The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Holy shit, right? That's pretty deep. Now, in the Mondial edition, this sentence becomes.
The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp on the brain of the living.Now i like "brain" singular, and I'll leave off criticism of substituting "past" for "dead," because i think the point still gets across, but "alp" and "nightmare" convey two very different meanings, the former history's omnipresence and mass, it's arbitrary inevitability, the latter also conveys history's horrific and lingering legacies and its trauma. I don't know German, let alone what the original text says, so i don't know which is more accurate, but i like the Marxists.org version better - and not just for aesthetic reasons.
That's an interesting take on the German; presumably the original uses "Alptraum," which means nightmare, but as you can see in the word, it's got this sense of "dream of an Alp" contained in there as well. I've been under the impression this is sort of like the Burkean idea of the sublime, seeing a mountain, it's going to crush you, you're aware of imminent death, ie. the stuff nightmares must be made of.
ReplyDelete... But then I remembered that Alptraum isn't really the standard spelling, Albtraum is technically more correct. So that changes the picture entirely: "Alben" are, in Germanic mythology, dark elves responsible for dreams (see also: Alberich the dwarf in Wagner's heinous Ring).
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting - so a nightmare is a fear of a black elf (as pre-Flavor of Love Public Enemy might have phrased it) and whoever retranslated the 18th Brumaire was using a strange translation of a weird orthography.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Evan!