» Die Predigt « - Preisrede 'Moby-Dick'

Preisrede zur Verleihung des Heinrich-Maria-Ledig-Rowohlt-Preises für Übersetzungen angelsächsischer Literatur

Frankfurt a.M., 12.10.2002, Hotel "Hessischer Hof" - gehalten zum Salat (and, upon request, in english)

Dear chairman, members of the jury and of the governing board of the Heinrich Maria Ledig Rowohlt Foundation and dear Mrs. von Salomon;
Ladies and Gentlemen,

"But this is not a novel!" exclaimed my significant other, who cannot be here tonight, when two years ago I was trying to translate this whale of a book and she, in a brave show of solidarity, was trying to read it. She was right, in a way. Indeed one may ask, paraphrasing Stanley Fish: "Is there a novel in this text?" There is, of course, and not just a novel, but also, as a powerful, strongly metricized and dramatized scene like Chapter 37: "Sunset" shows, a tragedy, albeit a very "bourgeois" and American one, "ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel", as we might say in our language. Yet Melville's strange and in many ways unique text is indeed just that: A text in the literal sense of the word, a weaving-together, a patchwork of genres, styles, tones and registers, an American quilt of many colours. The "careful disorderliness" that Melville himself, in one of those seemingly modern - or even postmodern - auctorial intrusions, defended as the "true method" for his enterprise, has produced an amalgam, or rather a melange, of a book, consisting of two prologues, one epilogue and 135 chapters - chapters that are often essayistic in a way that reminds me of Montaigne: rambling, digressive, spontaneous or at least seeming so. It was one of the major goals of this new translation to do justice to this diversity, this, if you like, polyphony.

I would like to entertain you, or at least keep you awake, with two examples from the wide atmospheric range this text provides.

The first passage dives right down to the depths, the somewhat seedy or in this case downright dirty depths of the ocean of words Ahab and his Pequod sail over. In Chapter 95, "The Cassock", we encounter a sailor called "the mincer" - "der Hauer" -, a man whose job entails to fashion himself some sort of office suit from what Melville, in a twice twisted joke, claims the simple sailors call "the Grandissimus" of the sperm whale, his membrum, his, to put it bluntly, "dick". This mincer carries that thing on his shoulders like a carpet roll - "as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field", Melville quips -, carries it to the ship's forecastle, takes off its skin and later slips into that skin and steps up to some sort of pulpit in order to cut, thus clothed or sheathed, the blubber - in German, "den Speck" - of the whale into very fine slices which Melville insists the mariners call "bible leaves". In terms fit for a Catholic priest's job description, Melville writes:

"The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office. [...] Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!"

in German:

"Nun steht der Hauer vor euch, angetan mit dem vollen Ornat seines Amtes. Nur diese Investitur, seit Menschengedenken für seinen gesamten Orden verbindlich, ist ihm bei seinen Offizien ein angemessener Schutz und Schirm. [...] Wie der Hauer so dasteht, gewandet in ehrbares Schwarz, an seiner hervorragenden Kanzel, vertieft in seine Bibelblätter - welch einen trefflichen Anwärter auf ein Erzbistum gäbe dieser Hauer ab, welch einen prächtigen Burschen für den Heiligen Stuhl!"

Now, in the first American edition of 1851, the word "archbishopric" ("Erzbistum" or "Erzbischofswürde, Erzdiözese" in German), which of course should end with an innocent c, had a not so innocent k added to it - which the careful English copy editor-cum-censor emended for the first English edition that same year. Which makes him rather naughty, this archbishop, does it not, giving him a membrum virile which should be counted among the Unspeakables, on a Man of God as much as in a Text of that Time - and which refers back, on a somewhat reduced, human scale, to the "grandissimus" of the whale.

What to do then, as a translator, with this "Zote", this less-than double entendre, this archbishop's prick? If any of you should come up with a brilliant solution that centers on the archbishop and his little friend, I would sure like to hear it, if only for a possible second, revised edition of the German Moby-Dick. My solution was to claim poetic licence and put the double entendre into the title of the chapter: "The Cassock" thus became not "Die Soutane", "Der Talar" or somesuch, but "Der Überzieher", which, as the German-speaking guests will remember, is not just a somewhat dated alias for a coat, but also German for what older British Gentlemen might still refer to as a "French letter" - while the French, never a nation to take an insult and turn the other cheek, refer to it as "capote anglaise". Germans, subconsciously encoding centuries of fighting the false French, of course call that thing "ein Pariser", after the French capital, the "City of Love"...

My second example moves to the end of the book, the end of Chapter 135 with its rather biblical title: "The Chase - Third Day" (in parentheses: the Bible in the King James Version of 1611 and Shakespeare’s works are the two major of a mass of pre-, sub- or intertexts for Melville's opus maximus). This passage takes us up to one of the many Melvillian narrative heights and to a pathos that elsewhere occasionally slips into bathos. The ship, in a stark inversion of the Myth of Noah's Ark, is sinking, a world is drowning and dying in three days, not being created in six, and a bird of prey, not of peace, perishes with the ship instead of being released from it, while an Indian nails the flag -which flag really? - to the sinking masttop. In Melville's words:

"A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that ethereal thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago."

It still sends a shiver down my spine to read those last lines. "Then all collapsed" sounds very modern, I think, and it is neither too far-fetched to interpret this as more a prediction than a description, nor is it too trivial to note that its reverberations and images engendered, as we read it today, are different after last year's “9/ll". “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold" wrote Yeats in ”The Second Coming", and is not this, indeed, the quintessential experience of modernity, that things, and not just towers, fall apart?

In German,
the last paragraph of this chapter now reads thus:

"Nun flogen kleine Vögel kreischend über dem noch gähnenden Abgrund; mürrische weiße Wellen schlugen gegen seine steilen Wände; dann brach alles ein, und das große Leichentuch des Meeres wogte weiter wie vor fünf Jahrtausenden."

You will probably note the curious stress on the five thousand years in those last words of the last regular chapter before the epilogue. Both Jews and Christians among you will easily recognize the reference to the biblical, mythical age of the world. And so, this translation ends with another, albeit slight, act of poetic licence on the part of the translator: "Five thousand years ago" have become "vor fünf Jahrtausenden" - a touch-and-go decision based on the intention to stress the biblical reference and to compensate, with the iambic metre of those last words, for rhetorical losses earlier in the end of that chapter, the numerous alliterations for example.

I should very much like to thank the Heinrich Maria Ledig Rowohlt Foundation for awarding a prize to this new translation - and for the money this prize brings, for Melville's cri de cœur at the end of Chapter 32 might well be the somewhat anguished motto of every literary translator: "Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!"

I thank Hanser, the publishing house, and especially Wolfgang Matz, for having shown patience with his long hunt, chase and quest.

And, last but definitely not least, I thank Daniel Göske, the editor of the series and close reader of this translation in its various stages, whose knowledge and critical acumen was in every sense of the word indispensable for this new rendering of the White Whale.

As for the new German Moby-Dick, I shall end with Melville's words to the reader at the end of Chapter 79:
"How may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can."

Or, in German:
"Wie kann der unbelesene Ismael dann hoffen, das altehrwürdige Chaldäisch auf der Pottwalstirn zu lesen? Ich stelle diese Stirn nur vor euch hin. Lest sie, wenn ihr könnt."

Ladies and Gentlemen, I thank you for your attention.