves, the ground changes under our feet; 
principles are always a step behind. Principles are the stuff of 
comedy. Comedy is what you get when principles bump into 
reality.”15 

And the fact that it needs to be so often repeated–this Against 
Theory—only goes to prove the persistence of theory. 

13   Kafka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, 313.
14   Kafka’s Selected Stories, 83. The reference is to Samuel Butler’s bitter, 
semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh.
15   J. M. Coetzee, Summertime: Scenes from a Provincial Life (London: Harvill 
Secker, 2009), 63.


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