Mittwoch, 20. Januar 2010

Miteinander reden...

Darin besteht Liebe: Einsame beschützen berühren miteinander reden .

Rainer Maria Rilke
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2 Kommentare:

epitimaios aristoxenos hat gesagt…

Liebe Tanja, leider hatte ich schon alles auf englisch geschrieben, als ich merkte, es würde zu lange werden, um es bei N&Q zu posten, aber ich habe keine Lust es nochmal auf deutsch zu schreiben.

My personal experience is that there are in the world some borders which are particularly hard to trascend. These borders corrispond for example to what sociologists call the geo-clichés, but also to some further lay outs. One of the borderlines of (in)comprehension are the Alps. I live in Italy for 30 years now and I could write a book on misunderstandings between the german and the italian culture (to start with Luther and Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici (Leo X) and to end with Leoluca Orlando and Berlusconi and the german media) and even on the misunderstandings between other groups. Because Florence is a place where you can meet people from all over the world if you want; and I wanted to do so.

Fortunatly Germany is Italy's first commercial partner and even the N'drangheta in Diusburg didn't deteriorate the relations between I and G. But when you go to South Tyrol you will notice that there isn't very much friendship between the two cultures, and that they do not even know each other very well. There are very few persons from this area working in the italian tv. Not only from the german population there, even from the italian group, which lost partly the italian roots but obviously didn't replace them with german roots. Lilly Gruber might be the only exception working in the italian tv. Markus Lanz works in Germany and he is not an exception. From all over Italy people come to Florence and Rome as professionals and students, but it is hard to meet someone coming from Bolzano/Bozen. Both, Lilly and Markus, speak perfectly both languages.
Cecilia Bartoli is an italian artist who lives in Switzerland. Rarly it happens that politicians or experts from Italy show up in a german talk show. And if they do, they mainly speak about Italy, not about Europe or national approaches to Europe. In Italy it happend two times in 30 years that I saw a german politician or expert speak in a talk show (while personalities from other countries can be seen often, especially from the USA).

A politician who very much was involved with promoting reciprocal respect and comprehension between the two cultures was Alexander Langer in Bolzano/Bozen. He certainly followed Rilke's exhortation for love, but the difficulties he met broke him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Langer
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Langer

21. Januar 2010 um 05:39
Anonym hat gesagt…

If you go to another border region, in Alsace, you will meet better conditions. The differences between Germans and Frenchmen are not so big as between Germans and Italians. You will find more value sharing.

You certainly know the trouble around Luther's translation... This trouble didn't concern only questions of doctrine. There are, at a deeper level some translation problems which have to do with different cultural traditions and they continue acting as uncompatibility still now, that latin isn't spoken anymore and italien became the language of the country. If you read the Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen, you can't not notice its persisting topicality and relevance to the present.

Milan Kundera wrote a whole chapter (chapter 19 in the first part, if I remember well) in his "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" about one single aspect of this issue, because he knew his book could be fully understood by readers belonging to the slavic and the germanic countries without his explanation, but not by readers from the romanic area. This chapter has no literary function and no part in the plot. It is an alien element and stays there like a dead body, but it is necessary, like a huge foot note, for EUROPE in order to favour understanding of different cultures. Kundera living in Paris, loving a french woman, new what he was writing about.

Consider that there is a wonderful, rimed translation in english of Goethe's "Faust" (by David Luke) and some other quite good translations. It is not so difficult to translate german into english. And these two cultures are quite similar and have no particular problems of comprehension.

But there are at least 20 complete translations and 8 partial translations of the "Faust" into italian!! and there is not one which is really satisfying. I use three different translations and I usually need to modify and adapt them... And mostly even italian Germanists do not have sufficient anthropological experience to know enough and be able to translate adequately a german book of great writers, because the Germanists after World War II usually didn't live for a long time in Germany. They call theirselves "silent translators". Who knows why they became Germanist? They do not like Germany.

So there is a lot to do for Sysiphos.


But there are also aestetic barriers. You would be surprised how different the reception of american culture in Italy and Germany is. This reguards even the radio and tv programm. And when I want to buy a cd or dvd of a Stephen Sondheim musical I have to order it in Germany, because in the best shops of Florence noone knows Sondheim.
The reason of this difference (which puts limits to reciprocal comprehension and could be matter of a comedy, since both germans and italians consider each other often very "primitive" for opposite reasons; but who could understand this comedy????) lies again in differences of mentality; but in addition it lies in the fact that german immigrants populated the USA in the 19. century, while the italian immigrants arrived mainly in the 20. century. Franc Sinatra, Liza Minelli, Sylvester Stallone, John Travolta, Madonna (Ciccone) and other "italians" therefore have a completly other status in Italy compared with Germany, while Germans usually even do not know which Americans have German origin and whether there are Majors, Governours or even Presidents in the United States of german descent. In Italy everyone knows who is Rudolph Giuliani or Nancy Pelosi. In Germany everyone knows who is Werner von Braun!

21. Januar 2010 um 05:41

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