Sign Systems Studies 40(3/4), 2012

Goethe’s glosses to translation

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Dinda L. Gorlée brought to you by CORE
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Abstract. The logical and illogical unity of translation with a triadic approach was
mediated by Peirce’s three-way semiotics of sign, object, and interpretant. Semio-
translation creates a dynamic network of Peircean interpretants, which deal with artificial
but alive signs progressively growing from undetermined (“bad”) versions to higher
determined (“good”) translations. The three-way forms of translation were mentioned by
Goethe. He imitated the old Persian poetry of Hafiz (14th Century) to compose his
German paraphrase of West-östlicher Divan (1814–1819). To justify the liberties of his own
translation/paraphrase, Goethe furnished notes in Noten und Abhandlungen and Parali-
pomena (1818–1819). Through his critical glosses, he explained information, adaptation,
and reproduction of the foreign culture and literature (old Persian written in Arabic script)
to become transplanted into the “equivalent” in German 19th Century verse. As critical
patron of translation and cultural agent, Goethe’s Divan notes are a parody mixing Orient
and Occident. He built a (lack of) likeness, pointing in the pseudo-semiosis of translation
to first and second degenerate types of object and sign.

1. Friendship
When I find myself recollecting some instances of meeting Juri Lotman, I
vividly remember the turmoil between East and West, making us captive of the
political history and alienizing all personal contact. Lotman’s effective appeal to
my invitation to become, together with Thomas A. Sebeok, key speakers of the
First Congress of the Norwegian Association of Semiotics in Bergen (1989),
became a semiotic extravaganza, unforgettable for all present. Translation was a
crucial issue, but it seemed to work between semiotic friends. Sebeok
addressed Lotman “mostly in German, with snatches of French, interspersed
by his shaky English and my faltering Russian” (Sebeok 2001: 167). During
one of the events of the congress, Lotman whispered to me in French, as I
 Goethe’s glosses to translation 341

guess, that translation was on the program in the semiotic school in Tartu. I
thought that the brief remark was a smart anecdote, but I had misunderstood
Lotman’s cryptic words, alas!
The semiotic approach to translation – semiotranslation – had for many
years been my lonely adventure. To write the methodology of Charles S.
Peirce’s semiotics in a doctoral dissertation was against the opinion of my
university superiors, so I worked on the enterprise alone. Later, under the
inspiration of Sebeok, Peircean translation had turned into my “mono-mania”.
In October 1999, if I remember well, I met for the first time Peeter Torop
during the 7th International Congress of the International Association for
Semiotic Studies in Dresden. Immediately, we became friends, although we
had in the beginning no real language in common, but needed to communicate
through half-words, body movements, and gestures. We have stayed honest
friends until today (and hopefully tomorrow). My words of friendship are a
simple yet affectionate statement but, in a time of professional wilderness, I
fully realize that having a real friend overcomes our active busyness to trust in
the truth and luxury of the language of friendship.
Lotman’s hidden and secret words were realized in the friendship between
Peeter and myself. A friendship between two semiotic translation theoreticians
exists in our case to challenge the “old” rules of linguistic translatology into
producing a new semiotic theory about the plural and manifold activity of
making sense of a source text into a target text. Translatology – translating
(process) and translation (product) – starts from the original, Romantic unity
of the ego breathing his or her individual fashion of translation traversing the
fixed and normative unity of language-and-grammar, but the perspective has
now changed into the revolutionary advance of the plurality of the translator’s
signatures. Translating (process) and translation (product) create a living and
radical form of Roman Jakobson’s transmutation, inside and outside the source
text, producing new target reactions of the “chaotic” symbiosis of language-
and-culture.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the Romantic poet-dramatist-
novelist-philosopher and scientist (anatomy, botany) of German culture, came
close to defining the modern version of translatology. In his days, he saw
translation – including annotation, retranslation, and even lexicography – of a
literary work in the German language as a means of performing a vital service
for particularly classical literature. Goethe introduced the concept of world
literature, building and mediating the cultural and political identity of the
342 Dinda L. Gorlée

German princedoms into one national home (Venuti 1998: 77–78). However,
at informal kinds of causeries with his younger secretary Johann Peter Ecker-
mann (1792–1854)1 – indeed, early forms of “interviews” occurring in

1
This footnote is an informal excursus to punctuate formally the acute angle to
understand the two ways of Goethe’s work in formal and informal writings, as argued here
separately and in mediation. Semiotically, both reflect knowledge and metaknowledge,
unfolding in the formation of reasoning in Peirce’s three categories: argumentative
deduction, experimental induction, and hypothetical abduction reflect the two concepts of
formality and informality, that are not separate but interactive in whole and parts. The
formal mind is the pure cognition of semiosis (logical Thirdness, with nuances of
Secondness and Firstness) and the informal mind is the degenerate pseudo-semiosis (real or
fictional Secondness, with nuances of Firstness and Thirdness). In literary genres, Peirce’s
categories represent description, narration, and dissertation. Formal works are the flow of
text-oriented thought-signs, to have essentially one interpretation, whereas informal works
embody culture-oriented “factors – the bodily states and external conditions – and these
interrupt logical thought and fact” (Esposito 1980: 112). The informal stories are the
picaresque variety of narrative genres. The flow of episodes, plots, anecdotes, and other
impressionistic and causal narrations can embrace many meanings, even ambiguous and
contradictory senses.
In Lotman’s cultural semiosis, the “constant flux” (1990: 151) of knowledge and
metaknowledge throws light on the dialogic interaction of different human semiospheres
(1990: 125ff.). The structural boundaries of formal cultural (moral, ethical, ideological)
space may be crossed by all kinds of informal human (self-)expressions reflecting various
cultures. In literary language, the crosswise dialog between formal and informal codes
demonstrates how and when human cultures (and subcultures) move away from domestic
codes to shift to adopting new and strange codes. Lotman exchanges the formal
“stereotype-images” into the informal image of what is described as “the unknown Dos-
toevsky” or “Goethe as he really was” to give a “true understanding” of literary personalities
and their works (1990: 137). See also metaknowledge in the encyclopedic information of
Sebeok (1986: 1: 529–534) and Greimas (1982: 188–190, 192).
Goethe’s formal attitude about literary translation will focus on his creative translation
of his West-östlicher Divan. His informal view will be argued about his own self-explanatory
notes, explaining the complexities of his German translation of the Arabic verse.
In this article, Goethe’s informal attitude about literary translation will be discussed:
firstly, in the editor’s “table-talk literature” (1946: viii) of Goethe’s Conversations with
Eckermann, and secondly, Goethe’s self-explanatory notes, explaining the German
translation of his Divan verse. The latter, the Divan and the notes, shows the difference
between Lotman’s terms of “central and peripheral spheres of culture” (1990: 162). The
Divan is “the central sphere of culture … constructed on the principle of an integrated
structural whole, like a sentence”, whereas the notes are “the peripheral sphere …
organized like a cumulative chain organized by the simple joining of structurally
 Goethe’s glosses to translation 343

Goethe’s study of the Weimar Palais, during dinner, in the library, in the
garden, or taking walks together – Goethe interpreted as “translator” of his own
experiences, the similarity between botanical form, shape, or pattern to:

[…] a green plant shooting up from its root, thrusting forth strong green leaves
from the sturdy stem, and at last terminating in a flower. The flower is unexpected
and startling, but come it must – nay, the whole foliage has existed only for the sake
of that flower […]. This is the ideal – this is the flower. The green foliage of the
extremely real introduction is only there for the sake of this ideal, and only worth
anything on account of it. For what is the real in itself? We take delight in it when it
is represented with truth – nay, it may give us a clearer knowledge of certain things;
but the proper gain to our higher nature lies alone in the ideal, which proceeds from
the heart of the poet. (Eckermann 1946: 155; see 327)

Goethe’s footnotes to the phenomenon of translation explained the organic

form of translation, attaining the long-cultivated ambition to blossom and fruit.
Anticipating the idea of intersemiotic translation, Goethe’s approach seemed in
some ways to anticipate biosemiotics. Indeed, the wilderness of the thistle path –
shooting up from the wild rhizomes, thrusting forth thorny weeds with sharp
spines and prickly margins – comes alive in the nomadic wanderings into the
translator’s semiosis or pseudo-semiosis (Kull, Torop 2003, Gorlée 2004a). As
a warning against the business of “a thousand hindrances” of translation,
Goethe’s proverb said, “one must not expect grapes from thorns, or figs from
thistles […]” (Eckermann 1946: 385, 199). After his botanical analogy,
Goethe added in spirited inspiration: “The like has often happened to me in
life; and such cases lead to a belief in a higher influence, in something
daemonic, which we adore without trying to explain further” (Eckermann
1946: 385). Friendship, I guess.

2. Semiotranslation
The conventional view of translation is the dual (or dyadic) approach that has
tended to predominate the whole of translation studies. This comprehensive
theory of translation studies was used as a systematic guideline and, semio-

independent texts” (Lotman 1990: 162). Lotman adds that “This organization best
corresponds to the function of these texts: of the first to be a structural model of the world
and of the second to be a special archive of anomalies” (Lotman 1990: 162).
344 Dinda L. Gorlée

tically, was based on the twofold concepts of Ferdinand de Saussure’s language

theory – signifier and signified, langue and parole, denotation and connotation,
matter and form, sound and meaning, as well as synchrony and diachrony. The
semiologically oriented language theory was in agreement with Saussure’s
system of contrastive terms, while the dual dichotomies produced, for example,
Hjelmslev’s expression and content, form and substance, and Jakobson’s code
and message, selection and combination, metaphor and metonymy, whole and
details. However, Sebeok’s inner and outer, vocal and nonvocal, verbal and
nonverbal, linguistic and nonlinguistic signs and sign systems, as well as Lot-
man’s primary and secondary modelling systems, internal and external com-
munication, closed and open cultures, cultural center and periphery, tended
not towards Saussure’s contrastive oppositions, but reflect a continuum,
echoing a relational structure of evolutionary progress. They grasp aspects of
dynamic modes of expression, as found in Peirce’s threefold (or triadic) doctrine
of semiotic signs.
Within the threefold categories, the two-step model of translation studies of
the linguistic (or multilingual) relation between the production and the
producer, or the producing activity and reproductive activity, loses the primary
importance. So does the ideal of perfect equivalence produced in the target
language stand for the “same” place in the source language. The “old” model of
classical equivalence has produced the paradigm of evaluating in the lines of
the argument a yes/no response. The dual explanation judges translation
according to the dual dichotomies of language: translation studies and trans-
lation practice, translation process and translation product, translatability and
untranslatability, prescriptive (normative) and descriptive translation, co-tex-
tual and contextual translations, as well as source-oriented and target-oriented
translations, faithful and free translation, linguistic and artistic translation,
naturalizing and alienating translation, exotization and acculturation of transla-
tions, historization and actualization (assimilation) of translations, accuracy
and receptibility of translations, and many others emanating from semiological
(structuralist) approaches to translation studies (Greimas 1982: 351–352).
Semiotranslation is the “new” methodology, characterized as Peirce’s doct-
rine of detecting and analyzing signs as a “progressive” thinking method, diffe-
rent from Saussure. Hijacked by Peirce, as my situation was, away from the
camp of Saussure, the outlook of translation studies and the translation of
meaning was based on the division and subdivision of the framework of
Peirce’s logical terms. The semiotic sign or representamen, object, and
 Goethe’s glosses to translation 345

interpretant, divided into various threeway elements, correspond to Peirce’s

categories of Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness. The threeway elements are not
separate but interact with each other in semiosis, when possible. Translators, as
human interpreters, work with pseudo-semiosis or Peirce’s degenerate semiosis
(Gorlée 1990; see fn. 1), as argued here. Semiotranslation channels a dynamic
network of Peircean interpretant-signs, considered as artificial “sign-things”
which are still alive, and thus progressively growing in time. A translation is a
(re)creative work by a translator (or various translators), going through
successive moods, aspects, and phases of the never-ending acts of translation.
Simplifying the complex tasks of the translator, the vague and impromptu
translations, made by so-called “bad” translators bringing in unintegrated and
illogical impressions, could under the fortunate circumstances of “good”
translators grow to become clear translations, giving higher determined and
logical features – or performing any interpretant-messages whatsoever between
“good” and “bad” (Gorlée 2004a: 167, 2004b) in what can be called inter-
mediate types.
Peirce’s mental activity of threeway subdivisions had the cultural flavor of
detecting all kinds of signs and nonsigns, analyzing both linguistic and non-
linguistic (graphical, acoustic, optical, and other) messages (see Sebeok 1985)
interplaying with each other in the outer and inner speech expressed in the
sensation, emotion, and attention of the new media. Between Saussure – in
agreement with Nida’s formal and dynamic equivalence (1964) – but tending
toward Peirce, Jakobson’s three types of translation (1959) gave widening
significances to the traditional concept of translation, defined as: (1) Intra-
lingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of
other signs of the same language, (2) Interlingual translation or translation
proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language, and
(3) Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal
signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems. (Jakobson 1959: 233)
Jakobson’s threefold division of translations gives the translational concept
new and extralinguistic horizons beyond merely the accurate “rewording” and
less accurate “translation proper” to the free and unbounded “transmutation”
(Gorlée 1994: 156ff.). The wider phenomenon, including an “unconventional”
repertoire of extensive forms of translations, was either supported or rejected,
by purely linguistic translation theoreticians, as being non-empirical and
“radical”. Jakobson’s On linguistic aspects of translation (1959) is now included
in The Translation Studies Reader (Venuti 2004: 138–143), but in this recent
346 Dinda L. Gorlée

manual of translation studies, semiotics is not (yet) mentioned as a metho-

dology of translation studies.2
The criticism of semiology (in the French tradition: structuralism) and its
symbiosis with translation studies may be summarized in the following three
points: (1) the linguistic imperialism, in which a linguistic model can be
applied to nonlinguistic objects in a metaphorical replacement, without doing
justice to the nature of the nonlinguistic objects, (2) semiology is basically the
study of signifiers, and does not ask what signs mean but how they mean, the
object that refers to the sign; meaning becomes wholly a sign-internal affair,
while Peirce’s interpretant-sign falls outside the sign and is not studied and not
described, and finally (3) binarism, the division into a priori dual oppositions is
presented as the instrument for exhaustive analysis, claiming to lead to ob-
jective, scientific conclusions; without analyzing the meaningful aspects of lan-
guage and culture, time and space of the dynamic idea-potentiality of the sign
in the human mind, that is identified and translated into the interpretant-sign
(see Savan 1987–1988: 15–72).
Peirce’s semiotics argues that any scientific inquiry is best conceived as a
dynamic truth-searching process, that is goal-directed (teleological) but with no
fixed results, no fixed methods, no fixed redefinitions, and no fixed agents. All
results, methods, and agents are temporary habits, which are repeatable and
nonrepeatable patterns of behavior. The same is also true for interpretative
translation – or semiotranslation. Peirce’s idea dramatically changes the whole
traditional approach, that as argued concentrates heavily on the basically
unverifiable dichotomies labeled as a dogmatic form of dual expression.
Semiotranslation offers answers of an evolutionary and sceptical nature about the
possibility (or impossibility) of translatability and untranslatability, equivalence
and fidelity/infidelity, the function and role of the intelligence, will, and emotion
of the translator’s fallabilistic mind, translation and retranslation, the fate of the
source text, the destiny of the target text, and other semiotic questions.
Sebeok’s encouragement deepened my interest in Peirce’s semiotics, but it
dawned on me that Jakobson’s organic concept of translation adhered a unified
whole in Lotman’s semiotic theory of culture. The natural inclination to
visualize translation from Peirce’s logics was capitalized in Lotman’s universe

2
Jakobson’s cardinal functions of language can be pairwise attached or matched to the
triad of Peirce’s categories, though they are not identical to them and their correlation is
interactive and may vary upwards and downwards with the communicational instances and
textual network (Gorlée 2008).
 Goethe’s glosses to translation 347

of translation that joined language and culture into what I call the concept of
linguïculture (Anderson and Gorlée 2011).3 The expansive system of semio-
translation includes culture and becomes linguïculture, grown and developed in
Peeter Torop’s concept of total translation (in 1995, in Russian, with following
publications), celebrated in the seminar Culture in Mediation: Total Trans-
lation, Complementary Perspectives (2010) in his honor. Torop’s linguïculture
and his semiotranslation are actively involved in reaching the ultimate goal of
Jakobson’s intersemiotic translation transferred to the forms and shapes of
interartistic and interorganic transmutation.
Returning to humanist Goethe, long ago he visualized intersemiotics in the
conversational approach to Eckermann, stating that:

The plant goes from knot to knot, closing at last with the flower and the seed. In the
animal kingdom it is the same. The caterpillar and the tape-worm go from knot to
knot, and at last form heads. With the higher animals and man, the vertebral bones
grow one upon another, and terminate with the head, in which the powers are
concentrated […]. Thus does a nation bring forth its heroes, who stand at the head
like demigods to protect and save […] many last longer, but the greater part have
their places supplied by others and are forgotten by posterity. (Eckermann 1946:
292)

Goethe, with his brother-in-arms Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), belong

to the Geniezeit, expressing the strong belief in the progress of individual work
to turn into cultural and scientific heroes – an opinion that was relevant in the
epoch of the progress of the industrial revolution. Goethe mentioned the
practical and theoretical evolutionism of literature, mineralogy, and meteoro-

3
Linguïculture is coined from “language” and “culture” to suggest their direct connection at
a cognitive-intentional-intuitive level beyond that of the mere word, sentence, or discourse.
Linguïculture, as language-cum-culture, follows an earlier term, languaculture (Agar 1994a,
1994b), according to Agar himself an “awkward term” (1994b: 60) meaning language-and-
culture. Languaculture is used by Agar to argue his anthropological fieldwork (1994b: 93,
109ff. 128, 132, 137, 253f.), discussing the patterns of linguo-cultural expressions, happening
in personal (low-content) or collectivistic (high-content) messages (Agar 1994a: 222).
Linguïculture broadens languaculture to other areas and directions, different from Agar with a
semiotic approach (Agar 1994b: 47f.). In the linguistic etymology of the binomial
construction, the first unit must be affixed to the second: instead of Agar’s Latin root, half-
translated into French, “lengua” into “langua” (languaculture), the proposed “lingui-” in the
transposition linguïculture, derived from Latin “lingua” with final affix –i attached after the
root, will capture the speech units together with the attached cultural clues.
348 Dinda L. Gorlée

logy (Eckermann 1946: 292–294), but as we see, his genre of semiotranslation

bears fruit from one to another language and stands for the continuity in the
future.

3. Truchement
During the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) years of Goethe’s youth,
Friedrich Schleiermacher’s (1768–1834) (Störig 1963: 38–70; trans. Lefevere
1977: 66–89 retrans. by Susan Pernofski in Venuti 2004: 43–63) dual or dyadic
idea of translation of Greek and Latin literature was the standard definition for
translators and critics of translations. Schleiermacher took a distance from in-
formal “newspaper articles and ordinary travel literature” where he argued that
translation is “little more than a mechanical task” (Venuti 2004: 44f.) and
concentrated on the formal peculiarities of “old” literature. The new world with
strange words and obscure sentences, rhymed in antique hexameter had to be
transmogrified to a version of German, the native tongue, adorned with
classical insights to imitate a “true” approximation of the classical authors and
the sacred writings. The translator needed to be a philologist, a poet, and a
classical or theological scholar, to respond to the complexities of the pro-
fession. The alternative attitudes of the translator were characterized by
Schleiermacher as Verfremdung – imitating the source language, creating a
foreignness of the German translation – or Verdeutschung – approximating the
target language and producing a germanization of the translation. In
Schleiermacher’s (and Goethe’s) day, only a tiny elite of the readers had access
to the knowledge of foreign languages, in the sense that real paraphrases or
imitations can lead to misconceptions and misunderstandings. Schleiermacher
stressed that language is a creative game and “no one has his language mecha-
nically attached to him from the outside as if by straps” (trans. qtd. in Venuti
2004: 56f.). Translation is for translators not so claustrophobic as it seems a
bootstrapping operation (Merrell 1995: 98).
Goethe’s priorities started indeed from the work of classical authors
(Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Plato, Cicero), the sacred writings (Old and
New Testaments), and traditional epics (Nibelungenlied). Since Goethe was
the multilingual humanist of the old Western secular culture, he broadened the
landscape to the socio-literary discussion of more modern or contemporary
writers, such as Alighieri Dante, Jean-Baptiste Molière, William Shakespeare,
Lord George Byron, and Walter Scott. Goethe had a classical mind, but his
 Goethe’s glosses to translation 349

unique genius and his global significance were universal and transdisciplinary.
He was strongly attentive to old and new developments in music, theatre,
opera, architecture, Serbian songs, Chinese novels into what he called the
global ideal of the “higher world-literature” (Eckermann 1946: 263). Goethe
knew French, English, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, and had
translated works by Denis Diderot, François Voltaire, Benvenuto Cellini, Lord
Byron, and others. Translation was Goethe’s special concern; he had been a
translator himself and was fully aware of the troubles with the critical
translation of literary works.4 Together with the brothers August Wilhelm and
Friedrich von Schlegel (1767–1845, 1772–1829), who broadened the signifi
oriental cances of translation to Indian literature, Goethe introduced Oriental
literature to Western readers.
Goethe’s spiritual revolt out of his artistic and political life was writing Faust,
his masterwork, in which the final volume II was completed in the last years of his
life, during his conversations with Eckermann. In a quasi-autobiographical
history, Goethe told the words and actions of a heroic man of enlightenment
struggling between God and Mephistopheles. Bemused with magical dreams and
wild passions for charming or even fatal women – recalling the Cartesian duality
of mind and body – Faust sought energy and redemption through love, study,
and good works. Before Faust, Goethe’s first escape was his pilgrimage from
bourgeois civilization to the “otherness” of the cultures of Oriental life, that was in
Germany otherwise regarded than the British and French explorations of the
East (Said 2003). In Goethe’s Germany, the Orient was an imaginative and
unknown world of mysteries, with the alien customs of a Muslim continent and
speaking Arabic, the language of the cryptic but sacred Islam.
Goethe was transmogrified into a Western Orientalist – although a salon
Orientalist, since he never traveled to the East to study Arabic in situ. He
composed the German translation of the Persian ghasal lyric of Hafiz5 (14th
century), written in Arabic script. In the years of Goethe’s translation of Hafiz,

4
In Goethe’s informal Conversations with Eckermann (1946), an intralingual translation of
the actual conversations, the phenomenon of interlingual translation is repeated and dis-
cussed many times: specifically (1946: 65, 78, 160, 163ff., 199, 309, 320, 341, 385, 395, 396,
400, 410) and references to Goethe’s intersemiotic translation (1946: 135f., 303, 320).
5
Hafiz (original name: Shams ud-din Mohammad) (c.1325–1390) was a Persian poet
(Shiraz, now Iran) of the ghazals or odes. Belonged to the order of dervishes and was a
member of the mystical Sufi sect. Hafiz has been the subject of an enormous and still
growing scholarship of Oriental studies, but will here only be indicated in some details.
350 Dinda L. Gorlée

the study of Orientalism changed his Western scale of art into a paradise of
Oriental art (Said 2003). The basic elements are not the familiar Western
“Skulptur und Bild, sondern Ornament und Kalligraph” (sculpture and image but
rather ornament and calligraphy, my trans.) (Solbrig 1973: 84). The mystical
understanding of the recitation of the Quran, the metaphors of a beautiful rose
with hundred leaves, and the nightingale’s song had to be symbolized, fictio-
nalized, and to a certain degree allegorized (Solbrig 1973: 96). The rhetorical
symbolisms of Hafiz’ mystical trance, drunk on the wine of the beloved sultana,
were translated into Goethe’s own sensual desire worded in his love poetry.6
Goethe mediated not in person, but in fine arts between East and West. His
German West-östlicher Divan was no ordinary translation but he composed a
retranslation and reversion, or better a:
Truchement [which] derives nicely from the Arabic turjaman, meaning “interpreter”,
“intermediary”, or “spokesman”. On the one hand, Orientalism acquired the Orient as
literally and as widely as possible; on the other, it domesticated this knowledge to the
West, filtering it through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical
reviews, dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, translations, all of which
together formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West,
for the West. (Said 2003: 166; see Paker 1998: 571)

Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan (tr. West-Eastern Divan) (1814–1819)7 is the

formal paraphrase of the Oriental narratives of Hafiz.8 However, Goethe was

6
See Thubron (2009). Sufi poetry was religious and didactic verse, but is at times full of
mystical satire with parodies and travesties. The criticism of the complexity of Islam society
can turn into a flirt “with public obloquy and social danger, as if to prove that their love of
God was wholly disinterested, uninfluenced by, indeed, contemptuous of, the social
approval sought by the outwardly pious. Wine, forbidden to Muslims, becomes the
emblem of divinity: homoeroticism (forbidden in theory, though not always in practice) is
a recurring theme, where the divine is manifested in the beauty of beardless boys”
(Ruthven 1997: 65–66).
7
For the German original of the West-östlicher Divan including Noten und Abhandlungen
and Paralipomena (Goethe1952, published in East Germany) and without Paralipomena
(Goethe 1958, published in West Germany). For Noten und Abhandlungen, see Störig
(1963: 35–37). For the English translation of West-östlicher Divan, see Goethe (1998), of
Noten und Abhandlungen, see Lefevere (1977: 35–37), retranslated by Sharon Sloan in
Venuti (2004: 64–66). The English translation of Paralipomena (Goethe 1952) is my own.
8
The Oxford English Dictionary refers that the Persian word “divan”, untranslated into
German and English, was “[o]riginally, in early use, a brochure, or fascicle of written leaves
or sheets, hence a collection of poems” (OED 1989: 4: 882).
 Goethe’s glosses to translation 351

acquainted with Hafiz through the German translation of Divan (1812),

written by the Austrian diplomat and Orientalist Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-
Purgstall (1774–1856). As Goethe explained in his Divan (1952: 183–185,
1958: 302–304), he had from 1814 read von Hammer-Purgstall’s recent
translation of Hafiz’ ghazals. This reading aroused so vividly his deeper
emotions, that he felt encouraged and stimulated into making his own
retranslation. Indeed, Oriental studies was in Goethe’s days a pioneer project,
so that Hammer’s translation in German was a bold experiment in Oriental
scholarship.9 Hammer-Purgstall had sent his translated book to Goethe, with
the artistic dedication “Dem Zaubermeister das Werkzeug” (“a tool for the magi-
cian”, my trans.) (Solbrig 1973: 13, 37). Hammer’s translation was basically an
interlinear version, a word-for-word imitation retaining the Arabic words and
their different meanings (polysemy) for the learned audience of Orientalists.
Yet in Goethe’s vision, Hammer’s philological translation became a dynamic
exhortation to develop further into elegant poetry for Western man and
woman.
Hammer’s poetic simplicity was compared by Henri Broms to a forgotten
treasure of “rough diamonds”, although in his beautiful metaphor Broms
recognized that “their roughness is no fault, it is, rather, as if these original, simple
rhythms might give a clearer sight of Hafiz’ world than many later inter-
pretations” (1968: 46–47). Eastern and Western man and woman do not use the
same structures and their minds use different logics (Broms 1990). Goethe was a
visionary poet and his duty was to animate Hafiz’ lyrical poems for the “popular”
elixir of Western life (Eckermann 1946: 271). He read Hammer’s poetically
rough translation as a tool to mix his meanings in the retranslation. There was in
those days no affair of plagiarism, claiming responsibility for Goethe’s copying or
stealing Hammer’s words or ideas. Indeed, Goethe highly appreciated Hammer‘s
translation – “mit Achtung und Anerkennung” (“with esteem and recognition”, my
trans.) (Solbrig 1973: 16), “höchster Lob” (“highest praise”, my trans.) (Lentz
1958: 21) – and vice versa. He consulted Hammer-Purgstall’s treatise again and
again to solve many of his translational problems. At the same time, Goethe
never wrote about the lack of artistic value of the alien words and ambiguities
used by Hammer-Purgstall, that, as it seemed to Goethe, were “created” for his
poetic verse (Lentz 1958: 24).

9
Joseph Hammer-Purgstall was a multilingual scholar. Beyond his native language,
German, he knew Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, English,
Hebrew, and Russian (Solbrig 1973: 45).
352 Dinda L. Gorlée

Goethe had been deeply interested in Zoroastrianism, Mohammad’s Quran,

and Bedouin poetry. Yet his thoughts must have remembered when he was a
boy and heard the Oriental storytelling of the beautiful and captivating princess
Sheherazade, whose marvelous fantasies of Oriental wealth, food and drink,
and sex were to pleasure her husband, the king of Samarkand. The original
stories of the popular (but unfinished) collection, Thousand and One Nights or
Arabian Nights (Mommsen 1981: ix–xxiii, 101–118, 290–295), had been
written in Arabic, but were translated to French in 12 volumes of Abbé Antoine
Galland’s Les mille et une nuits (1704–1717) and then retranslated from French
into other European languages, including German (Mommsen 1981: xv).
The popular Arabian tales, and the variants and imitations of this Western
pilgrimage, had nothing to do with the impoverished life of Eastern men and
women confined to the desert and held in low repute by the Muslim code of
the Islamic Middle East (Said 2003: 64f., 193ff.). From the informal coffee-
house pleasure to the formal amusement of Goethe’s genius, as man of Western
taste, he turned, with his intimate narration and wealth of local color, the Divan
into a dramatic imagery between reality and romance, a travesty in which
romance was stronger than reality. Despite the religious war of Christendom
and Islam, Goethe felt free in the poetic retranslation to identify himself with
his prophetic “twin brother” Hafiz. He also took the liberty to disguise
Marianne von Willemer (1784–1860), his mistress, to play the role of poetess
Suleika (Nicoletti 2002: 349-376).
Goethe followed the poetic verse of Hafiz’ ghazals (from Arabic
“spinning”), that were Sufi-inspired poems of varying length and made up of a
number of 4 to 14 couplets, all upon the same rhyme, playing together a
pattern of variations on the main theme. The rhyme is repeated throughout the
poem, but the off lines are unrhymed (aa, ab, ac, etc.). In the final couplet, the
poet signs his name. The continuity of ghazals is, for Western eyes, rhapsodic
and incoherent. To give the hidden meaning a sense, Goethe had expanded the
couplet into a stanza up to 30 lines and made the ghazal a logical unity. In
terms of style, he did not use the style of “old” quasi-Oriental writing, the
historicizing or retrospective approach, en vogue in the Western world to
approximate the Oriental world-picture to the West. Goethe abandoned his
earlier two-step model of either exoticizing or naturalizing translation and tried
to give the translated cycle of the poetic verse and essays a new, modernized,
and actual expression in the German Divan.
 Goethe’s glosses to translation 353

The target-oriented truchement meant that the translator Goethe had to a

certain degree modified linguistically and culturally the source text to suit his
reality, taste, and critical standards, attributing modern ideas, persons, things,
etc. to the target readership (Gorlée 1997: 162). Taking some scientific
distance from Hammer-Purgstall’s philological translation, Goethe wrote with
what sounded like the suddenly liberated translator of bridging socio-cultural
differences (Fink 1982). Despite the traditional models, Goethe was free and
followed his own lyric-prosaic “Spielformen” (Scholz 1990), that is playful
forms of abductive literature, including the free mixture of foreign and native
elements. As a globalized botanist, Goethe offered “something like a rhizomatic
model” of “the desert and the oasis [...] rather than forest and field” (Deleuze,
Guattari 1987: 18; see Gorlée 2004a). Goethe’s Divan collection is not
Hammer’s monolog but a role-playing dialog, or even trialog.

4. (Meta)statements
In Goethe’s Divan cycle, the formal story went hand in hand with the informal
asides: the Noten und Abhandlungen (tr. Notes and Essays) and then Parali-
pomena (1818–1819). In both marginal glosses10, Goethe coped with the
doubles entendres of the Divan’s rewording, paraphrasing, amplifying, re-
interpreting, condensing, parodying, and commenting of the revision and (re)-
translation. The comments, redactions, adjuncts, phrases, paragraphs, frag-
ments, and at times even misplacings and misunderstandings are published to
better understand the techniques, plots, motifs, and types of the German
Divan. Goethe’s informal marginalia reflected his own metastatements – Mer-
rell’s “counterstatements, counterpropositions, counterarguments, and co-
untertexts” (1982: 132) – about the analytical differences with respect to the
statements of creative translation (Popovič 1975: 12–13; see fn. 1).
One of the last glosses features Goethe’s new opinion: the threefold model of
translation. Goethe’s concept of translation manifests the information, and
reproduction, and adaptation of the real and fictitious specificity of Western
“orientalized” translations from Oriental literary works. In a selection of the
paragraphs of the Notes, Goethe stated that:

10
A gloss (from Greek glossa “tongue”, “language”) – used in the title as keyword of the
article – is an intellectual or naive explanation, by means of a marginal note of a previous
text; sometimes used of the foreign or obscure word that requires explanation.
354 Dinda L. Gorlée

There are three kinds of translation. The first acquaints us with the foreign
countries on our own terms; a plain prose translation is best in this purpose. Prose
in and of itself serves as the best introduction: it completely neutralizes the formal
characteristics of any sort of poetic art and reduces even the most exuberant waves
of poetic enthusiasm to still water. The plain prose translation surprises us with
foreign splendors in the midst of our national domestic sensibility; in our everyday
lives, and without our realizing what is happening to us – by lending our lives a
nobler air – it genuinely uplifts us. Luther’s Bible translation will produce this kind
of effect with each reading.
Much would have gained, for instance, if the Nibelungen had been set in good,
solid prose at the outset, and labeled as popular literature. Then the brutal, dark,
solemn, and strange sense of chivalry would still have spoken to us in its full power.
Whether this would still be feasible or even advisable now is best decided by those
who have more rigorously dedicated themselves to these matters of antiquity.
A second epoch follows, in which the translator endeavors to transport himself
into the foreign situation but actually only appropriates the foreign idea and
represents it as his own. I would like to call such an epoch parodistic, in the purest
sense of that word. It is most often men of wit who feel drawn to the parodistic. The
French make use of this style in the translation of all poetic works: Delille’s
translations provide hundreds of examples. 11 In the same way that the French adapt
foreign words to their pronunciation, they adapt feelings, thoughts, even objects;
for every foreign fruit there must be a substitute grown in their own soil.
[…] Because we cannot linger for very long in either a perfect or an imperfect
state but must, after all, undergo one transformation after another, we experienced
the third epoch of translation, which is the final and highest of the three. In such
periods, the goal of the translation is to achieve perfect identity with the original, so
that the one does not exist instead of the other but in the other’s place.
This kind met with the most resistance in its early stages, because the translator
identifies so strongly with the original that he more or less gives up the uniqueness
of his own nation, creating this third kind of text for which the taste of the masses
has to be developed.
At first the public was not at all satisfied with Voss12 (who will never be fully
appreciated) until gradually the public’s ear accustomed itself to this new kind of
translation and became comfortable with it. Now anyone who assesses the extent of
what has happened, what versatility has come to the Germans, what rhythmical and
metrical advantages are available to the spirited, talented beginner, how Ariosto and
Tasso, Shakespeare and Calderon have been brought to us two and three times
over as Germanized foreigners, may hope that literary history will openly
acknowledge who was the first to choose this path in spite of so many and varied
obstacles.

11
Abbé Jacques Delille (1738–1813) translated Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid into German.
12
Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826) translated Homer into German hexameters.
 Goethe’s glosses to translation 355

For the most part, the works of von Hammer indicate a similar treatment of
oriental masterpieces; he suggests that the translation approximate as closely as
possible the external form of the original work.
[…] Now would be the proper time for a new translation of the third type that
would not only correspond to the various dialects, rhythms, meters, and prosaic
idioms in the original but would also, in a pleasant and familiar manner, renew the
poem in all of its distinctiveness for us. […]
The reason why we also call the third epoch the final one can be explained in a
few words. A translation that attempts to identify itself with the original ultimately
comes close to an interlinear version and greatly facilitates our understanding of the
original. We are led, yes, compelled as it were, back to the source text: the circle,
within which the approximation of the foreign and the familiar, the known and the
unknown constantly move, is finally complete. (Venuti 2004: 64–66; original
Goethe 1952: 2: 186–189, 1958: 5: 304–307)13

As discussed by Venuti (2005: 801), Goethe’s first phase concerns the radical
domestication of the target language (Verdeutschung), making the reader forget
that the text really is a translation of a previous work. The source text has
“disappeared” and the translation is a totally Germanized version. The second
phase is a duality of domestication and foreignizing (Verfremdung). The
translation loses the closeness to the source text and becomes an alienated
world formulated and reformulated in a somewhat biased translation between
source and target texts. The reader of franglais and other mixtures of languages
is aware that the translator has mediated between both texts and becomes
puzzled. The third phase is a manipulation to accord with some ideology,
prejudice, dogma, or belief. The source text has been modified, even mutilated,
peripherically, or almost beyond recognition. Indeed, such manipulation, away
from the source center, may happen (fn. 1), and be accepted, welcomed, or
simply ignored in the target culture, due to the linguistic and cultural distance
between the codes involved, the temporal and/or spatial distance between the
text-to-be-translated and the translated text, and/or for other reasons, be they
social, political, religious, institutional, commercial, and so on.

13
The 1952 edition offered a non-philological edition of Goethe’s unchanged “original”
style in old-German, without rectifying capitalization, punctuation, parentheses, gram-
matical misconstructions, and so forth (Goethe 1952). The 1958 is a standard edited
edition. For discussion of Goethe’s Notes, see chronologically Pannwitz (1917: 240–243),
Lentz (1958), Radó (1982), Wertheim (1983), Steiner (1975: 256–260), and Nicoletti
(2002).
356 Dinda L. Gorlée

Goethe offered an alternative to Schleiermacher’s dual approach of

translation to a third “move” (Robinson 1998: 98) from the historical context
of German culture to the nostalgia of exotic life and the erotic love of the
Orient, as delicately restructured by himself. The orientalized metempsychosis
of two fictional cultures had challenged Goethe’s new vision in the informal
glosses to translation: was the Arabic Divan retranslated into German language
more than a nomadic enthusiasm for Oriental religion and culture? Was
Goethe’s triadic mention of translation a linguistic-anthropological symbol
mixing Orient and Occident? Was Goethe, the greatest cosmopolitan of his
days, in terms of sheer erudition and mastery of the Eastern material, a cross-
cultural critic of East and West?
The Paralipomena are metacomments of his own comments. They work as
Goethe’s catalogue-type information for his own use and are merely un-
mediated fragments, plagued by spelling mistakes and grammatical errors (see
fn. 13). Without their later unedited publication (in Goethe 1952), the
simplicity of Goethe’s metadata would have been lost and “forgotten”.14 The
whole text is as follows:

Three kinds
1, To reconcile foreign productions and the fatherland.
2, Further attempt against the foreign to achieve a middle situation.
3, final attempt to make translation and original identical
of all three the Germans can indeed show examples of exemplary pieces.
more than approaching the foreign situation we should certainly note,
to cheer loudly on the works of von Hammer, directing us on this way.
even warmly welcoming the hexameter and pentameter from the first concept of
translation.
The strangeness of the transfigurations into Greek and Latin of the excellent
Jones,15 recalls the foreign country, customs, and taste, meaning that the study of
the content totally destroys the originality of the poems.

14
The plural Paralipomena (from Greek paraleipein “to leave aside”, “to omit”) signify
“forgotten” postscripts, supplements, or reflections of a previous book or fragment.
Goethe’s Paralipomena has hardly been discussed.
15
Sir William Jones (1746–1794), an English polyglot with knowledge of twenty-eight
languages, was an eminent Oriental and Sanskrit scholar. Jones was interested in Hafiz and
translated the sacred texts of Eastern religions. He pronounced the genealogical
connection of Sanskrit with Greek and Latin, and the languages of Europe.
 Goethe’s glosses to translation 357

The grotesque enterprise of Mr. [any name] to rework Firdusi16 in the sense of
alienating it from the Orient without bringing it close to the West.
A prose translation should be far better than one transformed into an alien
unsuitable rhythm.
Von Hammer translation, retaining line by line of the original, is on its own
correct, perhaps can Mr. [any name] decide now to accept these intents and
purposes, to accomplish for himself and the bookseller in charge of the printing a
flourishing business.
The translator will not harvest any thanks and the publisher no profit. (My
trans. from Goethe 1952: 3: 130–131)

The chaotic Paralipomena naturally uses a different style of writing than the
ordered paragraphs of the Notes. The informal tone reflects the emotional voice
of Goethe’s personal words, but his dry and business-like actions speak louder.
The pitch of Paralipomena lay in the postscript: how to cook Goethe’s West-
Eastern Divan into a success story. Goethe focused on the production’s costs:
to win the spectacular bestseller the business went at the expense of his
associates (including the translator).
East and West mingle in bizarre juxtaposition, but they do not mix in
Goethe’s labyrinth of fragments. Guided by the spatiotemporal distance to
Hafiz, Goethe mediates semiotically in cultural differences of morals and
scholarship as a human and spiritual alternative. His agenda of the Notes
reflects a psychological and anthropological understanding of Eastern ideas,
concepts, meaning, and nuance. The public interest of cross-cultural
scholarship is translated into the free association of poetry. The results are
striking, including a new vision of translation. At the same time, Goethe’s
hidden agenda arises in the bottom line of Paralipomena to determine the
effectiveness of the agreement. The “negotiation” of bridging cultures and
national experiences becomes on dark spots an over-confidence, changing into
a purely commercial affair – an unhappy return to bourgeois civilization.

16
Firdusi (transliterated as Firdausi, Ferdowsi, or Firdowski) (932–1020) was the
Persian poet who wrote the Iranian national epic, the Shahnamah.
358 Dinda L. Gorlée

5. Semiotic Mediation
Goethe’s caravan of sign translation – from information and reproduction until
adaptation – makes the target text become more and more visible in Peirce’s
interpretants, and the source text more and more invisible. Goethe’s various
“epochs” – Peirce’s Secondness indicating the spatiotemporal object under the
force of haeccity (MS 909: 18 = CP: 1.405, 1890–1891) – were transported to
signify the whole sign of the trajectory of translation. Semiotic signs play the
role of a mediator between thought and reality, so that the “bringing together”
of translation is grounded not on genuine Thirdness, but rather on the “middle,
medium, means, or mediation” of the original sign (Parmentier 1985: 42 and
passim) to produce mediate interpretants.
Goethe’s and Jakobson’s three types of translation are the same in gram-
matical number, but differ on “such distinctions as objective and subjective,
outward and inward, true and false, good and bad […]” (MS 304: 39, 1903).
From a more external viewpoint, Goethe valued the three degrees of possible
equivalence between source and target texts, whereas Jakobson’s intralingual,
interlingual, and intersemiotic translations took the lack of equivalence for
granted as the standard “equivalence in difference” (1959: 233). From an
internal viewpoint, Goethe’s truchement disguised translation in a liberated
mode of a subjective translation, while Jakobson judged externally the distance
between source and target language. Then Jakobson broadened their mutual
translatability outside “ordinary language” (1959: 234) to translate the cultural
(inter)relations (unmarked and marked forms and functions) into the target
version (Mertz 1985: 13–16). Jakobson stated that the bilingual and bicultural
dilemma of implying linguïculture defied all efforts of translatability, repre-
senting the “Gordian knot by proclaiming the dogma of untranslatability”
(1959: 234). Semiotranslation can untie the intricate knot, cutting through
untranslatability to claim Jakobson’s degrees of a relative translatability – not
arriving at Goethe’s genial work, but an effort to solve the complexities.
Translation is freedom with a bold (re)action of the translator to reach his
or her signature of the “same” meaning. The sign action is semiotic mediation,
acting under the forces of reality and thought. In translation, Firstness – sign –
and Secondness – object – are linked to connect to the “medium” of Thirdness
(CP: 1.337, 1909). Peirce wrote that:
 Goethe’s glosses to translation 359

As a medium, the Sign is essentially in a triadic relation, to its Object which

determines it, and to its Interpretant which it determines. In its relation to the
Object, the Sign is passive; that is to say, its correspondence to the object is brought
about by an effect upon the Sign, the Object remaining unaffected. On the other
hand, in its relation to the Interpretant the Sign is active, determining the
Interpretant without being itself thereby affected.
But at this point certain distinctions are called for. That which is communicated
from the Object through the Sign to the Interpretant is a Form; that is to say, it is
nothing like an existent, but is a power, is the fact that something would happen
under certain conditions. This Form is really embodied in the object, meaning that
the conditional relation which constitutes the form is true of the Form as it is in the
Object. In the Sign it is embodied only in a representative sense, meaning that
whether by virtue of some real modification of the Sign, or otherwise, the Sign
becomes endowed with the power of communicating it to an interpretant. It may
be in the interpretant directly, as it is in the Object, or it may be in the Interpretant
dynamically, as [the] behavior of the Interpretant […] (MS 793: 2–5 = (in
different version) EP: 2: 544, 1906)

Thirdness in translation is no purely intellectual interaction of First and Second

into Third, but becomes a fantasy of a Second in relation to a First, without a
real Third. Peirce wrote that:

A man gives a brooch to his wife. The merely mechanical part of the act consists in
his laying the brooch down while uttering certain sounds, and her taking it up.
There is no genuine triplicity here; but there is no giving, either. The giving consists
in his agreeing that a certain intellectual principle shall govern the relations of the
brooch to his wife. (CP: 2.86, 1902)

The jewel of Goethe’s creative and recreative work West-östlicher Divan actively
involves the knowledge of Hafiz and von Hammer-Purgstall, but the “mere
congeries of dual characters” (MS 901: 13 = CP: 1.371, 1885) are brought in
such a way that the synthesis (Thirdness) lies on Goethe’s way of translation,
and particularly on himself as the translating poet.
In a literary work, the triadicity is dissolved into the “true duality” (MS 909:
11 = CP: 1.366, 1890–1891) of sign and object to embody the German
interpretants in verse of Hafiz’ Arabic Divan. Goethe’s “alienated” treasure-box
reflects his will and effort of mediation, based not alone on knowledge of
foreign languages, but on his artistic genius and aesthetic life. Peirce returned
to an Oriental tinge, when he continued as followed about semiosis and
mediation:
360 Dinda L. Gorlée

The merchant in the Arabian Nights threw away a datestone which struck the eye
of a Jinnee. This was purely mechanical, and there was no genuine triplicity. The
throwing and the striking were independent of one another. But had he aimed at
the Jinnee’s eye, there would have been more than merely throwing away the stone.
There would have been genuine triplicity, the stone being not merely thrown, but
thrown at the eye. Here, intention, the mind’s action, would have come in.
Intellectual triplicity, or Mediation, is my third category. (CP: 2.86, 1902)17

In the understanding of Goethe’s Divan and the “spontaneous” discovery of

applying a triadic translation, the “good”, “bad”, and “intermediate” sign-events
of translation modify and mediate the literary form of the accidental inter-
pretants, made by pure chance and effort (CP: 1.337, 1909). Goethe’s
intermediate (re)translation reflects not genuine semiosis – the “perfect” sign of
Thirdness – but offers “imperfect” signs. Pseudo-semiosis is represented in the
translation composed by human interpreters. The “quasi-minds” (MS 793: 2,
1906 = EP: 2: 544, 1906) create new but biased quasi-translations, on the
ground of quasi-signs made by the quasi-thought of a quasi-mind (Gorlée
2004b).18 Quasi-translations bring forth not the intellectual mind, but rather
some unanalyzable, unpredictable, unsystemic, and controversial qualities of
the feeling and mind of the interpreter-translator, manifesting instead of the
high-level mental semiosis the lower-level idea of Goethe’s wicked travesty of
the real facts.
Quasi- or pseudo-Thirdness is called “Betweenness or Mediation in its
simplest and most rudimentary form” (CP: 5.104, 1903). This degenerate sign
relation brings together and takes apart – semiotically, deconstructs and

17
The passage of Arabian Nights about accidental Thirds is repeated in Peirce’s episode:
“’How did I slay thy son?’ asked the merchant, and the jinnee replied, ‘When thou threwest
away the date-stone, it smote my son, who was passing at the time, on the breast, and he
died forthright.’ Here there were two independent facts, first that the merchant threw away
the date-stone, and second that the date-stone struck and killed the jinnee's son. Had it
been aimed at him, the case would have been different; for then there would have been a
relation of aiming which would have connected together the aimer, the thing aimed, and
the object aimed at, in one fact. What monstrous injustice and inhumanity on the part of
that jinnee to hold that poor merchant responsible for such an accident!” (MS 909: 12 =
CP: 1.365, 1890–1891) and mentioned again in “the date-stone, which hit the Jinnee in the
eye” (CP: 1.345, 1903).
18
Quasi-signs, see Gorlée (2004b: 66f., 87, 129f., 137, 148); quasi-thought, see Gorlée
(2004b: 145, 203ff., 206ff., 214, 217ff.); quasi-mind, see Gorlée (2004b: 66f., 87, 129f.,
137, 148).
 Goethe’s glosses to translation 361

constructs – Goethe’s glosses on the plurality of translation (CP: 2.89ff., 1902).

The deterioration of the triadic relation into a dyadic or degenerate semiosis can
define the varieties of intermediate types. The thought-off content of Goethe’s
Notes is regulated by the duality of first degenerate signs, but the ramified lines of
the Paralipomena agree with second degenerate signs (Parmentier 1985: 39f.).19
In first or singly degenerate signs, the interpretant points directly to its object, but
does not interact with the sign. For Peirce, the interpretant “forcibly directs [...]
to a particular object, and there it stops” (CP: 1.361, 1885) without giving a
specific reaction. The reaction is degenerate Secondness with a nuance of
Firstness and Thirdness. In second or doubly degenerate signs, the interpretant
relates to the sign and the object in separate sign-events, to make its own sense
representing the interpreter’s personal meaning. The degenerate Firstness with
a nuance of Secondness and Thirdness gives “a pure dream – not any particular
existence, and yet not general” (CP: 3.362, 1885).
Goethe was steadily accustomed to bilingual and bicultural identities in the
“radically new sort of element” (CP: 1.471, 1896) of his project, connecting
and disconnecting Hafiz and von Hammer-Purgstall within his German Divan.
He thus practiced in the definitions of the Notes a scientific proposition,20
identifying related and otherwise unrelated things about the types of translations
in his experience. Peirce’s proposition was a singly degenerate arrangement,
made “in a living effort to make its interpreter believe it true” (MS 646: 16,
1910). Goethe asserted that the dyadic connection of active sign and passive
object (CP: 1.471, 1896) was known as Schleiermacher’s duality of paraphrases
and imitations. Yet Goethe’s “triad brings a third sort of element, the expression
of thought, or reasoning, consisting of a colligation of two propositions, not
mere dyadic propositions, however, but general beliefs; and these two
propositions are connected by a common term and tend to produce a third
belief” (CP: 1.515, c.1896). Goethe wanted to affect the readers by the
freedom of his third agent, adaptation – a germane but extraneous element to
the interactive duality. In a proposition, Peirce stated that:

19
See Buczyńska-Garewicz (1979, 1983), Gorlée (1990), and Merrell (1995). Peirce’s
formal concept of degeneracy and its informal examples were specifically explained in his
later years, from 1885 and ending in 1909; see Peirce’s informal letter to Victoria Lady
Welby (1837–1912) with a glossary of intermediate types (PW: 194, 1905).
20
“Proposition” is one of Peirce’s favourite terms, omnipresent in his writings about
language, interpretation, utterance, and meaning.
362 Dinda L. Gorlée

[…] there are in the dyad two subjects of different character, though in special
cases the difference may disappear. These two subjects are the units of the dyad.
Each is one, though a dyadic one. Now the triad in like manner has not for its
principal element merely a certain unanalyzable quality sui generis. It makes [to be
sure] a certain feeling in us. (CP: 1.471, 1896)

Contrary to scientific method, “[…] it is to be understood that proposition,

judgment, and belief are logically equivalent (though in other respects different)”
(MS 789: 2, n.d.). Despite the doubts that “a proposition is nothing existent, but
is a general model, type, or law according to which existents are shaped” (MS
280: 29, c.1905), Goethe took his responsibility of the propositional
announcement, supporting the three types of translation as a general idea.
Peirce announced that “[i]n science, a diagram or analogue of the observed
fact leads on to a further analogy” (MS 909: 12f. [see 42] = CP: 1.367, 1890–
1891). The approximative approach of the “reactionally degenerate” (CP: 5.73,
1902) glosses of the Notes is again deconstructed in the doubly degenerate list
of Paralipomena. The separate lines depend not really on intellectual perfor-
mance (Thirdness), but sketch the design of the “qualitatively degenerate”
(CP: 5.73, 1902) moods and tones of thought of Goethe’s own self. Goethe’s
images of self-depiction in the edited version “address themselves to us, so that
we fully apprehend them. But it is a paralyzed reason that does not acknowledge
others that are not directed to us, and does not suppose still others of which we
know nothing definitely” (MS 4: 49, 1904; my italics). Goethe’s “airy nothing-
ness” (CP: 4.241, 1902) means that the sign of “Brute Actuality of things and
facts” (Secondness) has weakened beyond the meaningful occurrence into the
undetermined and vague quality of “suchness” (Firstness) (CP: 1.303, c.1894,
CP: 1.326, c.1894, CP: 1.304, c.1905), independent from the object (Gorlée
2009). To illustrate the empty pages of “Translations” in Paralipomena, Peirce
wrote something analogous, saying that:

Combine quality with quality after quality and what is the mode of being which
such determinations approach indefinitely but altogether fail ever to attain? It is,
as logicians have always taught, the existence of the individual. Individual existence
whether of a thing or of a fact is the first mode of being that suchness fails to
confer. (CP: 1.456, c.1896)
 Goethe’s glosses to translation 363

The mere Firstness is a “rough impression” (SS: 194, 1905) reflecting the
“Sign’s Soul, which has its Being in its power of serving as intermediary
between its Object and a Mind. Such, too, is a living consciousness, and such
the life, the power of growth, of a plant” (CP: 6.455, 1908). Grasping the
possibility of understanding the hidden idea of a “dark instinct of being a germ
of thought” (CP: 5.71, 1902), the reader is brought “face to face with the very
character signified” (NEM 4: 242, 1904), with the expressions and emotions of
Goethe’s own self-portrait.
With “only a fragment or a completer sign” (NEM 4: 242, 1904) in
Goethe’s Paralipomena, the last and final point of intermediate types has been
argued in bricolages (Firstness) (Gorlée 2007: 224ff.). Translation started out
as pure intellectual Thirdness, but was accurately and sharply weakened into
mixed concepts of Secondness and Thirdness, mingling with Thirdness.
Pseudo-translation is degenerate thought, mediated into a representation of
the fact according to a possible idea. Goethe’s images of translation are not
reasoned, but rely on experience and education. In the Notes and the Parali-
pomena, degenerate translation gave in Peirce’s perspective “just one un-
separated image, not resembling a proposition in the smallest particular [...];
but it never told you so. Now in all imagination and perception there is such an
operation by which thought springs up; and its only justification is that it
subsequently turns out to be useful” (CP: 1.538, 1903) – like Goethe’s thing of
beauty in West-östlicher Divan.

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Комментарии Гете по поводу перевода

При объяснении логической и алогической общности триадического метода перевода
в статье опирались на пирсовскую семиотическую модель–триаду знак, объект и
интерпретант. С помощью семиоперевода создается динамическая сеть пирсовских
интерпретантов, в которой искусственные, но развивающиеся знаки прогрессируют
от неопределенного («плохого») перевода ко все более определенному («хоро-
шему») переводу. Три типа перевода выделял и Гете. В произведении «Западно-
восточный диван» (West-östlicher Divan, 1814–1819) он подражает персидскому поэту
14 века. Использование свободного перевода/парфразирования Гете оправдывал в
своих работах «Заметки и очерки о «Западно-восточном Диване»» (Noten und
Abhandlungen) и Paralipomena (1818–1819). С помощью критических комментариев
он объясняет передачу, адаптацию и репродуцирование информации, представленной
в чужой культуре и литературе (на староперсидском языке арабским шрифтом)
способом, позволившим ее трансляцию в «эквивалентный» стихотворный немецкий
язык 19 века. Будучи критическим представителем перевода и культурного посредни-
чества, Гете представляет свои комментарии к «Западно-восточному дивану» как
пародию, соединяющую Запад и Восток. Гете создал (не)похожесть, указывая в ходе
псевдосемиозиса на первый и второй дегенерированный тип объекта и знака.

Goethe kommentaarid tõlkimise kohta

Triaadilise tõlkemeetodi loogilise ja ebaloogilise ühtsuse vahendamisel tugineti Peirce’i
kolmetisele, märgiks, objektiks ja interpretandiks jagunevale semiootilisele mudelile.
Semiotõlkega luuakse Peirce’i interpretantide dünaamiline võrgustik, milles kunstlikud,
kuid arenevad märgid progresseeruvad määratlematust (“halvast”) versioonist järjest
määratletuma (“hea”) tõlke poole. Kolme tõlketüüpi eristas ka Goethe. Teoses West-
östlicher Divan (1814–1819) imiteerib ta Pärsia poeedi Hafizi (14. saj) töid. Kasutatud
vaba tõlget / parafraseerimist õigustas Goethe oma töödes Noten und Abhandlungen ja
Paralipomena (1818–1819). Kriitiliste kommentaaride abil selgitab ta võõras kultuuris ja
kirjanduses (araabia tähestikus esitatud vana-pärsia keeles) esineva informatsiooni
edastamist, adapteerimist ja reprodutseerimist viisil, mis võimaldaks selle transleerimist
368 Dinda L. Gorlée

“ekvivalentsesse” 19. sajandi saksa värsikeelde. Tõlkimise ja kultuurivahendamise kriitilise

eestkostjana esitab Goethe oma teost West-östlicher Divan käsitlevate kommentaaride näol
ida- ja õhtumaid ühendava paroodia. Goethe vormis sarnasuse (puudumise), viidates tõlke
pseudo-semioosis objekti ja märgi esimesele ja teisele degenereerunud tüübile.