Frühere Englisch-Sprachklausuren

11. April 2001 – Markus Edler

William Wordsworth: Essays upon Epitaphs. Herausgegeben von W. J. B. Owen. London und Boston 1974, S. 131f.

Yet, though the writer who would excite sympathy is bound in this case, more than in any other, to give proof that he himself has been moved, it is to be remembered, that to raise a monument is a sober and a reflective act; that the inscription which it bears is intended to be permanent, and for universal perusal; and that, for this reason, the thoughts and feelings expressed should be permanent also – liberated from that weakness and anguish of sorrow which is in nature transitory, and which with instinctive decency retires from notice. The passions should be subdued, the emotions controlled; strong, indeed, but nothing ungovernable or wholly involuntary. Seemliness requires this, and truth requires it also; for how can the narrator otherwise be trusted? Moreover, a grave is a tranquillising object: resignation in course of time springs up from it as naturally as the wild flowers, besprinkling the turf with which it may be covered, or gathering round the monument by which it is defended. The very form and substance of the monument which has received the inscription, and the appearance of the letters, testifying with what a slow and laborious hand they must have been engraven, might seem to reproach the author who had given way upon this occasion to transports of mind, or to quick turns of conflicting passion; though the same might constitute the life and beauty of a funeral oration or elegiac poem.

These sensations and judgements, acted upon perhaps unconsciously, have been one of the main causes why epitaphs so often personate the deceased, and represent him as speaking from his own tombstone. The departed Mortal is introduced telling you himself that his pains are gone; that a state of rest is come; and he conjures you to weep for him no longer. He admonishes with the voice of one experienced in the vanity of those affections which are confined to earthly objects, and gives a verdict like a superior Being, performing the office of a judge, who has no temptations to mislead him, and whose decision cannot but be dispassionate. Thus is deasth disarmed of its sting, and affliction unsubstantialised. By this tender fiction, the survivors bind themselves to a sedater sorrow, and employ the intervention of the imagination in order that the reason may speak her own language earlier than she would otherwise have been enabled to do. This shadowy interposition also harmoniously unites the two worlds of the living and the dead by their appropriate affections.

Anmerkung:
Epitaph: Grabinschrift.

13. Oktober 2000 – Florian Cramer

Vladimir Nabokov: Poems and Problems. (Auszug aus dem Vorwort). New York und Toronto (McGraw-Hill) 1970, S. 13ff.

INTRODUCTION

This volume consists of three sections: a batch of thirty-nine Russian poems, given in the original and in translation; fourteen poems which I wrote directly in English after 1940 (the year of my leaving Europe for the United States); and eighteen chess problems.

[...]

For the last ten years, I have been promoting, on every possible occasion, literality, i.e., rigid fidelity, in the translation of Russian verse. Treating a text in that way is an honest and delightful procedure, when the text is a recognized masterpiece, whose every detail must be faithfully rendered in English. But what about faithfully englishing one’s own verse, written half a century or a quarter of century ago? One has to fight a vague embarrassment; one cannot help squirming and wincing; one feels rather like a potentate swearing allegiance to his own self or a conscientious priest blessing his own bathwater. On the other hand, if one contemplates, for one wild moment, the possibility of paraphrasing and improving one’s old verse, a horrid sense of falsification makes one scamper back and cling like a baby ape to rugged fidelity. There is only one little compromise I have accepted: whenever possible, I have welcomed rhyme, or its shadow; but I have never twisted the tail of a line for the sake of consonance; and the original measure has not been kept if readjustments of sense had to be made for its sake.

There is not much to say about the section of fourteen English poems, all written in America and all published in The New Yorker. Somehow, they are of a lighter texture than the Russian stuff, owing, no doubt, to their lacking that inner verbal association with old perplexities and constant worry of thought which marks poems written in one’s mother tongue, with exile keeping up its parallel murmur and a never-resolved childhood plucking at one’s rustiest chords.

Siehe auch: Beispielübersetzung.

14. April 2000 – Brian Poole

Tim O’ Brien: „On the Rainy River“. (Auszug).
in: Tim O’ Brien: The Things They Carried.

This is one story I’ve never told before. Not to anyone. Not to my parents, not to my brother or sister, not even to my wife. To go into it, I’ve always thought, would only cause embarrassment for all of us, a sudden need to be elsewhere, which is the natural response of confession. Even now, I’ll admit, the story makes me squirm. For more than twenty years I’ve had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on paper, I’m hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams. Still, it’s a hard story to tell. All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968.

Tim O’ Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough – if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough – I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.

22. November 1999 – Florian Cramer

John Barth: „The Future of Literature and the Literature of the Future“. (Auszug).
in: John Barth: The Friday Book. Essays and Other Nonfiction. New York (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) 1984, S. 164f.

Written literature, most especially prose fiction, is ineluctably anesthetic because it is essentially semiotic. It transpires in the mind. It can’t deal directly with qualities, sensations, emotions, actions, things; it can’t even deal directly, as theater can, with imitations of actions and emotions. It can deal only with their signs, their names: pain, blue, courage, Venezuela, walking around, once upon a time. Writers who are also philosophers, like William H. Gass, have explored the metaphysical implications of this state of affairs. As a professional writer who is only an interested amateur of metaphysics, indeed of reality, I find the chief implication to be that written literature can deal most appropriately – at least more effectively than any other art – with just those aspects of our experience that are at some remove from direct sensation: not only the whole silent life of the mind – cognition, reflection, speculation, recollection, calculation, and the rest – but even the registration of sensation, so to speak: what perception is like.

That’s the famous fact about metaphor, of course, a main property of language and mainly a property of literature (nonverbal metaphors, like the ones film makers sometimes attempt, seem to me to be metaphors for metaphors): to call the sea „wine-dark“ and the dawn „rosy-fingered“ is to say something about the sea and the dawn (and about wine, roses, and fingers) that can’t really be photographed, just as photographs and paintings show us things that can’t finally be said. As long as the private, verbal registration of experience has a future – and, just as important, the registration of verbal experience, the experience of language, which can take us beyond the possibilities of reality – literature has a future.

„Sun so hot I froze to death; Susanna don’t you cry.“ „’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble on the wabe. / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe.“ Try making a movie out of those.

Hinweis: Die rot hervorgehobene und unterstrichene Passage bitte nicht übersetzen!

Siehe auch: Beispielübersetzung.

15. Oktober 1999 – Florian Cramer

William H. Gass: „Robert Walser“. (Auszüge).
in: William H. Gass: Finding a Form. Essays by William H. Gass. New York (Alfred A. Knopf) 1997, S. 65-76.

They found Robert Walser’s body in the middle of a snowy field. It was Christmas Day, so the timing of his death was perhaps excessively symbolic. I like to think the field he fell in was as smoothly white as writing paper.

[...]

Walser is no ordinary voyeur, consumed by the secrets he feels have enraptured his eye, because quite prominent in any of his observations is the observer himself, and that person, too, Walser is watching. He follows each thought, each feeling, from the time one arrives on the scene to the moment it leaves, with a fond but skeptical regard, so that it is the seeing of the thing seen, he sees; and then, since he is also an author composing a page, in addition to everything else he must take into account, he watches the writing itself (both the walk through the woods and the corresponding walk of the words), until a person who has been simply encountered in this world becomes a person perceived in his, and until, in turn, this complex, pale, increasingly imaginary figure is further transformed by words into further words; words which talk about themselves, moreover, which smile at their own quirks and frills, and wave farewell while a substantial and often painful world dwindles away into his detached, multiphenomenal, pleasantly impotent, verbal object.

How absurdly philosophical we have become, Walser might exclaim at this point, and threaten (it would be characteristic) to drop our entire subject, lift my pen and his abruptly from the page.

Siehe auch: Beispielübersetzungen 1, 2 und 3.

16. April 1999 – Jana Ziganke

Thomas de Quincey: „Preface“.
in: Thomas de Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822).

TO THE READER

I HERE present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period of my life: according to my application of it, I trust that it will prove not merely an interesting record, but, in a considerable degree, useful and instructive. In that hope it is that I have drawn it up; and that must be my apology for breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers, or scars, and tearing away that „decent drapery“ which time, or indulgence to human frailty, may have drawn over them: accordingly, the greater part of our confessions (that is, spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed from demireps, adventurers, or swindlers; and, for any such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation from those who can be supposed in sympathy with the decent and self-respecting part of society, we must look to French literature, or to that part of the German which is tainted with the spurious and defective sensibility of the French. All this I feel so forcibly, and so nervously am I alive to reproach of this tendency, that I have for many months hesitated about the propriety of allowing this, or any part of my narrative, to come before the public eye until after my death (when, for many reasons, the whole will be published): and it is not without an anxious review of the reasons for and against this step that I have, at last, concluded on taking it.

Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude; and, even in their choice of a grave, will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man, and wishing (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)

-- „humbly to express
A penitential loneliness.“

It is well, upon the whole, and for the interest of us all, that it should be so; nor would I willingly, in my own person, manifest a disregard of such salutary feelings; nor in act or word do anything to weaken them. But, on the one hand, as my self-accusation does not amount to a confession of guilt, so, on the other, it is possible that, if it did, the benefit resulting to others, from the record of an experience purchased at so heavy a price, might compensate, by a vast overbalance, for any violence done to the feelings I have noticed, and justify a breach of the general rule.

[...]

For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual creature; and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my school-boy days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man, it is no less true that I have struggled against this fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal, and have at length accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man –– have untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me.

16. Oktober 1998 – Brian Poole

William B. Yeats: „The Symbolism of Poetry“ (1900).
in: William B. Yeats: Essays and Introductions. New York 1961.

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols. If certain sensitive persons listen persistently to the ticking of a watch, or gaze persistently on the monotonous flashing of a light, they fall into the hypnotic trance; and rhythm is but the ticking of a watch made softer, that one must needs listen, and various, that one may not be swept beyond memory or grow weary of listening; while the patterns of the artist are but the monotonous flash woven to take the eyes in a subtler enchantment.