Reciprocity between the Various Tribes and Dialects of the Slavic Nation

A Note on Translation

A Note on the Translation Translation is always imprecise. A translator should be faithful to the literal meaning of the original text, yet must also attempt to reproduce the style of the original in a new language. Striking a balance between literal content and style inevitably leads to judgment calls. Other scholars confronting Kollár’s work would inevitably have produced a different English text. I would like to explain briefly my own motives for my decisions. Since many contemporary historians lay great emphasis on the use of key words, my translation deliberately errs on the side of literalism at the expense of style. Kollár wrote his Reciprocity in German, but used several words and phrases from Latin, Czech, Polish and so on. To maintain the atmosphere of the original text, I have only translated Kollár’s German. Phrases from other languages are translated in the end notes. Titles of books also are given in the original language. I have, however, avoided leaving any words in the original German, even key words that are notoriously difficult to render in English. Two important examples are Geist, always rendered as “spirit,” and Volk, always rendered as “people,” though I have sometimes rendered the adjective völkisch as “national.” Wechselseitigkeit, the key term of this book, has been translated as “Reciprocity,” so I have always rendered the adjective gegenseitig as “mutual,” never as “reciprocal.” The desire for literalism also justifies sexist language. Reformminded linguists in both the German-speaking and English-speaking worlds have come to reject the once prevalent convention that a generic human being can be referred to with the masculine pronouns “he,” “him” etc. This reform impulse is worthwhile, but Kollár’s nineteenthcentury prose makes no concessions to twenty-first century sensibilities. I have, however, consistently translated the German word Mensch as “person” rather than “man.” I also translated the poem at the end of Kollár’s text as if it were prose, without making any attempt to replicate the rhyme or rhythm. I anticipate that this book will appeal primarily to historians, not scholars of literature, and expect historians to prefer a literal translation. I also thought the poem itself had limited value as a work of literature, and 70 ALEXANDER MAXWELL that any literary scholar who could develop an interest in this poem would probably be able to read the German original. Readers who understand German may wish to compare my approach to that of Robert Pynsent, the leading anglophone scholar to discuss this period of Slovak history. Consider the following passage, which appears in chapter 9 of Kollár’s Reciprocity: Wir wollen hiermit die Vaterlandsliebe überhaupt keineswegs verdammen, sondern nur wünschen, dass sie den antiken Character verlasse und den der Humanität annehme. In his Questions of Identity, Pynsent translated this as follows: In writing this, I do not on any account wish to damn love of one’s mother-country, but only to express a desire that love should abandon its Ancient character and assume the character of Humanität. 1 My version reads: We do not at all wish to condemn love of the fatherland, instead we only wish it to abandon its ancient character and adopt that of humanity. I see no reason why Humanität should not be translated as “humanity,” and also retain Kollár’s somewhat pretentious use of the first-person plural (the “royal we”). Given the Nazi connotations of the word Vaterland , Pynsent’s “mother-country” may more closely evoke Kollár’s intended meaning to modern readers, but I stayed with “fatherland” because it is etymologically closer to the original German. My translation makes more concessions to modern style on the issue of sentence and paragraph breaks. As one might expect from a Lutheran pastor, Kollár’s text reads like a sermon. It contains several sentences of extraordinary length and complexity, and hardly ever has paragraph breaks. I have tried to divide Kollár’s text into digestible pieces. For example, I have split Kollár’s chapter 10, originally a single ten-page paragraph, into nineteen paragraphs. Chapter 9, originally one paragraph , has similarly been divided into nine paragraphs. I made a con1 Pynsent, Questions of Identity, 59. A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION 71 scious effort not to split any of Kollár’s individual sentences across different paragraphs, but otherwise took whatever liberties seemed necessary to promote...