bnamenwirth@yahoo.com
November 27, 2018

Dear Barbara,

On one of my bookshelves there is a set of three volumes, duodecimo in size, each on about 400 pages of onion skin paper, bound in yellow linen, with the title: Die Reden des Gautamo Buddha (The Speeches of Gautamo Buddha), and every few years when I make a stab at reading them, I stop in disappointment, because the style of the modern German into which they are translated, leads me to suspect that the translator was, to put it mildly, uncomfortable with the version of Sanskrit that he was rendering into a language with which I am very familiar. 

In the course of years, I have become increasingly suspicious of translations primarily because I am consistently confronted with the awkwardness of trying to translate what I myself have written from German into English, and conversely to express in German the English technical terminology in the many new Anglo-American scientific enterprises. That my problem is more than an idiosyncracy is suggested by the circumstance that contemporary technical German has turned into an impalatable concoction of American anglicisms.  By way of contrast, two of the most satisfying translations into German with which I am familiar are of Shakespeares plays by Schlegel and Tieck, and of his Sonnets by Stefan George. On reading more closely, I conclude that these are not true translations, but that the artistry of the translators has created new works of German poetry patterned on an English original. 

Aside from the fact that I am ignorant of Hebrew, the Bible provides me with an set of texts I can readily compare: the Greek of the Septuagint and of the New Testament, Saint Jerome's Latin Vulgate, the translations of Luther and of the Jacobeans, and the pathetic attempts of contemporary missionary spirits to dumb down into a "Religion for Dummies" format the older texts in the hopes of making them accessible to a semi-literate modern clientele which is barely able to read, and which is hard put to understand anything at all. Such comparisons are very informative concerning religion and conerning language.

What I glean from the "translated" Buddha speeches, - and please correct me, if I am wrong, - is concerted persuasion to communal meditation, with a scarcity of external sources to provide substance to memory and a paucity of external structure to offer direction to thought, imagination or verbal expression, very much in contrast to the formal Roman Catholic and Protestant liturgy with which I am familiar, the prayers and Masses and Creeds which are inherently poetic and have served many composers as texts for religious music. 

The phenomenon of communal meditation is of particular interest to me, because for years I have labored - or played - with a theory which makes a sharp distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, where what is subjective is individual and "inward", not susceptible to verbal expression, while what is objective is outward, public, and is shared by many individuals through the symbolism of language and to a lesser extent, mathematics. That this scheme oversimplifies, is suggested to me by my participation in Protestant religious services where the congregation is expected to express its beliefs by repeating together: "I believe in God the Father Almighty ... etc.", a statement whose communal expression means that not only I, but that "We believe in God the Father ..." Perhaps I should refrain from making an issue of this contradiction and accept it as an expression of the circumstance that the human being is both an individual and a social, a subjective and an objective being. Perhaps I should accept the contradicting usage of "meditation" as a private exercise and as a public ceremony as demonstration that the word "meditation" has at least two contradictory meanings and can express two different experiences.

At this juncture I remind myself of your explanation that you are a person of few words, while I am promiscuous with language. You obviously have no obligation to answer this letter. My feelings would not be hurt. All I ask is that you forgive my verbal exuberance.

Jochen