cahn | Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

All Yuletide requests are out!

Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!

-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)

Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!

-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French

-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...

Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links

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From:

selenak

Oh, and I almost forgot:

“Do you know that you are a fine man?”

pfff, English translator. My German translation has "beautiful man" here, and I believe Fritz does say "beau homme", not "gentil" or whatever in the original.

cahn, Casanova naturally also wrote his memoirs in French, though as opposed to everyone else in this tale other than the Mozarts, he didn't learn the language in the nursery. As you non-nobly do. Son-of-an-actress Giacomo learned it as a student, and cheerfully mentions in the foreword he's writing his memoirs in French instead of Italian because French is more universally understood and he wants this to be read. (A French friend of mine,

shezan, tells me Casanova's French is gorgeous and beautiful, and that he's on a level with Nabokov or Joseph Roth as a writer writing in a language not his own there.)

The history of the Memoires de ma vie manuscript is also fascinating. Casanova started to write them in 1789, the year of the revolution. He did mean them for publication, hence the French, and there were some early readers like the Duc de Ligne (not his boss), but he couldn't find a publisher agreeing to his terms, though he pitched it to, among others, a Saxon in Dresden ("what do you mean, a cut version in only three volumes?!? I've written twelve!") within his life time. When he died in 1790, the husband of one of his nieces who'd been in Dresden on business before hearing old Giacomo was in a bad state of health and hence could make the journey to Bohemia was present, and returned with the complete Histoire de ma vie manuscript to Dresden. When he died, his daughter Camilla inherited the manuscript. By now we're in 1821, and Camilla, no fool she, decides to go for broke and sell it to the highest bidder among publishers.

The race is made by Brockhaus in Leipzig, most famous these days for publishing the standard German spelling dictionary for the last 150 plus years. Brockhaus, now the proud owner of the manuscript, first goes for a "Best of Casanova" one volume German translation, then, when there's an illegal supposed complete French edition publishes a complete twelve volume German edition of their own. But! The dastardly German translator doesn't send four chapters of the manuscript he's been entrusted with back to the publisher once he's done; these remain lost to this day, and hence exist only in translation.

The rest of the original manuscript gets put into a safe in the Brockhaus main building in Leipzig and remains there until 1943. At which point allied bombings have reached the Eastern German cities, and the publishers want to protect the Histoire de ma vie, along with some other manuscript treasures, for posterity, so it's off to a bunker with the manuscript. Where it stays until the last days of the war, when the Red Army is approaching. The Brockhaus publishing staff goes west, but with the manuscript, and relocates to Wiesbaden (in the US sector), where the Memoirs are kept in a safe of Deutsche Bank, one of the few institutions still to have one in 1945.

Until the 1950s, everyone at newly relocated Brockhaus is a bit paranoid about this particular manuscript by now and refuses access to it. Then, in 1960, they strike a deal with the French publisher Edition Plons which leads to the first complete (minus four chapters) authentic publication of the Histoire de ma vie in the original French. And in 2010, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France acquires the original manuscript for over seven million Euro, the highest price this particular national library has ever paid for a single manuscript, which is thus now owned by the French nation.

ETA: Mildred, Cahn, which English translation doesm Gutenberg use? Because English wiki has this to say on the problem of English Casanova translations:

Due to the success of the (first) German edition, the French editor Victor Tournachon decided to publish the book in France. Tournachon had no access to the original manuscript, and so the French text of his edition was translated from the German translation. The text was heavily censored. In response to the piracy Brockhaus brought out a second edition in French, edited by Jean Laforgue (1782–1852) which was very unreliable as Laforgue altered Casanova's religious and political views as well as censoring sexual references. The French volumes were published from 1826 to 1838. These editions were also successful, and another French pirate edition was prepared with another translation from the German edition. As the German edition was not entirely published at this time, this edition allegedly contains passages invented by the (French) translator.

From 1838 to 1960, all the editions of the memoirs were derived from one of these editions. Arthur Machen used one of these inaccurate versions for his English translation published in 1894 which remained the standard English edition for many years.

Now, at a guess, Gutenberg does not use any post 1960 English translation, do they?

Edited Date: 2019-11-10 09:12 am (UTC)

From:

cahn

That is a fascinating story, haha, that's awesome paranoia.

I believe Fritz does say "beau homme", not "gentil"

Hm. I will cut the translator a little more slack than you -- American English, at least, doesn't really say "beautiful man" the way that the French (and Germans?) say "beau homme." The closest translation might be "handsome man" or "good-looking man," although that doesn't really have the same connotation, and "fine-looking man" might actually be fairly close (though "fine" alone does tend to make one think of virtues other than one's looks, so I see your point).

Gutenberg uses the Arthur Machen translation, yuuuuup. Right -- note to self to buy a newer translation if/when I end up reading this. (And yes, in general, Gutenberg would have to be < 1960 for copyright.)

this edition allegedly contains passages invented by the (French) translator.

lol, wow!! That's... not something I'm used to seeing from a translator :)

From:

selenak

A man still gets more commonly described as "gutaussehend" - handsome - than as "schön" - Beautiful - but "ein schöner Mann" is still a valid phrasing occasionally used.

(Now what really gets debated is whether Napoleon's remark about Goethe upon meeting him - "Voilà un homme" - should have the "homme" translated as "Mann" or "Mensch", i.e. "man" or "human being" - could be either in French.) :)

#FrenchGermanTranslations

Re: the alterations in Casanova's original text - blame the 19th century mores again. I remember an article that lists the most annoying examples, I shall see whether I can find it for you.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, damn. Wow, that is one complicated history, and of *course* the only version I can read is a highly inaccurate one. Dammit!

Thank you for sharing the history of the memoirs. That was super fascinating, even without the warning that I'm reading a very bastardized copy if I read the Gutenberg one.

That's... not something I'm used to seeing from a translator :)

Yeah, it was a *thing*. I would love to see the list if

selenak can dig it up.

Re "fine", when I read that, I took it as meaning "good-looking" in rather old-fashioned English, and the Oxford English Dictionary agrees with me: "Of a person or thing: remarkably attractive; good-looking. Now somewhat dated, except U.S. slang (originally and chiefly African-American), of a person: sexually attractive," with examples of the older meaning up to the early 20th century. So since the Machen translation is over 100 years old, I'm willing to go with "good-looking" as the originally intended meaning.

From:

cahn

Yeah, that's fair, and that's how I read it too (as good-looking in old-fashioned English), although it's also true no one would speak like this today.

I just did a search on amazon, and it's kind of amazing how little there is in the way of Casanova that isn't the bastardized version (and in particular, that none of it seems to be available in e-book).