Presenting the Unpresentable: Goethe's Translation of Le Neveu de Rameau

JOCELYNE KOLB Presenting the Unpresentable: Goethe's Translation of Le Neveu de Rameau [D] a jedesmahl nach Abfluß einer Reihe Jahrhunderte immet eine neue Religion in der Welt aufkommt, und indem sie in die Sitten übergeht sich auch als eine neue Moral geltend macht: so würde jede Zeit die Kunstwerke der Vergangenheit als unmoralisch verketzern, wenn solche nach dem Maßstabe der zeitigen Moral beurtheilt werden sollen. —Heine, Die Romantische Schule (1836) To JUDGE FROM famous portraits of Goethe, he never wrote (or thought) anything improper; and although the impression he leaves has much to do with the conventions of portraiture, it has often been confirmed by the pronouncements of scholars. Posterity presents Goethe as the stereotypical German poet—sombre, distinguished, and dominated by things of the spirit. One can argue that myths and stereotypes are based on ignorance and must therefore be discounted; someone who has read Goethe, and certainly someone who has studied him, will have a more differentiated view. But how, then, does one explain the tendency of scholars to preserve for his writings the image of decorum we find in the portraits? It may be defensible to protect Goethe from the fashionable demythologizing of great figures by exposing unheroic details (usually sexual) of their private lives.1 But in this case, the issue is one of his writing, not of his life. It makes no sense to protect Goethe's reputation from works that do not conform to one's own sense of decorum—texts like some of the early plays, the four suppressed Roman Elegies, the Tagebuch, or the Paralipomena to Faust.2 That Goethe himself felt constrained by the prudery of his public is clear from his correspondence with Schiller, for example, and from the conversation with 150 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA Eckermann about the suppression of Das Tagebuch, where Goethe, like Heine in Die Romantische Schule, speaks about the changing (and restricting) perception of morality in art: [Die Zeit] ist ein Tyiann, der seine Launen hat, und der zu dem, was einer sagt und tut, in jedem Jahrhundert ein ander Gesicht macht. Was den alten Griechen zu sagen erlaubt war, will uns zu sagen nicht mehr anstehen, und was Shakespeares kräftigen Mitmenschen durchaus anmutete, kann der Engländer von 1820 nicht mehr ertragen, so daß in der neuesten Zeit ein Family-Shakespeare ein gefühltes Bedürfnis wird. (Eckermann, 24 February 1824) But Goethe did more than grumble privately over the bowdlerizing of other poets' works and the restrictions placed on his own; he gave his objections public and aesthetic form when he undertook a translation of Diderot's Neveu de Rameau and wrote a series of brilliant annotations to accompany it. His annotations make good reading in their own right, as Schiller remarked,3 but when read together with the translation they give a new meaning to the expurgations Goethe says were necessary in order to make Diderot's unpresentable text presentable. In the translation, Goethe makes a few changes and omissions, one of which appears to have been prompted by his own sense of propriety; in the annotations, he repudiates his emendations, which he blames on the intolerance of a conservative readership. Yet Goethe's rendition is more faithful than he claims; his translation is not much more decorous than Diderot's original, and certainly not as different as his commentary makes it seem. The tension he implies in the annotations between his conviction and his practice is a fiction he invents in order to ridicule the constraints of a prudish audience; and this fiction reflects the satirical method of Le Neveu de Rameau and Goethe's aesthetic convictions, not the commitment to decorum one would assume from looking at portraits of him and listening to many Goethe scholars. The genesis and publication history of Diderot's dialogue are as complicated and unorthodox as the work itself. Like Jacques le Fataliste, Le Neveu de Rameau was published first in Germany, and posthumously; but Jacques, a work that Goethe also found spellbinding, had circulated during Diderot's lifetime in Melchior Grimm's Correspondance littéraire. The history of Le Neveu de Rameau reads like an adventure story.4 Diderot...