Subject: November 27, 2018 (BN)

From: Ernst Meyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2018 18:41:35 -0500

[email-masked]
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