The Translator, Translated | Lives and Deaths of Werther: Interpretation, Translation, and Adaptation in Europe and East Asia | British Academy Scholarship Online (2024)

Johannes Kaminski

The Sorrows of Young Werther saw its protagonist meet an untimely death, but the text afforded Goethe literary immortality – not only in Germanophone countries, but also across Europe, North America and East Asia. After its original publication in 1774, the text was first translated into French in 1776, into English in 1779 and into Italian in 1782.1 For the first time, a German text circulated in multiple translations in other European languages within just a few decades. By 1806, six additional translations had appeared in English,2 and six in French by 1804.3 In view of the controversy surrounding the text’s alleged complicity in promoting suicide, Goethe was increasingly alarmed by his novel’s popularity. In 1787, he published a revised edition which presented the protagonist in a slightly more critical light. For the rest of his life, the author continued to question the merits of his debut novel, portraying it either as pathological or as the product of a literary fashion, namely sentimentalism. Beyond the narrow confines of academe, Goethe’s self-criticism found no real echo and had little effect on the text itself. Instead, Werther became a cipher of the self-articulation of the modern soul, demonstrating a unique ability to engage readers in a productive dialogue.

With substantial delay, of roughly a century, the text also reached East Asia. Here, it became a key text for those generations which sought to modernise their national literary traditions. Once Japan and China became exposed to Western ideas, their intelligentsia absorbed not only occidental science and medicine but also literature and thought. In 1889, Nakai Kinjo translated fragments of Werther into Japanese; by 1935, ten translations had appeared.4 In 1902, the novel arrived in China, when Ma Junwu rendered a fragment in Chinese. Twenty years later, Guo Moruo, a celebrated poet, completed the first full translation; within two years, it had been reprinted no fewer than eight times.5 By 1940, another four alternative translations had appeared.6

This chapter starts out with reflections on methodological problems and Werther’s own translations from James Macpherson’s Ossian – or to be precise: Fingal (1761) – which depart considerably from another contemporary German rendering by Michael Denis. The second part addresses the linguistic and cultural threshold between Germany and England at the end of the 18th century. As the first English translation of Werther, the focus is on Richard Graves’s (or Daniel Malthus’s) edition, which is complemented by William Render, who took substantial liberties with the Original. These versions are then compared with the modern translations of Catherine Hutter and David Constantine, respectively. While reliable studies on Werther’s European translations already exist, these two sections provide a synthesis and question established assessments of good and bad translation. This provides the intellectual foundation for the third part, which presents a survey of Werther translations in Japan and China at the onset of the 20th century. In view of the text’s reception in Japan, the analysis concentrates on three early translations, respectively, by Takayama Chogyū, Kubo Tenzui and Hata Toyokichi. Finally, three Chinese Werthers will conclude the chapter: renderings by Ma Junwu, Guo Moruo and Qian Tianyou. Inevitably, the present selection cannot account for the numerous translations in existence. The aim is to highlight scenes of translation that facilitate an insight into the delicate balance between source and target language.

Methodologically, this chapter draws on the takeaways from Chapter 1, which are discussed in the light of contemporary translation theory. At the heart of the analysis stand back-translations to illustrate – and further exacerbate – the idiosyncrasy of the addressed translations.7 The gap that is filled between the languages leads straight into the grafting process, as the original text is deprived of some features while new ones are added. To fully exploit this method, this chapter concentrates on two sample passages that document the text’s transformations. The first one, taken from James Macpherson’s Ossianic songs, features the lament of Colma, who learns of the tragic result of the duel between her brother and her lover. First rendered by Werther in German, this passage is useful to indicate linguistic strategies of subsequent translations from German into English and Chinese. The second reference passage is Werther’s letter dating from 21 June 1772, in which natural ecstasy is rendered in highly expressive language. In Chinese and Japanese translations, such exclamatory clauses put translators at loggerheads with established linguistic norms.

Grafting and translation

When a text moves across linguistic and cultural boundaries for the first time, translation cannot tap into an inventory of established equivalents. Unaffected by the stellar career of the charismatic writer in his native Germany, the text’s foreign reception documents the semantic possibilities of a text that is not yet colonised by an ‘Author-God’8 or the belated, saturated perspective of the reader in the 21st century. This situation forced early translators and editors to resort to invasive strategies that allowed the text’s meaning to proliferate. They inserted foot- or endnotes and replaced obscure literary references with familiar ones. Prefaces and appendices were added. Such interferences were based on assumptions about the imported text’s foreignness or familiarity among the audience, be it semantic, linguistic, cultural or aesthetic. Needless to say, translators and editors thereby inject their own ideas, which inevitably clash with those of other translators and editors.

This situation is analogous to the patterns of literary grafting that were discussed in Chapter 1: the selection of the rootstock, the elimination of incompatible elements and the addition of a scion. There is an equivalent to this process in translation studies: the ‘filling of gaps’. This concept was introduced by Gideon Toury to capture the uneasy tension between different tongues. Since no translation can ‘share the same systemic space with its original’,9 translators bring to light this incongruence and turn it into a virtue. Something exists in the source system (the language from which a text is translated) that is missing in the target system (the language into which it is translated). As translators amend one language by appropriating the other, they create a space between languages that previously did not exist: ‘Thus, cultures resort to translating precisely as a major way of filling in gaps, whenever and wherever such gaps manifest themselves […], i.e., in view of a corresponding non-gap in another culture that the prospective target culture has reasons to look up to and try to exploit.’10 What is perceived as absent in one language already exists in another one and can be incorporated through translation. Toury’s approach is representative of an entire generation of translation scholars devoted to the study of translational shifts that avoid flattening linguistic difference by invoking equivalence. At the same time, they also steer clear of obscure concepts, such as Benjamin’s much-quoted idea of an interlinguistic progression towards a messianic ‘pure language’.11

Lawrence Venuti pursues a similar approach by introducing two terms, ‘foreignization’ and ‘nativization’, that correspond to polar opposite attitudes in translation. While the former approach allows the source system to maintain some of its idiosyncrasies at the expense of the norms of the host language, the latter addresses the assimilating force of the templates and filters that exist in the target system. Ultimately, translation documents an epistemic process: ‘Every step in the translation process – from selecting a foreign text to implementing a translation strategy to editing, reviewing, and reading the translation – is mediated by the diverse values, beliefs, and representations that circulate in the translating language.’12

Although Toury and Venuti primarily talk about linguistic phenomena, their focus on gaps and the compensation thereof can be extended to other dimensions of cultural transfer. Toury’s and Venuti’s observations of how target systems draw on other languages easily connect with François Jullien’s recent call to identify cultural products as ‘resources’ that are freely available to new audiences. He decidedly objects to a notion of culture as a solid unit that must be defended against contamination. Despite being criticised for having overemphasised cultural difference in the past,13 he argues that awareness of cultural difference is merely part of a dialectical process that results in a productive interaction. Using a terminology similar to Toury, Jullien views the ‘gap’ between cultures as a starting point to escape conventional modes of thinking: ‘The gap means a distance which opens up, places what was once separated into pairs and makes visible the betweenness between formerly separated terms. They are required to face one another.’14 The observer who becomes aware of what lies between cultures encounters an opportunity to step outside conventional modes of thinking. There is a programmatic dimension to Jullien’s study that runs against the assertion of monolithic cultural identities. Caught in such ‘betweenness’, cultures do not represent a heritage reserved for those who are allowed to identify with it but are understood as resources that are available to everyone who is prepared to reinvest them.15

In sum, Toury’s, Venuti’s and Jullien’s appreciation of the gap that opens when a text migrates across linguistic and cultural borders puts forward a generous attitude reminiscent of grafting. Like the reader who creates the text by limiting its plural to a singularity, the translator chooses among a spectrum of possibilities. Since this spectrum consists of equally legitimate variants, a most accurate choice does not exist. That said, convention has it that translations also function as tributaries of the Author-God. Similar to the quest for singularity that shaped the interpretations of Werther, the standard of ‘invariant’16 translations asserts appropriateness, plausibility and truth as values that guide the work of translators. Whereas philological translations make this process evident by inserting commentary, glosses and variants, invariant translations limit themselves to explanatory notes in prefaces and postscripts that reproduce the scholarly common sense. Regarding the text itself, such translations are based on the idea that meaning, form and effect can be rendered in another language without offering an interpretation. In English, this approach was popularised by Penguin and Oxford World Classics editions and was successfully reproduced by similar formats across the world. Invariance in translation offers a reader-friendly, methodologically questionable compromise that observes rules of thumb and caters to the tastes prevalent in the publishing sector. Venuti has critiqued this approach for eliding translators from their works, not only as craftsmen, but also with regard to their creative manipulations of the text.17 On a global scale, critics have also pointed towards a more comprehensive effect of invariance in translation: as the global library is measured against a norm established by modern realist fiction, cultural difference is flattened out.18

Held against a text that has become stale or, as Gert Mattenklott contends, over-researched and excessively familiar, eccentric translations of Werther are invaluable tools for its revaluation. Arguably, even mistake-ridden renderings might be preferable to the products of invariance. As the following section demonstrates, the grafting habits of translators can already be observed in Werther’s own rendering of Ossian and have continued unabated ever since.

Werther’s Ossian

The climax of Werther, the protagonist’s open rejection by Lotte and his subsequent suicide, is intimately connected to Ossianic song, supposedly written in ancient Gaelic and translated into English by James Macpherson. While the protagonist’s polyglot erudition is evinced by many references to ancient and modern letters throughout the novel, his concrete output as a translator is limited to Ossian. Needless to say, these passages are translations made by Goethe from Macpherson’s English, yet they differ considerably from Goethe’s first renderings dating from 1771.19 In contrast to those earlier, more academic translations, Werther’s are saturated with psychological characterisation. These passages are formed by and inform his portrait as an ingenious and mentally unhinged young man.

For a long time, scholars felt that Goethe’s text was tainted by this intertextual insertion. Doubts about Ossian’s authenticity were raised as early as 1765, almost a decade before the first publication of Werther.20 While such discussions did not resonate beyond the English-speaking realm for some time, the questionable status of the text could no longer be ignored at one point.21 It turned out that Macpherson did not just take liberties by inserting his own poems, as Samuel Johnson initially suspected, but that he was ‘virtually composing as a “bard”’.22 While this spoke for Macpherson’s literary talent, it was not well received by his audiences across Europe, who felt betrayed. Subsequently, commentators have excused Goethe’s insertions as the product of a ‘moment of blind enthusiasm’,23 shared by many contemporaries, including Johann Gottfried Herder and Klopstock. More recently, such scepticism has been replaced by an interest in ‘Goethe’s seemingly modernist technique of incorporating two complementary and creatively modified extracts of Ossian’24 and in Macpherson as an author in his own right.

Regardless of Macpherson’s status as a translator, fraud or gifted writer, Werther uses the text in a manner that is crucial for evaluating the virtues of free translation. In the narrative logic of the book, the intertextual insertions encourage the protagonist, who wants to move away from everyday aesthetics, to pursue more profound and ecstatic forms of expression. After all, he proclaims: ‘say what you will of rules, they destroy the genuine feeling of Nature and its true expression’ (L 11). The selection of Ossianic song is crucial in advancing this mission; after all, Herder characterised the bardic songs as imbued with the poet’s ‘majesty, innocence, simplicity, activity and blissfulness’,25 which he derives from the specific character of the Scottish mountain people: ‘The wilder, that is, the livelier and more active a people, […] the wilder, that is, livelier, freer, more sensual, more lyrical […] also its songs!’26 Rich in apostrophes and ellipses, full of personifications, archaic formulas and obsolete diction, Ossian’s oral style complemented a utopian desire for a life untainted by social convention and a less mediated experience of nature and emotions. To Herder and his peers, such primitivism did not point to a state of irretrievably lost innocence, as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 1750), but evoked the tantalising image of an advanced culture that contemporary society should strive to emulate.27

To a sanguine person such as Lotte, the allure of Ossian is not entirely relatable at first. Sitting next to Werther in a carriage, she mentions her own book preferences: ‘I like those authors best who describe my own situation in life […] whose stories touch me with interest because they resemble my own domestic life’ (L 16). Given her focus on the familiar rather than the exotic, Werther’s Ossian translation ends up in her drawer at first, unread. It is only in the presence of the distraught young man that she turns to these texts: ‘There in my drawer […] is your own translation of some of the songs of Ossian. I have not read them yet’ (L 76). After finishing the passage, he can no longer contain his feelings: ‘he threw himself at Charlotte’s feet, seized her hands, and pressed them to his eyes and to his forehead.’ The sombre tone of Ossianic language intensifies pent-up feelings, even in Lotte, who suddenly releases ‘a torrent of tears’ from her eyes. At this point, Werther frees himself from his perennial state of sublimation: ‘He clasped her in his arms tightly, and covered her trembling, stammering lips with furious kisses’, eliciting yet another ambivalent signal from his beloved. She pushes him away, ‘casting one last, loving glance at the unhappy man’ (L 80–1) before bolting the door.

The purpose of the textual insertion of Ossian is twofold: on a narrative level, ‘the bardic song is instrumental to the build-up of tension and the development of the themes of love and suicide’,28 as Gerald Bär points out. On a psychological level, the appeal of these poems also lies in a symbolic representation of the triangular relationship between Werther, Lotte and Albert. In Fingal’s ‘Songs of Selma’, the toxic triangle (involving Colma, her brother and her lover) culminates in a duel that ends in death for both men, leaving the girl wailing alone before their lifeless bodies. According to Ehrhard Bahr, the translation of this drastic passage helps Werther and Lotte indirectly address a radical solution to their emotional pain: the possibility of Werther murdering Albert in a duel.29 Lotte hid those translated verses in the drawer for a reason.

Towards the Arch-Original (Michael Denis, Goethe)

This snippet from Macpherson’s original voices pain and loss. Within the register of linguistic expression, it opts for direct emotive articulation, lamentations and cries. The rivalry between two men is not redirected through the mannerisms of bourgeois law-abiding society but culminates in a deadly duel, as lover and brother take each other’s lives. The violence that Shakespearian tragedies save for the fifth act represents the starting point of ‘Songs of Selma’. Left alone, Colma directs her speech at the ghosts of the deceased. One crucial element of oral discourse, however, is lacking: rhyme.

This type of rhymed rendering, also found in an early Italian Ossian,32 evinces that, in contrast to Herder and his peers, many translators ‘found nothing inherently attractive about Macpherson’s spare, asyndetic and paratactic prose style’.33 Denis makes up for such (perceived) shortcomings through substantial interferences with the aesthetics of the Original. Hand in hand with the changed form comes a semantic shift, not least due to structuring devices such as rhyme and metre. They tone down the spiritual bleakness of the original Ossian, the feature that makes the text so attractive to Werther.

In rhymed verse, Macpherson’s song loses its raw appeal, as a symbolic order places semantically unrelated words in musical proximity and in rhythmic sequence. Once ‘todt’ (dead) rhymes with ‘roth’ (red), and ‘warum’ (why) with ‘stumm’ (mute), the implication is that a higher order overwrites the conflicts that play out on the text’s surface. Denis’s rhymed version connects Salgar and Colma to other tragic love couples in literary history whose suffering is also articulated in metrical patterns and couplets, notably Dante’s Francesca di Rimini and Paolo. In the second circle of Hell, their state of torment – they are caught in an eternal whirlwind – is described in terza rima, the interlocking three-line rhyme scheme used throughout the Divine Comedy. Such semantic graftage has a drastic effect on Macpherson. As Francesca and Paolo’s punishment is testimony to a moral code which punishes illegitimate love and unrestrained jealously, Ossian’s spiritual bleakness is toned down and introduces a difficult configuration into the text, Dante’s ‘ineliminable gap’34 between rigid faith and aesthetic play.

Werther renders Ossian sentence by sentence. The powerful, allegedly primitive style of the Original shows in exclamations, apostrophes and personal address. In the absence of rhyme and metre, bardic song remains untainted by the metaphysical connotations that come with rhyme.

But since no translation can share the same systemic space with its original, as Toury points out, Werther’s text still differs in three aspects. Firstly, there is some stylistic moderation. Archaic terms, such as the exclamation ‘lo’ and the archaic second-person singular pronoun (‘thou hast’), indicating informal familiarity, give way to contemporary German usage. The Original’s excessive use of exclamation marks is reduced from ten to five. Secondly, the image of the grey rocks, elided by Denis, is elevated to proto-expressionist intensity, as the adjective ‘grau’ (grey) is presented in adverbial use: ‘die Felsen stehen grau den Hügel hinauf” (The rocks stand grey-ly on the steep hill). In contrast to Denis’s translation (‘Des Felsen Klippen stehn ergraut’), this endows the rocks with a hostile physiognomy and exacerbates the beholder’s desolation. This particular attention to adjectives endows the text with a fashionable feel, as many of Goethe’s contemporaries shared such stylistic preferences.36

Goethe’s third notable amendment is the lack of the critical commentary that typically accompanies Ossian editions, both the English original and most translations. Macpherson introduces ‘Songs of Selma’ with a brief account of the song’s presumed context: ‘Minona sings before the king [Fingal] the song of the unfortunate Colma’, a rite that forms part of ‘an annual custom established by the monarchs of the ancient Caledonian’. In the running text, a footnote elaborates the Gaelic etymology of Colma’s name: ‘cul-math, a woman with fine hair’.37 Following in the footsteps of Macpherson, Denis, also a theologian, kept the commentary, adding further remarks on his choice of metre and other European translations. Worried about clarity, Denis even adds stage directions in footnotes. After Colma’s first lamentation, he notes: ‘One should keep in mind that she descends the hill at this point to take a closer look at the two prostrate men.’38 While such additions appear gratuitous, glosses have an immediate effect on the reading flow: they eliminate semantic uncertainty and embed the text in a supposed historical context.

Embracing Ossianic song as an unmediated form of expression, Werther demonstrates little interest in such historical contextualisation. Werther’s pursuit of the supposedly raw sound of the Gaelic Original departs considerably from Macpherson’s own ambitions for the epic; after all, its production closely corresponded with the ideas that occupied the Scottish intelligentsia of the time.39 As Goethe proceeds to graft Ossian on Werther, he broadens its scope to suit a universalist agenda that tallies with Herder’s vision of a cultural alternative to classicism.

Given this discrepancy, it is important to point out that the protagonist does not adopt Ossianic language as a whole but embraces one of the most effective tools of grafting: the elimination of incompatible elements. In contrast to the stolid heroism of ‘Book of Fingal’, for example, ‘Songs of Selma’ focuses on grief, despair and desolation. Werther’s Ossian is a curated selection, demonstrating a preference for repetitive apostrophes and exclamatory language that sacrifices the inflection of the narrator for a stronger focus on the experience of pain and grief. This applies not only to the introductory words at the beginning of ‘Songs of Selma’ and the running commentary, but also to the editorial afterword. As Werther’s translation reaches the end of the declamatory passages and Lotte erupts in tears, he elides the editor’s closing remark: ‘Such were the words of the bards in the days of the song; when the king heard the music of harps, and the tales of other times’,40 to jump to yet another declamatory passage, a paragraph from ‘Berrathon’.

Denis’s and Goethe’s Ossian translations evince different uses of grafting. While Denis elides the text’s bleakness by reinserting it in an old chain of signification, the holistic unity of rhyme and metre, Goethe’s Ossian trims the text’s philological layers to underline its desolation and expressivity. Since the discrepancy between the Ossian of Macpherson and its transformation in the hands of Denis and Goethe is programmatic, the tool-like function of the original text becomes apparent. And yet translators are not quite prepared to openly accept their manipulation as an inevitable departure from the Original; instead, the idea is that the translator has access to a truer version of the source text: a truer Original lurks behind the deceptive Original. In Denis’s case, the idea is that bardic song must accord with the time-tested norms of metre and rhyme; in Goethe’s, that ‘the torrent of genius’ was compromised by philological commentary. There is an underlying assumption that the Original, on which the translators base their texts, is only an epiphenomenon of a hypothetical entity: the Arch-Original.

Like the reading techniques discussed in Chapter 1, the invocation of this Arch-Original also aims at creating a singularity. To return to the metaphor of grafting, this means to engage in a process that is analogous to the reverse breeding of hybrid plants, a forceful procedure that includes the ‘silencing’ of the elements that have contributed to crossovers in the first place.41 Such genetic manipulation eventually results in the re-creation of the ‘founder line’. While translators would insist that their return to the Original represents nothing but the elimination of the scions that previous episodes of grafting have added, this factually sets in motion another ground of grafting, with ‘silencing’ leading to the elimination of the undesired element. The Arch-Original is yet another graft that benefits from the plurality of the text.

Translations into English

If one takes Macpherson, the self-proclaimed translator from Gaelic, at his word, then Werther reads out to Lotte the literary product of translation twice over: first Gaelic to English, then English to German. Considering the emotional impact of the Ossian passage on the protagonist and his beloved, nothing appears lost in this double filtering process. But once Ossian travels from German back to English, through Werther’s translation, the directionality of the filtering process is reversed and raises several questions that have impacted the historical reception of Werther in English.

Most early English translations of Werther concede little room to this intertextual insertion. The first was anonymously published in 1779, variously attributed to Richard Graves and Daniel Malthus. Based on Philippe Aubry’s pioneering French rendering from 1777 rather than on the Original, this Werther made Goethe known in England and was reprinted more often than other contemporary translations.42 The translator takes many liberties, especially in view of extravagant phrasings that could cause offence, such as Werther’s seemingly blasphemous comment regarding a child who has washed their face in a well, which prompts the letter writer to compare this solemn scene to a baptism. The preface of the Graves–Malthus edition explains: ‘A few expressions […] have been omitted by the French, and a few more by the English translator, as they might possibly give offence in a work of this nature.’43 The translation also follows a reductive approach in view of Werther and Lotte’s emotive reading session. The translator picks the final segment from Goethe’s selection from ‘Songs of Selma’, faithfully reproducing it in Macpherson’s original English.44 This selective approach is representative for early translations and culminates in John Gifford’s from 1789, which scraps Ossian altogether.

In the English context, there is a rationale to reducing or omitting the Ossian. On the one hand, it relates to growing suspicions about the text’s authenticity. According to Bär, ‘the inclusion of Ossianic poetry could have damaged Goethe’s reputation in Britain’.45 It would appear preposterous to think that a suicidal young man should spend his final days with a literary forgery rather than, say, Homer or Klopstock. One who allows himself to be fooled by a faux-Gaelic epic runs the risk of becoming the butt of a joke instead of attracting readerly empathy. That said, scholars have also pointed to the possibility of the exact opposite: for a reader who puts faith in the authenticity of Ossian, its partial inclusion in Werther would represent a literary heresy. After all, one should not use ancient poetry for dramatic effect.46 One way or another, Ossian appears to be an unfitting textual insertion, for its literary status is either too low or too high to facilitate seamlessness.

Conversely, scholars have also protested the corrupting effects that the reduction or omission of Ossian has on Werther. In Bär’s eyes, the absence of the intertext ignores its function as a compositional device, leaving the psychological change in the protagonist unaccounted for and distorting the novel’s build-up.47 Since all actions in Werther are motivated by multiple chains of cause and effect, however, the result is hardly as dire as Bär suggests. As soon as one weight is removed from the scale, other elements fill the vacuum. In fact, their absence gives the physical aspect of Werther and Lotte’s joint reading session greater prominence. In contrast to modern translations, early renderings enjoyed full legitimacy to carry out such interferences. To them, the Original’s idiosyncrasies did not hold auratic appeal.

The interfering translator (Render)

More than any other early translation, William Render’s Sorrows of Werter (1801) revels in a unique determination to manipulate the source text. The title page deprives the protagonist’s name of the letter H and converts the author’s name into ‘Göethe’,48 a programmatic idiosyncrasy that foreshadows the many other liberties this translation takes. Although taken directly from German, the text abounds with inaccuracies that violate the expectations of modern readers.49 Based on Goethe’s second version of 1787, the text happily produces its own variants on the subject. Render’s interferences cover the full spectrum from grammatical changes, most of which are clearly identifiable as mistakes,50 to inaccuracies, additions and conspicuous deviations from Goethe’s text. As semantic proliferation is given free rein, the original text is transformed into an independent version.

To begin with, this tendency is evident in the incorporation of Ossian. The intertext taken from ‘Songs of Selma’ is reduced, as the narrator explains, to ‘that affecting passage where Armin deplores the loss of his beloved daughter’ (R 336) – that is, the last three paragraphs of Goethe’s selection. In contrast to the Graves–Malthus translation, however, Macpherson’s words make space for a rendering taken directly from Goethe’s German. The result can be detected not in more explosive language, as one would expect, but in slight alterations of the scenery. In Werther’s translation, Macpherson’s ‘the rain beat hard on the hill’51 morphs into ‘der Regen schlug scharf nach der Seite des Berges’. Render happily follows Goethe: ‘the rain beat furiously on the side of the mountain’ (336–7). The landscape is more dramatic, as a more violent rain (hard/furiously) meets a more imposing geological structure (hill/mountain). Such philological detail hardly compromises Goethe’s text. One of Render’s more severe amendments of this passage from Ossian lies somewhere else. Despite orienting the wording after Goethe, he inserts an additional paragraph of Armin’s lament into the text. The following segment is found in Macpherson’s original but not in Goethe’s: ‘Will none of you speak in pity? They move on regardless of their father! I am sad, O! mourners, nor small my cause of woe!’ (337). This addition produces a stronger invocation of pity, as Armin’s complaint that ‘none of you speak in pity’ relates to Werther’s situation: he, too, longs for his pleas to be heard.52

Although faithfully reproduced in Wertherian staccato, this paragraph is entirely a fabrication on the part of Render. The reinvention of Leonora alters the protagonist’s psychological development significantly. While one finds many Werther critics who speculate about the origins of the protagonist’s death drive – it appears as early as 16 July 1772 – this version relates his mental fixation to a traumatic event: the loss of Leonora, his first love. Here, Werther’s reluctance to consistently pursue Lotte is rooted in existential melancholy: how could she replace the person he has irretrievably lost? After Leonora’s death, it is no longer surprising that all his subsequent love interests should end in disappointment, as he prefers to indulge in Leonora’s memory, which ‘no time nor circ*mstance shall efface’. The enigma of Werther’s fickle libido, an observation that inspired modern scholars to speculate about his body–soul conflict,54 is resolved by means of a plausible backstory.

Render’s preference for pseudo-accuracy also extends to Lotte. Drawing on the popular idea that Goethe based his novel on Charlotte Buff, who was betrothed to Johann Christian Kestner, the translator refers to her as ‘Charlotte Buff’. Aware that previous editions, including Goethe’s original, only reference her surname as ‘S’, Render adds a footnote, confirming the ‘real name of the bailiff’s eldest daughter’ (49). Although this could be nothing more than a clichéd biographical interpretation, the translator does not leave it at that, claiming his own part in the narrative.

Render in conversation with Werther

As their dialogue progresses, the reader learns that the translator is a Protestant pastor who previously delivered a sermon addressing suicide – with Werther among the churchgoers. The occasion was the drowning of a young girl, whose fate was also discussed by Werther and Albert in great detail (12 August 1772). In his sermon, however, the pastor offers a more sympathetic viewpoint than Albert, arguing that individuals must control ‘the seeds of destruction’ (393) that lie dormant in everyone. During their follow-up conversation in ‘Frankfort’, the translator shares his personal take on unhappy love with Werther. In fact, he just separated from Sophie, a Catholic girl, whose father objected to his daughter marrying a Protestant. Heroically, he resigned himself to accepting her father’s wishes. But the translator’s moral example does not produce the intended effect, as Werther reacts with condescension and accuses him of betrayal: ‘You who never loved, you who deserted your Sophia’ (374). Afterwards, the conversation turns to more banal topics, such as coffee and tea consumption, and to the excessive cost of funeral expenses.

One cannot help but notice the tight schedule that Werther would have had to observe to meet the translator in Frankfurt ‘a few days preceding his death’ (361). Prior to making a case in defence of the country boy who murdered his landlady or reading Ossian to Lotte, Werther would have had to jump on a carriage to meet the translator a day’s ride away. Furthermore, the strange cause of their conversation, moving from love to funeral expenses, adds to the awkwardness of this postscript. Despite such narrative hiccups, the effect of the appendix is evident: although it enforces the auratic appeal of Werther at first glance, it disturbs the reader’s potential identification with the extravagant young man. Render’s take on the genesis of Werther presents a unique case, differing markedly from clichéd accounts of Goethe and Lotte Buff’s relationship. Instead, Render prioritises the idea that Werther is an unhinged, pathological young man. He closes: ‘This was the last time I saw him, nor did I hear of him again, till about three months after I learned the dreadful catastrophe which has given rise to the publication of these pages’ (375).

Despite the pedestrian sound of this judgement, it is embedded in yet another wild claim. Render’s idea is that Goethe – or rather ‘Göethe’ – was merely the editor who published the man’s letters posthumously. What is more, he is portrayed as an unreliable editor who not only suppressed the correct last names and place names, but also abridged some letters and ultimately obscured the crucial reasons behind the protagonist’s obsession with death, the fate of Leonora. Once again, a translator professes to reconstruct an Arch-Original that is not yet corrupted by a compromised edition, resorting to eliding some passages and adding new ones.

It remains impossible to say whether Render’s hypothesis of a real Werther is simply the product of simple opportunism, with the translator hoping to find a larger audience by making spectacular claims. Or did he just get carried away in the spirit of, say, the narrator of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy? Render’s deliberations, however, are not based on the fact that the audience only had a vague idea of the Original;55 after all, by 1801, the year of Render’s publication, the identification of Goethe with Werther had already become a firmly established cliché across Europe, including England. As early as 1787, the author met a pertinacious Englishman in Naples who insisted on seeing the author in person, wondering: ‘so often as I think of all that was required for the writing of it, I must ever wonder anew.’56 His assumption was that the protagonist’s and the author’s ennui de vivre are impossible to separate, turning Goethe, the survivor, into a freakish personality. Render does not taint the author with such associations but grants Werther an independent life, which affords him the licence for free fabulation.

Scholarship embraced neither Render’s free translation – or rather his adaptation – nor his neat separation between author and literary figure. Instead, the world of letters concerned itself with their interrelatedness throughout the 19th and 20th century. Render offers a rare example of translations outside the Author-God paradigm.

Translations into global English (Hutter, Constantine)

Among early translations, Render’s proactive translation was the exception. Most translations tried to maintain fidelity by avoiding excessive interference with the text. Abbreviations for place names and surnames remained intact. Characters that appear irrelevant to the plot were carefully reduced or disappeared as in the Malthus–Graves translation, where the story of Frau M. and her stingy husband (11 June 1772) is omitted. Such translations follow a poetics of invisibility and avoid applying the glowing colours of active interpretative interference.

A tendency for reduction also shows in most back-translations of the Ossian passage. When not elided completely, this quotation is reduced to a few paragraphs. With the exception of Render, early translations into English jump at the opportunity to render the rudiments of Macpherson’s lyrical prose in the original, as does Victor Lange’s 1988 translation, a translation that is otherwise praised for its accuracy.57 In translation theory, this approach is called ‘natural equivalence’, a method that is intuitive to many readers: enunciations that are articulated in foreign languages remain identical when translated back into the original language. Yet sceptics argue that it presents ‘an illusion of symmetry between languages which hardly exists beyond the level of vague approximations’.58 In view of Werther’s Ossian, this creates a problem, as John R. J. Eyck points out: ‘To neglect – as many have – the product of Goethe’s (or, as Goethe presents it: Werther’s) translation nearly obliterates critical insight into the character of Werther as well as the overall nature of the story.’59 Like Bär, Eyck asserts that critical insight can only derive from Werther’s Ossian, a self-contained entity detached from its English original. Eyck regards Catherine Hutter’s translation as exemplary, for it allegedly incorporates Goethe’s concessions to his audience. Indeed, the wording of Hutter’s Ossian departs from Macpherson, which makes a point about the irreversibility of translation: one cannot just move back and forth between languages without sacrificing their life. But upon closer inspection, the additional value of her back-translation seems limited. The translation of the reference passage reads:

In contrast to Eyck’s claim, the effect of Hutter’s translation is not to produce a more intense rendering of Macpherson to faithfully incorporate Werther’s perspective, but rather the elision of idiosyncrasies of both originals: Goethe’s text and Fingal. Hutter not only avoids Goethe’s exclamatory style and wild use of punctuation, she also dodges old-fashioned, rather cloying terms in English. Her modern usage elides the archaic exclamation ‘lo’ and replaces ‘You were both so dear to me’ with a rather plainly worded ‘I loved you both’.

Constantine’s text barely differs from Hutton’s. Where it does, he produces a historic feel that evokes the Victorian era. He avoids the modern ‘love’ and inserts slightly old-fashioned ‘hounds’ (where even Macpherson speaks of ‘dogs’).

Both Hutter and Constantine cater to a readership that assumedly prefers a historical feel to actual archaisms. Excessive punctuation, such as Macpherson’s and Goethe’s exclamation marks, is reduced to a minimum. The result lacks the kind of accentuation that produces the impassionate declamatory power of both Macpherson and Goethe. In view of Bär’s reservations against the elision of Ossian and Eyck’s irritation at translators who insert Macpherson at the expense of Goethe’s translation, this approach raises a fundamental question: what kind of understanding does a streamlined and toned-down translation facilitate? On the one hand, such changes water down the emotional expressivity of the text. This effect can be evaluated negatively, as seen in Goethe’s reaction to Gaetano Grassi’s Italian Werther (1782), which, the poet finds, alters the protagonist’s psychology: ‘His translation mainly paraphrases. Gone are the glowing expressions of pain and joy, which constantly move in circles; now it’s hard to tell what Werther actually wants.’62 On the other hand, this effect can also be considered in the light of the myriad complaints about the bad example that Werther sets by giving in to unhinged emotionality, a standpoint that Goethe himself supported to some extent. Even if such translations confuse the protagonist’s psychology, one can argue, this could be the price for achieving more readerly guidance.

While such deliberations indeed played a role in the text’s first translations, the text’s toned-down expressivity in contemporary English translations derives less from a concern for readers’ safety and more from commercial considerations that also come with considerable aesthetic repercussions: editors’ worries about the accessibility of the text. Werther undergoes a certain degree of linguistic transformation to fit into the canon of world literature, as understood from a publisher’s perspective: a set of domain-free texts that continue to be consumed for a variety of reasons. To this end, Hutter and Constantine have to conform to the norms of ‘global English’ based on the present version of English as a universally binding compromise that facilitates the smooth accommodation of foreign literary expressions within a fixed linguistic system.63 In the light of the arising systemic, let alone stylistic differences, this requires considerable compromise – one is tempted to speak of pruning. As the catch-all for literature written in languages other than English, global English can be greeted as a convenient tool to free classical literature from its enclosure in highbrow contexts, with its confinement to privileged circles who read literature in the original and celebrate historical quirks as an end in itself. In this spirit, David Damrosch argues that ‘we won’t see works of world literature so fully enshrined within their cultural context as we do when reading those works within their own traditions, but a degree of distance from the home tradition can help us to appreciate the ways in which a literary work reaches out and away from its point of origin’.64 Once a piece of writing is removed from its original language, the reader is meant to encounter a meta-version of the text, facilitating new vantage points that connect more easily to the reader’s present.

Damrosch’s eulogy of abstraction, however, entails serious implications regarding a text’s aesthetic presentation. There is more to maintaining the specific flavour of a foreign text than mere elitism. With regard to the tendency to erase a text’s origin, postcolonial scholarship has drawn attention to the not-so-neutral mediating role of English. On this point, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak regrets that ‘[s]‌tudents in Taiwan, Thailand, or yet Nigeria will learn about the literature of the world through English translations’.65 Other languages than English are seen as unable to compete as epistemic instruments to describe the world. According to Spivak, the negative effects of global English are not limited to the reproduction of postcolonial hierarchies; they also interfere with English itself, as academics increasingly lose their ability ‘to understand that the mother-tongue is actively divided’.66 Historic and geographic fault lines disappear and create the misleading idea of a language that no longer needs to fill gaps. Toury’s observation that translators often find something missing, ‘which should rather be there and which, luckily, already exists elsewhere’, becomes obsolete. The inclusion of foreign elements would only stand in the way of Damrosch’s abstraction process. Spivak regards such avoidance of interlinguistic nuance as intimately tied to the requirements of world literature’s academic audiences. Their focus is on plot summaries, while ‘the languages of the cultures of origin [are] invoked at best as delexicalized and fun mother-tongues, as fragments signalling “otherness”’.67 Eventually, the translated text becomes a mere reiteration of familiar patterns.

Hutter’s and Constantine’s tame Werther-renderings cater to a linguistic hierarchy that ranks some of the world’s languages higher than others. Their English makes no concessions, neither to the German original nor to historic forms of English. Given the lowly status of German, it should not come as a surprise that Goethe’s text was in no position to colonise English.

Translations in East Asia

If the previous paragraph presented German as a language subjected into passivity by English, the situation was different in the East Asian reception of Werther. Here, German held substantial cultural prestige. On par with English and French, it was regarded as the language of a nation state worthy of imitation, but unlike the English and the French, the Germans were considered a less threatening imperial force. The Iwase–Harris Treaty of 1858 forced the Japanese administration to open up the harbour of Yokohama to international trade, with American, British and French traders as the primary beneficiaries. For Japan, Germany never represented a colonial threat but was an emblem of cultural modernity sans geopolitical rivalry. In China, the situation was different, as Wilhelmine Germany pushed to acquire colonial possessions towards the end of the 19th century, when the instability of the Qing administration hastened the devolution of port cities. In reaction to the 1897 Juye Incident, when two missionaries were killed by insurgents, Germany sent gunboats to Shandong province and carved out its own protectorate, the Kiautschou Bay concession. Regardless of the questionable legal status of such annexations, the German administration never attracted as much public protest as did Britain, the driving force behind the Opium Wars.68 Moreover, the German concession ended soon enough, in 1914, when the territory was occupied by Japanese forces. During the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Kiautschou was officially awarded to the Far Eastern island empire.

Consequently, the East Asian situation of the German language differs from the colonial mindset, as described by Edward W. Said. Japanese and Chinese writers did not have to wrest their heritage from German colonisers.69 As the reception of Marxism in China demonstrates, German letters and thought were, particularly in this case, regarded as universal goods rather than as ideological contraband. The same applies to the reception of Werther. Its reception fell into the Age of Imperialism, when occidental values spread across the globe, but owing to Germany’s weak position in East Asia, the book was not accompanied by the background noise of gunboats.

For want of shared cultural references, such as Greek antiquity, Christianity and the Enlightenment, Werther’s arrival in East Asia, one can safely assume, required a considerable degree of intertextual and linguistic grafting. The absence of a critical consensus unleashed the spectrum of a text’s plurality. Precisely the ‘degree of distance’ that Damrosch considers essential for the liberation of a literary work from its point of origin appears in its most powerful form, as the aim is not to reimagine the text in accordance with established linguistic patterns. Quite the contrary, the hope is that existing gaps can be closed by granting the source text greater freedom vis-à-vis the constraints of the target language.

Japanese translations

Goethe wrote in a period when native German had already started to replace French as the language of belles-lettres in German-speaking countries. The formative period of the language goes back even further, to the early 16th century, when Martin Luther synthesised an idiom from various dialects and administrative conventions. Despite the protagonist’s stylistic idiosyncrasies, the language of Werther operates within an already stabilised linguistic system. In contrast, Japanese and Chinese translations of Werther fall into a period when their respective vernacular languages were still in flux. In view of their own tongues, translators were confronted with, to use Toury’s words, stylistic modes of expression ‘which should rather be there and which, luckily, already exis[t]‌ elsewhere’.

During the Meiji era, starting in 1868, Japan started not only to adopt modern warfare and industrial production, but also to adjust its language to the needs of a changing world. The fear was that cultural inertia would entail occupation or even extinction. Prior to that, the official idiom was kanbun (漢文), modelled after Classical Chinese. In use since the Nara period (710–94 ce), kanbun was never intended as a linguistic system accessible to all social classes but was reserved for cultural and administrative matters communicated among literati and the samurai class. During the phase of government-sponsored modernisation, this disjunction was increasingly viewed as a symptom of a historical backlog: while all European languages were already established as vernacular languages, Japan was still in want of a unified language that would bridge the gap between the elitist written system and the confusing variety of regional dialects. Yeounsuk Lee highlights the artificial nature of this project: ‘Therefore, it became necessary to create an image of the language that was spoken by an anonymous “nation people”, an indefinite “somebody” who could be anyone from the upper or lower class of samurai, merchants, and peasants.’70 Although spoken Japanese acted as the prime source for the new vernacular, European translations also played an important role in its development.71 The first translations of Werther coincided with the advent of the genbun itchi (言文一致), which translates as ‘reconciliation of spoken and written language’.

Ironically, the emphatic adoption of occidental cultural goods was, with few exceptions, mediated by Japanese translations and scholarship. This changed with language reform, when such texts served as a model alongside translated foreign fiction.72 At one point, the number of translated books even exceeded that of works written in Chinese.73

Translations by Chogyū, Hata, Kubo

This kind of writing presents a number of obstacles for the Japanese translator. Goethe’s text achieves emotional charge by wild syntactic turmoil and is indebted to the linguistic virtuosity Goethe first explored in Songs of Sesenheim (Sesenheimer Lieder, 1770–1). According to Hans Peter Herrmann, Werther successfully channels the silent activity of nature into the swaying rhythm of this sentence, as ‘nature itself claims active agency’.75 Uncritically reproducing Storm and Stress aesthetics, this claim emphasises that a loss of subjective control results in an effect that can be identified as poetic inspiration. Emil Staiger’s analysis is much more concise, as it links this loss of control directly to breaches of grammatical rules: ‘When Werther finds himself unable to take a breath, […] he deliberately ends the subclauses with full stops.’76

Werther’s heavy use of exclamation marks, interjections and dashes presented a substantial problem for translators; after all, punctuation is not a cultural universal. Unknown to Latin and medieval European languages, the exclamation mark is a modern typographic invention which first entered English in the 16th century, prompting spelling reformers such as John Hart to explicitly advise against its usage.77 In German, the exclamation mark started to appear around 1600.78 As English translations of Werther demonstrate, aesthetic considerations continued to rein in its excessive use, not only in the late 18th century but up to the present. This situation was exacerbated in the Japanese context. Prior to their exposure to the West, East Asian languages had no systematic punctuation at all. Japanese texts written in kanbun style lacked punctuation altogether, and vernacular texts were only sketchily and inconsistently punctuated. Nanette Twine explains: ‘No spaces separated words, which rendered the mainly hiragana classical Japanese style particularly difficult. To extract the sense of the passage, the reader had to recognize sentence finals and other grammatical signals indicating function.’79

Next to the editors of Meiji-era school textbooks, novelists became the greatest driving force behind the adoption of Western punctuation. In contrast to official documents, narrative texts require more punctuation to separate dialogue and narrative, for example. Efficient use can make a text more accessible to less versed readers. According to Twine, Yamada Bimyō’s colloquial-style works counted among the first texts that comprehensively embraced Western punctuation. Ridiculing a Vain Novelist (嘲戒小説天狗 Chokai shōsetsu tengu), a fragment from 1886, included ellipses to indicate lingering memory, quotation marks for dialogue and exclamation marks for agitated speech.80 From this point onwards, the use of punctuation accelerated and eventually attained literary dignity through its prominent use in Sōseki Natsume’s modern classic I Am a Cat (吾輩は猫である Wagahai wa neko de aru, 1905).81

This English translation sounds plain yet appears typographically compromised. The dilemma of Takayama’s genbun itchi is that no blueprint existed for how to represent Werther’s emotive outbursts. After the elimination of what were perceived as incompatible elements deprives the text of its expressivity, the addition of a scion – in this case, formal language – generates a graft that gives away the systemic difference between the source text and a changing Japanese vernacular.

Such heterogeneity does not gloss over the choices of the translator by invoking an Arch-Original or hide behind the conventions of a stylised idiom; instead, the reader is confronted with the ghostly presence of a foreign text that is not yet assimilated to readerly conventions. As a consequence, Japanese scholars label this translation stilted and unreadable.86 For the purpose of the present study, however, Takayama’s text offers a welcome alternative to the norm of invariant translation, where the plural of the source text is replaced by the gesture of singularity.

Foreignisation

The choice of words is somewhat old-fashioned but the prose reads elegantly, skilfully reproducing Werther’s lively tone. The style of this rendering can be compared to Lange’s safe English translation and requires no re-translation.

Even though the grammar follows most conventions, the short sentences and the frequent omission of a subject engender a colloquial writing style that no longer lives up to the standards of formal Japanese.90 Instead of Takayama’s irritating exclamation marks, this rendering opts for the mere use of the question denominator ko か, indicating a sense of doubt. The translator also opts for the modern copula de arou (である), which is based on the established translation for the verb ‘to be’ and which had entered literary language during the 1890s.91 With regard to Toury’s metaphor, Hata’s translation has to fill fewer gaps than Kubo’s.

On the whole, Japanese Werther translations between Takayama and Hata mirror the move from a heterogeneous approach that leaves linguistic hiccups unresolved to more invariant translations. With regard to the use of foreign punctuation, for example exclamation marks and dashes, no clear tendencies can be detected. These Japanese translations, while participating in the radical shifts of genbun itchi, never go as far as imitating the syntax of the source language. A sensitivity for stylistic purity and syntactic correctness kept Werther’s erratic language at bay. Altogether, the translators did not wish to extend genbun itchi too far. This careful and scrupulous attitude towards potential foreign influence is complemented by a literary genre which circumvents the necessity to engage with excessively foreign features: hon’an (翻案), adaptations rather than translations of foreign literature.92

Despite the Japanese language’s alleged openness to foreign interference during the Meiji era, the three translations do in a way resemble European translations. With the exception of Takayama’s awkward juxtaposition of exclamation mark and kuten (！。), Werther’s language does not drive a wedge into a fluid language system but is carefully adapted. Indeed, the relevance of Werther in Japan is less connected to its stylistic expressivity than to its iconic representation of literary and behavioural codes that served as templates for modern literature. Since Japanese translators privileged syntagmatic clarity, the protagonist’s letters were never read as the ramblings of a delusional young man who gets entangled in a self-inflicted situation; rather, he was seen as an exponent of the modern love discourse. He exemplifies, as Kayo Yamamoto argues, how a man should feel towards his beloved.93 As Werther, the martyr of love, solemnly puts his unrequited feelings into words, his orderly prose evinces a man in full possession of his mental powers. In the European context, scholars such as Niklas Luhmann and Eva Illouz have emphasised the role of literary models for the development of romantic sentiments.94 The same can be stated for the Japanese context, where the notion of free love gradually replaced the practice of arranged marriages.

Naming names

In the analysis of stylistically challenging passages, such as Werther’s letter dating from 21 June, the effect of translational grafting shows in the use of historical linguistic patterns that changed in quick succession during the early 20th century. As regards the elisions and replacements of the protagonists’ names, the case is much simpler to analyse. Takayama’s text, for example, features wholesale nativisation: Lotte’s name is translated as sha-musume (紗娘) and Werther as juntei-rō (准亭郎), ‘Ms Sha’ and ‘Mr Juntei’. Both names are written in kanji, the usual format of Japanese names, reflecting Takayama’s ambition to cast the protagonist as Japanese. This changes with Kubo’s rendering, which introduces a fair level of foreignisation also with regard to names. ‘Werther’ is rendered phonetically in hiragana and without an honorific: Weruteru (ゑ゙ るてる). ‘Lotte’, meanwhile, is also translated phonetically, but this time in katakana, the script often employed for transcribing foreign-language words: Rotsute (ロツテ). The novel’s status as a foreign text is underlined by the appearance of protagonists with explicitly foreign names.

Furthermore, the translators embrace Werther as a gateway to occidental culture. This is most evident in the Ossian passages that English translations tend to abbreviate or elide. While Takayama based his text on Gotzberg’s rendering, which only gives a small part of Macpherson’s intertext, both Hata and Kubo cover Werther’s entire translation of the bardic song.95 Ossian is seen as an integral part of the novel, and the names of Macpherson’s heroes are also rendered in foreign-sounding katakana transcription. In one instance, however, Takayama strongly interferes with the source text, when he elides Werther and Lotte’s reference to Klopstock, then a fashionable German poet.96 In this translation, the window scene instead culminates in Lotte and Werther’s invocation of Homer – or rather Hōmā (ホーマー).97 While the Greek epic poet is mentioned repeatedly throughout the text, he primarily appears in scenes of solitude to mark Werther’s naive appreciation of antiquity as a source of enjoyment. After Takayama’s amendment, the two lovers appreciate Homer as a means of communication that nurtures a pleasing prospect: like Odysseus and Penelope, they will have to go through hardship but will be reunited eventually. The heroic narrative serves as a template for the present.

The first Chinese Werther (Ma Junwu)

In China, formal vernacularisation started later than in Japan, and so did the import of European letters. Despite the use of vernacular baihua since the Ming dynasty, there existed no convincing solution to reconcile the different dialects of Chinese in the north, notably in the capital, Beijing, and in the country’s commercial centres, Shanghai and Canton. Next to the cultural depth of Classical Chinese, its success as an administrative and literary idiom also rested on its perceived geographical neutrality. After reformers of the Qing dynasty failed in their attempts to transform Chinese from a single-word unit to a phrase-unit language, a tangible proposition came only a few months prior to the Revolution of 1911, when the Central Congress of Pedagogues discussed formalising the vernacular. The joint statement read: ‘In order to function as a national language, Guoyu [i.e. Chinese] cannot be based on any “natural” local dialect but must be a standardized “artificial” language.’98 Eventually, the New Culture Movement (新文化運動 xin wenhua yundong) used their socio-political clout to establish their version of the vernacular as the only legitimate written language.99 Regardless of the artificiality of the idiom, literary reformers placed great hopes in its ability ‘to destroy those restrictive shackles and chains’100 of established linguistic conventions and to engage the wider public more actively with the products of intellectual activity.

The reform of punctuation had already started in 1904, when Yan Fu, a prolific translator, suggested a system modelled after European languages. His proposition eventually caught on, at least in the intellectual sphere, when Hu Shi and Zhu Yuanfang presented a punctuated edition of Outlaws of the Marsh (水滸傳 Shui hu zhuan, 14th century ce). In spite of the text’s historic aura, their 1920 edition featured full stops, commas, colons, semicolons, question marks and exclamation points to provide better readerly guidance. Responding to scholarly protestations,101 Hu argued: ‘We believe that the absence of punctuation creates all kinds of difficulties. Once there is the help of punctuation, the effect of the words is especially wholesome, especially great.’102 Applied to literary prose, punctuation did not simply make writing more efficient by eliminating ambiguous meaning but also changed the rhythm of the narrative.

Ma renders the segment taken from ‘Songs of Selma’ bilingually, in Classical Chinese and English, basing the latter text on the Malthus–Graves or the Gotzberg translation. Yet the text is not attributed to Macpherson or Ossian, but to Goethe, since Ma was under the impression that the textual insertion was an integral element of the text. One can safely assume that the spelling mistake (‘Ossing’ instead of ‘Ossian’) and the amendment of the English original (‘Along’ instead of ‘Alone on’) are errors introduced by the typesetters.

Ma’s translation uses Classical rather than vernacular Chinese, combined with minimal punctuation. The circular judian (。) stands indiscriminately for the functions of the English full stop and colon. In combination with the dignified tone of the classic idiom, this passage is indicative of the few concessions Ma was prepared to make. The scene culminates in Werther’s Ossian recitation in lüshi style (律詩 lü shi), a metric choice that draws on traditional poetry. He specifically uses seven-character regulated verse (七律), a form often found in elegies that address personal misfortunes, as seen in Qu Yuan’s ‘Encountering Sorrow’ (離騷 Li sao, 3rd century ce).105 In contrast to Denis’s Werther rendering in hexameters and couplets, there is something congenial about this stylistic archaism; after all, the narrator’s fate in Encountering Sorrow resembles Werther’s to some extent, both biographies featuring strained relationships with courtly authorities. Indeed, the generation of Chinese writers who discovered European Romanticism also encouraged the rediscovery of Qu Yuan and other nonconformist poets of Chinese antiquity.

Ma’s choice of where to end the text is surprising. In the original, after Lotte’s sobbing fit, Werther continues to read the ‘Berrathon’ passage, then the excerpt ends. Here, however, Werther’s breakdown, commonly considered the narrative climax of the entire novel, is left to the reader’s imagination. This elision is indicative of Ma’s indebtedness to traditional Chinese aesthetics, where indirectness is preferred over drastic imagery, a feature that late Goethe indeed cherished in Chinese novels.107 Despite such restraint, nothing is lost on the reader. Werther and Lotte’s shared literary experience resonates with Chinese tropes about secret love, notably the tragic story of Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu, the main characters from Dream of the Red Chamber.108

In the light of such linguistic amendments and intertexts, Ma Junwu’s Chinese rendering falls short of linguistic innovation but remains a document of a careful transfer that incorporates European literature into those literary tropes and modes of expression that were available around 1900. Grafting led to the creation of a text that loses its exotic appeal amid a seamless integration into a new chain of signification. Rarely has transcultural ‘misunderstanding’ produced such a smooth reinvention of the source text in a foreign tongue.

Radical Wertherism (Guo Moruo)

More popular among academics than the wider public, this approach differs considerably from previous examples. According to Venuti, direct translation treats the tension between languages in a way that registers rather than removes the linguistic and cultural differences of foreign fiction,110 an effect that perfectly suits Lu and Zhou’s emphasis on the attractive strangeness of modern ideas and forms in the Chinese context of the time.

On the one hand, Guo follows time-tested conventions of baihua literature, using two-character words instead of compact classical style. The verb shi 是 replaces the formal wei 為; de 的 replaces zhi 之 as a possessive modifier, except in the last sentence, where it indicates a certain degree of pathos (如時之未來). His forceful use of exclamation particles, however, such as a 啊, ai 唉 and ya 呀, makes this translation deeply idiosyncratic.113 Here, exclamation particles tower Werther’s impressions of the forest, as if to rival the mentioned mountain peak and the valley. In Chinese vernacular literature, such use is unprecedented. Guo enters the scene of translation with poetic aplomb.

Late Qing novels feature exclamations to express wonder, relief or shock, either at the beginning of a sentence or at the end, but are never followed by an exclamation mark, only by a full stop, or its Chinese equivalent, the judian (句點). The reason why vernacular fiction uses exclamation particles, the Chinese equivalent of English interjections, was the general lack of punctuation. When the protagonist of The Travels of Lao Can awakes from a shocking dream, no punctuation is necessary. An early non-punctuated edition reads: ‘呀原來是一夢.’ In English: ‘Ya so this was just a dream.’114 His surprise is indicated through a word (呀 ya) rather than punctuation. Guo’s contemporaries continued this practice but combined particles with modern punctuation. In Somebody’s Tragedy (或人的悲劇 Huoren de beiju, 1922), Lu Yin’s suffering heroine cries out: ‘唉！天乎！不可治的失眠病.’115 In translation, this passage reads: ‘Ai! Oh Heavens! This incurable insomnia!’ Notably, Lu Yin still uses vernacular (唉 ai) and classic particles (乎 hu) side by side. Such texts combined exclamation and exclamation marks for the first time, thus creating double exclamation. The typographic innovations ‘唉！’ and ‘呀！’ are not cases of redundancy, as in Takayama’s sequence of exclamation mark and full stop (‘！。’), but create double emphasis, a phenomenon that is comparable to multiple exclamation points in contemporary English (!!!). While Western punctuation needs such typographic markers due to the lack of onomatopoeic expressivity, Chinese particles attain a certain over-expressivity in this specific combination. Still uncommon in the 1920s, this juxtaposition was soon naturalised. In today’s usage, ‘呀！’ is seen as grammatically correct and stylistically unproblematic.

In addition to Guo’s preference for anything associated with expressivity, his translation treats the text as a gateway to occidental letters. Its heavy appendix provides detailed explanations, including even an incidental reference to ‘Kreuzer’, a German unit of currency. Similar to modern critical editions, Lotte’s exclamation ‘Klopstock!’ is elucidated with a full ten-page translation of ‘The Spring Festival’ (‘Die Frühlingsfeier’), the poem often associated with the morning scene at the ball. Yet Guo’s attention to detail does not result in a nuanced philological introduction to another foreign literary text, the German poet whom Takayama had elided in his translation; instead, the translator-cum-editor pursues an idiosyncratic aesthetic programme, as the sound of Klopstock’s poetry becomes difficult to tell apart from Werther’s prose.

In Macpherson’s original, there is something theatrical about Colma’s surprise at the sight of her lover’s dead body: ‘Who lie on the heath beside me?’ Goethe’s Werther maintains this tone: ‘Aber wer sind, die dort unten liegen auf der Heide?’ Guo, however, opts for a simple question: ‘Oh, who is over there?’ (哦，那是誰？ O, na shi shei?) This colloquial tone reduces the scene’s epic weight. The focus is on subjectivity and the immediacy of experience, a tendency that culminates in the second paragraph which gives voice to the unmitigated expressiveness of enthusiastic youth.

Defying notions of translational humility, Guo did not aim at imitating Werther in Chinese in a way that would require him to diversify his register. Instead, he regarded the text as a canvas for his own poetic style. In fact, the stylistic blur between Goethe, Klopstock and Ossian results from Guo’s own style. By 1922, he was already regarded as the ‘most provocative voice in modern Chinese literature’.117 His poetry collection Goddess (女神 Nü shen, 1921) abounds with apostrophes, ellipses and double exclamations, among them ‘Morning Peace’ (晨安 Chen an), counting thirty-eight lines that contain no fewer than sixty-five exclamation particles. Like in his translations, ya 呀, a 啊 and ba 吧 are invariably followed by exclamation mark. ‘Climbing the Mountain’ (登臨 Deng lin) could be a paraphrase of Werther’s 21 June letter: the individual addresses an anthropomorphised nature – apostrophe follows after apostrophe.

Summoning the God-Author

Guo’s carefree translational ethos exacerbates and inverts Eyck’s demand that translators should respect ‘the product of Goethe’s (or, as Goethe presents it: Werther’s) translation’. What Eyck would not have expected is an author who assimilates the Wertherian tone to such a high degree that it blends with Ossian, Klopstock’s odes and the translator’s own poetry. As Guo’s poetic voice drowns out their nuances, Werther plays a secondary role in his grand literary vision of a universal language of the soul.

Guo’s translational enthusiasm for a text steeped in autobiographic resonance is part of a larger project: the introduction of the Author-God into Chinese letters. While this literary simulacrum was firmly established in the West (only to be questioned in the post-war era), authorship was largely anonymous throughout East Asian literary history. Since authors such as Guo aimed to establish themselves as genius figures in the literary scene, they pointed to the elevated status of genius in occidental literature. The hope was that the special status of European writers would also catapult East Asian poets from obscurity into the limelight. In view of this apotheosis of authorship in the 1920s, Haun Saussy argues: ‘The emergence of the author […] is part and parcel of the consolidation of modern Chinese literature. It is an event that […] saturates both “literature” and “criticism”, both textual and social formations.’120

The original reference is taken from the passage in Johann Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (Gespräche mit Goethe, 1836/1848) in which the poet looks back at his earliest poems and gives an account of his erratic writing, which he soon abandoned.122 Guo isolates Goethe’s self-portrait as a young man and remains unimpressed with the mature poet’s general aesthetics of moderation, a point that is made repeatedly throughout the Conversations.

Although Guo does not claim privileged insights into Werther’s personal life as Render does, the appendix features a number of wild claims. In a commentary on Werther’s brief Leonora reference in the first letter (4 May 1772), Guo provides a biographic key, stating plainly: ‘Leonora is Lucinde’s nickname.’123 In contrast to Render, who gave himself to free fabulation, Guo’s commentary is based on German scholarship of the late 19th century, which drew this biographical key from a segment of Goethe’s Poetry and Truth, where the autobiographer describes how he found himself caught in a rivalry between two sisters, Emilie and Lucinde. From today’s perspective, such claims appear incidental and gratuitous; in this context, however, they point to the wide appeal that positivism had across the world at the onset of the 20th century. It is likely that Guo acquainted himself with such interpretations, specifically Woldemar von Biedermann’s scholarship,124 in foreign-language libraries during his studies in Japan.

Despite the glory attributed to the literary hero, Goethe, the paradoxical situation of the Author-God is that he is perpetually subjected to the whims of readers who, like Guo, claim privileged insight. The complexities of poetic productions are streamlined to suit the immediate needs of cultural activists who looked for specific characteristics in the literature they translated. Guo’s treatment of Werther and the Conversations exemplifies literary grafting, as he selects specific information like a gardener who picks a specific twig to become a scion in an organism that outshines the original. Guo’s identification with Werther’s ejacul*tory prose comes at a price, as the translator elided the different narrative voices that Goethe incorporated into his text.

Toned-down translations

This translation demonstrates that Guo’s double exclamation was primarily a gesture rather than a means of more succinct communication. The particles can be omitted without diminishing Werther’s fits of enthusiasm. In other passages, however, Qian Tianyou’s conservative approach is reminiscent of Grassi’s Italian translation, where Werther’s erratic prose is replaced with orderly sentences, making it ‘hard to tell what Werther actually wants’. His characteristic aposiopeses, interruptions in the middle of a sentence (e.g. the onset of the letter dating from 16 June 1772), are converted into full clauses.

The removal of exclamation particles reflects the waning appeal of literary experimentation, as language reformers increasingly perceived the proliferation of the vernacular as a problem. The more authors insisted on regional dialects or highly personal literary styles, the greater the risk of linguistic fragmentation. Although Shanghai, Guo’s base, was the unquestioned cultural centre of China, where the film, music and publishing industries flourished, the decisive steps towards linguistic unification were taken at Beijing’s universities. This became clear in the 1930s, when the Beijing dialect was declared the national standard in terms of both grammar and pronunciation: ‘for the first time in the history of the Chinese language […] instead of retaining historical distinctions that no longer existed in modern vernaculars […] the phonology of the contemporary vernacular of Beijing should be adopted as its standard pronunciation.’127

This bad reputation followed Guo well into the post-war period, when the conservative critic C. T. Hsia, one of the most influential US historians of Chinese literature, emphatically dismissed the latter’s literary output as mediocre writings that only appealed to untrained readers: ‘the seeming vitality […] is not nourished by any inner wealth of feeling: both its mechanical rhythm and its overuse of exclamatory sentences betray a lack of poetic sensitivity.’130 Such damning criticisms may have contributed to Guo’s falling silent in literary matters after 1926. At the time, the realist faction among progressive writers established a sober narrative tone as the norm. The aesthetic excess of Guo’s Creation Society was increasingly seen as an anti-revolutionary force that gave preference to subjective individualism over revolutionary action.131 Henceforth, exclamatory speech acts were reserved for ridiculous characters who placed too much emphasis on their own petty feelings. At this point, Werther was no longer embraced as a symbol of modernity but became an emblem of the kind of subjectivity that prevents a person’s maturation.

Conclusion

In the history of translation, critics often invoke Ezra Pound’s quasi-translations in Cathay (1915), a selection of Classical Chinese poetry from Li Bai, Wang Wei and Tao Yuanming, as an instance of felicitous linguistic transfer, even if the preconditions were set to produce plenty of misunderstanding. Himself ignorant of both modern and Classical Chinese, the American poet drew, with considerable freedom, from posthumous sketches left behind by Ernest Fenollosa, an Anglo-American scholar of Japanese studies. Although the latter’s manuscript abounded with imperfections – for example grammatical misprisions – Pound amended Fenollosa’s mistakes. Wai-lim Yip observes that ‘even when [Pound] is given only the barest details, he is able to get into the central consciousness of the original author by what we may perhaps call a kind of clairvoyance’.132 For lack of a better framework, T. S. Eliot called the Cathay poems not translations, but ‘translucencies’,133 indicating that Pound had access to some sort of poetic interlingua.134

Held against the concept of grafting, translucency taps into layers of meaning that one would assume to be hidden from the translator, causing the tension between source and target text to give way to spontaneous unanimity and mystical oneness. The Arch-Original, a hypothetical text inferred by the translator, coincides with the real text. Granted that the concept can also be playfully applied to the non-linguistic realm, the history of Werther translation also features translucency in regard to many translators’ hesitation to imitate the protagonist’s expressivity. Like Goethe’s 1787 edition of the novel, which limited readerly identification, many translators of the first edition unwittingly created the same effect by adhering to the rules and conventions of the target language. One could consider Render’s refusal to consider Goethe the author of Werther’s letters as another translucency, by which the translator enforces the kind of distance between author and protagonist that Goethe was desperate to establish among his readers. In a way, the Englishman even surpasses Goethe’s intended effect as the translator assumes authorship himself – and even befriends Werther in person. In Ma Junwu’s case, Ossianic lyricism, translated into Classical Chinese, displaces the original prose of Werther, eliciting a different kind of translucency. Ma enters – unbeknownst to him – into a dialogue with Macpherson. While such translucencies indicate a mysterious correspondence between the original and its translations, most of the surveyed translations document a more pedestrian process, in which foreign literature is seamlessly incorporated into existing linguistic conventions. One may speak of trimmings rather than grafts.

Neither Takayama nor Guo can claim to follow in Ezra Pound’s footsteps, especially Guo, who so clearly prioritised his own appetite regarding expressive language. Arguably, their awareness of the systemic differences between the original and their target languages was too great to facilitate such spontaneous agreements. Instead, they emphasised the awkwardness that was inevitable once Werther was fitted into modern Japanese and modern Chinese. Their Arch-Originals represent a step into an abyss rather than a safe retreat into a framework replete with familiar clichés. Takayama’s juxtaposition of exclamation mark and full stop (！。) and Guo’s successions of exclamation mark and particles (呀！) exploit the tension between source and target text in a way that was unthinkable for their peers, let alone for the European context, in which the similarity of Latin-based systems thwarted such stylistic experimentation. One wonders what kind of interlinguistic system would have emerged had voices such as Takayama and Guo played a greater role in the consolidation of modern Japanese and Chinese.

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