Translating Thomas Mann's German Introspection Into English

13 August 2024

After many years of putting it off, I've started reading Thomas Mann's monumental Der Zauberberg, or, in English, The Magic Mountain. It's a beautiful, thought-provoking meditation on time, love, illness, and, I assume, a host of other heady concepts I haven't gotten to yet because I've only read up to chapter 5. One thing particularly jumped out at me though: there's a recurring deconstruction of the German language that points to what can only have been a vexing problem for the translator¹. When the novel is explicitly looking inward at the language it happens to be written in, how do you translate that introspection to another language?

The example that made this problem apparent to me occurs early in the novel² when our protagonist, Hans Castorp, is talking to Settembrini, an Italian resident of the sanitorium that he, Hans Castorp, believes that he, Hans Castorp, is visiting for only a short time.

"Yes, yes, yes," he repeated, hissing the s all three times. Turning again to Hans Castorp, he clicked his tongue softly an equal number of times. "I see, I see, I see," he now said in another triplet of sharp s's"... (84) ³

The problem leaps off the page: I don't know very much German, but I do know that the German word for 'yes' is ja, which obviously contains no s's⁴, contains, in fact, no letters that can be hissed. The only thing to do is look up how Mann wrote it in his beloved native German.

«So, so, so», sagte er dreimal mit scharfem S, indem er sich wieder gegen Hans Castorp wandte, und schnalzte dann ebensooft mit der Zunge leise am oberen Gaumen. «Sieh, sieh, sieh», sagte er hierauf, ebenfalls dreimal und mit scharfem S-Laut... (54) ^{5 6}

So instead of "yes, yes, yes", Settembrini is saying "so, so, so", and instead of "I see, I see, I see", he's using the second-person imperativ mood of sehen (to see), which Google Translate renders as "look, look, look", which seems both more accurate and semantically different than the way Woods renders it. To be clear, this is not a criticism of Woods, obviously I am in no position to do that. This is simply an observation of the difficulties of translation. In any case, both triplets can be read as meaningless filler syllables rather than attempts to convey an actual point, so considering that the surrounding text requires the presence of s's in the translation, "yes, yes, yes" and "I see, I see, I see" are perfectly acceptable translations – though I think it's interesting that Woods chose not to retain "so, so, so" which works just as well in English as in the original German.

Helen Lowe-Porter gives this translation:

"Yes, yes, yes," he said, repeating the word three times, with a sharp s, turning to Hans Castorp again as he spoke, and then, in the same measured way, clucking three times with his tongue against his palate. "I see, I see, I see," he said again, giving the s the same sharp sound as before. (58) ⁷

Aside from a general clunkiness that I think Woods improves on, the German schnalzen⁸ seems to refer specifically to the clicking of the tongue and to my ear, 'cluck' is an odd choice for that. Perhaps not wrong, per se – Wiktionary's third definition of cluck reads "A kind of tongue click used to urge on a horse", but, as you'd expect the first is "The sound made by a hen" and, pleasingly, the second is "Any sound similar to this" – but my first introduction to Lowe-Porter's translation does seem to support the notion that her work editorializes in a way the source text doesn't.

The next example made me think this would be a common occurence and I should start looking out for instances of this phenomenon. Hans Castorp is attending a lecture given by the director of the sanitorium's assistance, Dr. Krokowski, on the subject of love. I'm going to quote a bit of a longer passage here because it's good. The hardest part of choosing quotations is deciding where to cut them off and I'm deciding to let this one breathe.

In particular, the orator constantly used the word 'love' in a gently irresolute sense, so that one was never quite sure whether he meant its sanctified or more passionate and fleshly forms – leaving one feeling slightly nauseated and seasick. Never in his life had Hans Castorp heard this word spoken so many times in a row as he did here and now; indeed, when he thought about it, it seemed to him as if he had never spoken it himself before or heard it pass anyone else's lips. He might have been mistaken – but at least he did not think such frequent repetition did the word any good, either. On the contrary, this slippery syllable with its lingual and labial consonants and scanty vowel in the middle really began to disgust him after a while, conjuring up for him somehow images of watery milk – something whitish-blue and insipid, particularly when compared with all the robust fodder that Dr. Krokowski was serving up. (124)

Isn't that good? Anyway, the point is the minutely deconstructive description of the word itself, 'love', or liebe im Deutsch. Enjoying and then subsequently ignoring the surrounding text, the important bit is 'this slippery syllable with its lingual and labial consonants and scanty vowel in the middle'. Mann's original reads:

diese schlüpfrigen anderthalb Silben mit dem Zungen-, dem Lippenlaut und dem dünnen Vokal in der Mitte (116)

'These slippery one-and-a-half syllables with the tongue and lip sounds and the thin vowel in the middle.' Here, Woods gets lucky; the English and German words for love are similar enough that the original description doesn't feel out of place, though it's also not perfact. Of course, there's the difference in the number of syllables (liebe being pronounced more or less 'LEE-buh', with the 'buh' being cut off a bit), though subjectively, I think that the 'ee' of liebe is 'thinner', or 'scantier', than the broad, round 'uh' of love. More technically, [b] is labial while [v] is labiodental, a word I learned right now and I promise I'm not trying to be pedantic about, indicating an interaction between lips and teeth. In linguistics terminology, [l] is the voiced alveolar lateral approximant, each word of which has a Wikipedia article too long and technical for me to read right now though I did learn that 'alveolar' refers to consonants produced by placing the tip of the tongue against the back of the upper teeth, and that 'lateral' indicates the way that gesture restricts airflow through the middle of the mouth and pushes it to the sides. I agree with Woods that '...tongue and lip sounds' is probably better translated as 'lingual and labial consonants', since German is often frugal about new, specific words when existing ones can be combined to create new ones. It seems notable that Mann doesn't say 'consonants', just 'sounds', but I suppose it's implied by the contrast with the thin vowel.

I have no desire to compare every passage of Woods to Lowe-Porter's rendition so I will here provide only the specific line that we're interested in. Regarding the description of the production of the word 'love' via mouth, tongue, lips, and teeth, Lowe-Porter has this to say:

The slippery monosyllable, with its lingual and labial, and the bleating vowel between (126)

The vowel that Mann calls dünnen and Woods calls 'scanty', Porter-Lowe calls 'bleating', which, again, I can see the logic of but it feels like it's adding an extra layer of connotation. Interesting, she drops laut/'consonant' all together and uses 'lingual' and 'labial' as nouns unto themselves, which I can't fault! Having been thinking about Woods's translation, it's a little hard to not read it as having a blatantly absent noun but in a vacuum I don't mind it at all.

The last one I'm going to cover in this article is a bit different, being more to do with idioms than with the sound and emotional effect of words themselves. Per Woods:

"Precisely," Hans Castorp exclaimed with genuine enthusiasm. "You’ve put it perfectly, dotted the i and crossed the t, Herr Settembrini.." (197)

«Genauso» rief Hans Castorp in aufrichtiger Begisterung. «Tadellos ausgedrückt bis aufs I-Tüpfelchen, Herr Settembrini!» (184)

As far as I can make it out, it's something like 'Perfectly expressed down to the dots on the i'. Wiktionary's entry on i-Tüpfelchen defines it as the English 'tittle', which is apparently an English word for the dot of an i or j in particular, but any 'dot, stroke, or diacritical mark, especially if part of a letter, or if a letter-like abbreviation', and, '(by extension) A small, insignificant amount (of something)'. I was hoping there would be a completely different idiomatic way of expressing this notion in German but in my disappointment I take consolation in being aware of both i-Tüpfelchen and 'tittle'.

Interestingly, Lowe-Porter doesn't say 'dotted the i and crossed the t' but 'expressed it to a T' (200). Mann uses only i, Woods uses both i and t, and Lowe-Porter uses only t, removing the graphological metaphor employed by the other two while retaining the same meaning. I'm really trying to wrap this article up but I just checked Wiktionary and the phrase 'to a T' is of uncertain etymological origin but may originate as "to a tittle", which brings Lowe-Porter's apparently divergent translation back to the congruence with Woods and Mann!

If I find any other juicy bits of translation as I proceed through The Magic Mountain I will probably collect and write more about them as I've really enjoyed writing this article. If not, I will still almost certainly have enjoyed reading it anyway. Translation is as beautiful and messy and fascinating as writing itself and I think it's neat to see how a translator's personality can come through in their attempt to complete an impossible task.

• ¹ In my case, John E. Woods's 1996 edition. It's excellent, though I haven't read any others so I can't speak to how it rates in comparison. I've heard, though, that Helen Lowe-Porter was uncomfortable with some of Mann's more transgressive themes and that later translations are a little less editorial in that regard, which feels like a good thing to me. ↩︎
• ² All my examples will occur early in the novel because it's a long book and again, I can't stress this enough, I've only gotten to chapter 5. ↩︎
• ³ As tempting as it is to get into it, I'm going to leave aside the lexicographical problem of "hissing the s" and "triplet of sharp s's", though, if I may be permitted one brief observation, when I was first introduced to Greek letters – alpha, beta, gamma, etc – the idea of letters having names that were repesentable as full words with multiple syllables was almost incomprehensible to me, but it's a tidy solution to this problem. If I may be permitted another brief observation, crossword puzzle constructors would like to think that English letters are representable in this way and if any of them are reading this: thank you for your service but no, they are not. ↩︎
• ⁴ Page numbers for quotes from the Woods translation come from my First Vintage International Eddition, 1996. ↩︎
• ⁵ Quotes from the original German are coming from this PDF on archive.org. Page numbers refer to page numbers as marked in the book itself, not the pages of the PDF. ↩︎
• ⁶ German uses guillemets (« ») in literary works while newspapers and hand-written texts tend to use Anführungszeichen („ “) – literally, "quotation marks". I tried to find the German word for guillemets and the closest I got is one website that called them Anführungszeichen 2 with the alternative being called Anführungszeichen 1. I'm not sure I trust this information but it does feel very German. ↩︎
• ⁷ Quotes from the Lowe-Porter translation are coming from this PDF on archive.org. Page nummbers refer to page numbers as marked in the book itself, not the pages of the PDF. ↩︎
• ⁸ The word Mann uses (schnalzte) is, incidentally, almost impossible for me to type as my brain refuses to recognize that arrangement of z and t in German orthography. ↩︎
• ⁹ Incidentally, when I was writing the bit above about the kinds of meaningless syllables that are technically words but carry very little semantic value, I was thinking of the German genau. Wiktionary defines it as 'just, exactly', but my impression of its common usage among Germans is as a sort of all-purpose way to agree, acknowledge, start a sentence that would sound blunt without some kind of preamble, etc, and can be found peppered involuntarily throughout speech in myriad ways. Here, Mann's word that Woods and Lowe-Porter agree should be translated as 'precisely' is genauso, literally 'just/exactly so'. Neat!