Wagner on the German language

[Anonymous No.22487324]

From the essay Public and Popularity:

>What then is the character of the Mediocre?
>By this term, I should say, we commonly signify that which brings us no new and unknown thing, but the known already in a pleasing and insinuating form. In a good sense, it would be the product of Talent—if we agree with Schopenhauer that Talent hits a mark we all can see, but cannot lightly reach; whilst Genius, the genius of "the Good," attains a goal we others do not even see.
>Hence Virtuosity proper belongs to Talent, and the musical virtuoso affords the clearest illustration of the preceding definition. The works of our great composers we have always with us; but he alone can perform them rightly, and in the master's spirit, who has the talent. To let his virtuosity sparkle solely for itself, the musician often trumps up pieces of his own: these belong to the class of the mediocre; whereas their virtuosity cannot in itself be strictly ranged in such a class, for we must candidly confess that a middling virtuoso is of no class at all.— A virtuosity very near of kin to that denoted, accordingly the exercise of Talent proper, we find most pronounced in the literary profession among the French. As instrument they possess a language that seems purposely built for it, whose highest law is to express oneself cleverly, wittily, and in every circumstance neatly and clearly. It is impossible for a French author to gain acceptance, if his work does not before all else comply with these requirements of his native tongue. Perhaps the very excess of attention he thus has to devote to his expression, to his style regarded in and for itself, makes it difficult for a French writer to have novelty of thought, to recognise a goal which others don't yet see; and for the simple reason, that he would be unable to find for these wholly new ideas the happy phrase that at once would strike all readers. This may account for the French having such unsurpassable virtuosi to shew in their literature, whilst the intrinsic value of their works—with the great exceptions of earlier epochs—seldom rises above the mediocre.

[Anonymous No.22487326]

>>22487324
CONT

>Now, nothing more perverse can be imagined, than the adoption by German writers of that attribute which makes the French such brilliant virtuosi on the ground of speech. The attempt to treat the German language as an instrument of virtuosity could only occur to those to whom the German tongue is truly alien, and who therefore twist it to improper uses. None of our great poets and sages can be rated as virtuosi of speech: every one of them was in the same position as Luther, who had to ransack every German dialect for his translation of the Bible, to find the word and turn to popularly express that New he had discovered in the sacred books' original text. For what distinguishes the German spirit from that of every other culture-folk is this, that its creative sons had first seen something ne'er yet uttered, before they fell a-writing,—which for them was but a necessary consequence of the prior inspiration. Thus each of our great poets and thinkers had to form his language for himself; an obligation to which the inventive Greeks themselves do not appear to have been submitted, since they had at command a language always spoken by the living mouth, and therefore pliant to each thought or feeling, but not an element corrupted by bad pensters. In a poem from Italy how Goethe bewailed his being doomed by birth to wield the German tongue, in which he must first invent for himself what the Italians and French, for instance, found ready to their hand. That under such hardships none but truly original minds have risen to production among ourselves, should teach us what we are, and at any rate that there is something peculiar about us Germans. But that knowledge will also teach us, that if virtuosity in any branch of art is the evidence of talent, this Talent is denied in toto to the Germans, at least in the branch of Literature: who toils to acquire a virtuosity in this, will stay a bungler; if, following the musical virtuoso who composes pieces of his own, he trumps up poetical sketches for setting off his fancied virtuosity, however, they will not even belong to the category of the Mediocre, but simply of the Bad, the wholly null.

END

[Anonymous No.22487329]

>>22487326
From Shall We Hope?:

>I believe I may say without presumption that the thought worked out in that essay on "German Art and German Policy" was no idle caprice of a self-deluding fancy: it took shape within me from an ever plainer recognition of the powers and qualities peculiar to the German spirit, as witnessed by a lengthy roll of German masters all striving—in my way of feeling—for that spirit's highest manifestation in an Artwork national to the human race. The importance of such an Artwork for the very highest culture of this and all other nations, once it were tended as a living, ever new possession of our people, must strike the mind of him who has ceased to expect aught beneficial from the working of our modern State and Church machinery. If with Schiller we call them both "barbaric" by singular good fortune it is another great German who has rendered us the meaning of this word, and that from Holy Writ itself. Luther had to translate the eleventh verse of the fourteenth chapter of the first epistle of Paul to the Corinthians. Here the Greek word "barbaros" is applied to him whose tongue we do not understand; the Latin translator—for whom the word had already lost its Greek significance and become a mere synonym for uncivilised and lawless foreign races—sets down a half unmeaning "barbarus", no longer to the point. All subsequent translators, in every language, have followed the Latin example; especially weak and formal seems the French translation of the text, "Si donc je n'entends pas ce que signifient les paroles, je serai barbare pour celui a qui je parle; et celui qui me parle sera barbare pour moi"—from which one might deduce a maxim that governs the French to this day, and not to their advantage, in their judgment of other nations. Even in this connection, on the contrary, Luther's rendering of "barbaros" by "undeutsch" gives a milder, unaggressive aspect to our attitude towards the foreign. To the dismay of all philologists he translates the verse as follows: "If I know not the meaning (Deutung) of the voice, I shall be undeutsch to him that speaketh, and he that speaketh will be undeutsch to me."—

CONT

[Anonymous No.22487331]

>>22487329
>Anyone who carefully collates the Greek text with this frankly faithful rendering, will perceive that the latter gives us its inner meaning even more aptly than the original itself, for it sets "Deutung" and "Deutsch" in direct relation; and, kindled to a deep sense of the treasure we possess in our language, he will surely be filled with unspeakable sorrow when he sees its value shamefully debased. Yet it was recently said [by Nietzsche] that it would have been better if Luther had been burned at the stake, like other heretics; the Romish renaissance would then have taken root in Germany as well, and raised us to the same height of Culture with our reborn neighbours. I fancy this wish will strike many as not only "undeutsch", but also "barbarous" in the sense of our Romanic neighbours. Despite it we will cling to one last hope, and take Luther's "un-German" for a translation of Schiller's "barbaric", as applied to our State-and-Church machinery; then, seeking for the German Spirit's must, we perhaps may even light upon a glimmer of its realising.

END

[Anonymous No.22487335]

>>22487331
From Cosima's diaries:

>In the evening finished the Grimm essay; R. disputes the glorification of the English language in it; he says the only language which can be recognized as really beautiful is the one which is still attached to its roots, and it is a false optimism which induced Grimm to say that the mixing of the Latin and Germanic languages had produced perfection; such mixtures, R. says, are an evil, and the purer a language remains as it develops, the more significant it is. “Of course,” he concludes, “Grimm had given up all hope of a German culture (and one can’t blame him), and he was glad that at least one severed tribe had managed to get as far as the English and their culture had done.”

>In spite of a violent headache, R. spoke a lot with me early this morning about the German language, which has in his opinion not yet displayed all its riches, “for Lessing, finding it in the state it then was, constructed words based on foreign conceptions, which then dominated everything. It is fortunately true that these constructions were in the spirit of the German language, but the language has not yet undergone a development coming from its own roots.”

>At lunch the statement of the gladiators—“Morituri te salutant”—cropped up. — The word morituri cannot be expressed in other languages in a single word; the German language has lost these potentialities because it took its cultivation from the languages of the Latin countries, that is to say, from the languages based on Latin in an emasculated form.

>Then, in all seriousness, he talks about the German language, its arrested development, the great intellects searching around for foreign models—“Is it still possible now to return to the source, to think again about the wealth of inflections, etc.?”

>Prof. N. departed, having caused R. many difficult hours. Among other things, he maintains that the German language gives him no pleasure, and he would rather talk Latin, etc. R. mentions his own rules for treating the German language, says one should first look to see whether a foreign term is completely necessary to express the sense; if it is, then use it boldly, and untranslated.

>The German language, he says, is now the only one which, as J. Grimm says, can be studied physiologically, not just in order to speak it or to read the classical writers (in contrast to French, English, and Italian).

>In the evening, coming back to the German language, he says the spirit of the language does not allow one to express oneself just in short sentences, the art lies in being clear and definite within the encapsulated structure of German.

CONT

[Anonymous No.22487339]

>>22487335
>When I come down to supper, [R.] says, "I have been pursuing philology." He has looked to see how the passage in which Luther translates the word "barbaros" as "undeutsch" appears in Greek, Latin, English, and French—French the least felicitous with the abstract word "barbare," which is also so ambiguous, the English somewhat better; but Luther is splendid! R. cannot stress too strongly what this touch means to him; he returns to it once more late in the evening and says: "These young people! Do you remember how I once showed that passage to [Erwin] Rohde and Nietzsche, and they saw nothing in it? Such lack of understanding and imagination!"

>At lunch R. said that W. v. Humboldt was driving him to despair with all his drivel about his ideas, excellent as these may be in themselves. He also expresses his antipathy toward the English language; the fact that in it a Shakesp. has emerged does not disturb him—that is an anomaly; but imaginative writing is possible only in a language in-which one feels every word to be alive. The German language is still half alive. He cites the verb “sprechen’’ [“to speak”] as a living word, whereas “reden” [“to talk”] is a constructed, dead word. I think I understand correctly what he then added: that English was a created language (under H. VII), since before that time French was spoken, and that Shakespeare was able to work creatively with a language in the process of creation, rather like Dante; however, by the time the mixtum compositum was finally established, poetry was already dead.

>He lies down in bed, we have breakfast, and he is soon so much recovered that he can embark on a detailed discussion of the passage in Kant concerning “seeds.” “I can very easily imagine how a Laplander, for instance, evolves out of a Norman, however farfetched it sounds, and this idea opens many doors. The seeds of the widest variety are in Nature itself—for example, man’s carnivorous tendencies are indicated by his canine teeth, and it all depends on the way things evolve. In Germany everything is in the process of dying out—for me a dismal realization, since I am addressing myself to the still-existent seeds. But one thing is certain: races are done for, and all that can now make an impact is—as I have ventured to express it—the blood of Christ.”

END

[Anonymous No.22487858]

Can you post more extracts? These are all so terribly interesting. Especially from the Cosima's diaries: there is something so eery about reading about the reflections Wagner might have went through during a single day.

Anyway thanks for this thread, I think you've just convinced me to read Wagner's writings and Cosima's diaries. Dunno why I never thought about doing it, considering how much I appreciate Wagner's sublime musical dramas