<au>Steven P. Sondrup</>

<at>1Literature and Language</>

<@@@>

Early in their careers, most comparatists no doubt have faced the challenging task of explaining

to curious interlocutors what comparative literature as a discipline is. Part of the challenge of

explaining the discipline is that over the decades since its institutionalization in American

academe it was been relatively flexible in expanding and reconfiguring itself to accommodate

new areas and techniques for teaching and research. This flexibility and elasticity

notwithstanding, one of the enduring characteristics that has served as something of a hallmark

and a distinguishing feature over and against national language and cultural studies departments

is the comparative juxtaposition of literary works from differing cultural and linguistic

backgrounds—ideally in their original language—with the anticipation that this contrastive

reading strategy will reveal important aspects of the texts under consideration more forcefully

and clearly than their study in the context of their culture of origin alone. Although universal

admiration for both the breadth and depth of the erudition of some of the earliest practitioners of

the discipline remains undiminished—for Spitzer, Auerbach, and Curtius—during the early

phases of its institutional life, comparative literature was comparing things that were not very

different. As has been so often noted, the locus of attention was clearly western Europe centering

on the Rhine River valley and North America. More recently significant initiatives to include the

rest of Europe, Latin America, east and south Asia, the Middle East, the traditions of the Pacific

basin, and north as well as sub-Saharan Africa have been undertaken and proven generally

successful. The International Comparative Literature Association has affiliated associations in all

these areas and is sponsoring major research efforts dealing with many of them.

Just as the cultural-geographic purview of the discipline has expanded so have its

methods and focus. During the 1980s in many institutions, comparative literature became the

principal domicile of literary theory, which now has migrated in a number of different directions

and more recently has been particularly hospitable to various approaches to identity formation

and definition. It has responded to new methods of instruction and research that have come from

both relatively proximate as well as more remote disciplinary investigations. Among the most

recent of these—world literature—is obviously closely allied to comparative literature and at

once addresses its historical Eurocentricism. It offers an exciting and highly stimulating new

reading strategy that, as a number of books published in the recent years clearly suggest, has

important implications for how literature is taught and for new emphases that can be brought to

bear on understanding the production and dissemination of literary works. In a pioneering

volume, David Damrosch defines world literature with an elegant succinctness that explicitly

excludes any claim to chaotic universal inclusiveness, but rather as a “mode of circulation and

reading” (5) applicable to individual as well as collections of works that range from established

canonical masterpieces to new works that come to the attention of scholars and critics. He begins

his discussion of world literature in this sense with a detailed presentation of Goethe’s famous

use of the term Weltliteratur in a discussion with his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann and

interestingly draws Eckermann out of the shadows cast by Goethe’s luminous presence in which

he has for so many years remained all but hidden. I would like, though, to revisit this exchange

and some of Goethe’s other references to the all-important concept of world literature in order to

examine some telling details.

As is very well known, on Wednesday, January 31, 1827, Goethe advised his young

secretary that the age of national literatures had passed and that the morning of Weltliteratur was

dawning.i Since parts of Europe of great importance from a literary point view were not yet

nations in any modern sense of the word—Germany and Italy for example—he must have

intended nation to stand for something like linguistic or closely-knit cultural communities. As

comparatists we all presumably agree that the observation was prescient and that the broadly

encompassing and international contextualization of literature is a mode of literary study that

offers numerous insights not readily available from a narrower nationalistic or monocultural

study.

The topic of Weltliteratur had apparently been on Goethe’s mind for at least a few days

as evidenced by a letter written four days earlier (on January 27) to Adolf Friedrich Carl

Streckfuß. The term continued, moreover, to appear in his letters, diaries, conversations, and

published works until the end of his life in 1832.

When Goethe first mentioned the topic of Weltliteratur to Eckermann, it was in

connection with his observations on a vast array of different literary traditions. Perhaps most

notable among these were his comments on a Chinese novel that he had just been reading, Ju

kiao Li ou les deux cousines (published in Paris in 1826) and on a collection entitled Chinese

Courtship. Both seem to have stimulated Goethe’s imagination in that they gave rise to a very

short essay dealing with the emergence of Weltliteratur and the poem cycle “Chinesisch-

deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten.” Young Eckermann remarked that the Chinese novel must

have seemed very exotic, but Goethe countered that it was not as foreign as one might imagine

and that the characters think, behave, and feel just about as we do. He then concludes that the

novel has certain similarities to his Hermann und Dorothea and certain novels of Richardson. In

all fairness, it must also be noted that Goethe then cites a number of differences between the

Chinese novel and typical practices in Western narrative dealing for the most part with the

setting and major elements of the plot that are distinctive and highly notable.

The history of the novel in question is of some interest. A modern (Wade Giles)

romanization of the title reads Yü Chiao Li (玉嬌梨). There are as well two other names by which

it is known: Ti-san ts’ai tzu shu (The Third Book of Genius) and Shuang-mei ch’i-yuan (The

Unusual Marriage of a Pair of Beauties). The novel is of uncertain authorship, consists of

twenty-two chapters, and was written some time toward the end of the Ming Dynasty (1368–

1644) or early in the Ch’ing (1644–1912). The action is set in the Ming Dynasty sometime

shortly after 1449 and describes the intrigues of a minister of the king in finding a talented and

upwardly-mobile husband for his two beautiful daughters upon whose names the title is based.

The narrative is populated by mostly stock characters who result, perhaps, from its relatively

comic but highly complex plot full of amorous twists and turns. It is by no means regarded in

China as one of that nation’s masterpieces but was translated as part of the chinoiserie passion

that engulfed Europe during much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and involved

interest in everything Chinese from porcelain, fabrics, paintings, architecture, and literature. A

note to the English translation, which was made from the French, traces interest in the novel back

to the early eighteenth century, mentions a copy of it in the royal library in Paris, describes

various summaries and abstracts, and praises the French translation, all to the end of establishing

the authenticity of the novel as a genuine representation of Chinese culture.

I have rehearsed some of the details of Goethe’s well-known conversation with

Eckermann and some of the background on which it was based because I want to attempt to tease

out some of the details that are sometimes overlooked but may be relevant for our contemporary

efforts to configure world literature as an emerging pedagogical strategy that manages to

negotiate the extremely divergent claims of cultural and ethnic diversity while not providing

subversive cover for subtle forms of racism or sexism. During the last decade of his life, Goethe

was interested in literature from many and truly diverse parts of the world—perhaps most

notably England, France, Italy, Serbia, Persia, India and China—and from many historical

periods, which in some senses well served to confirm his stature as a citizen of the world. His

acquaintance, however, with much of it and particularly with what from his point of view

originated in more remote parts of the world was in translation into one of the major cultural

languages of the nineteenth century, which for the most part corresponded to centers of political

power and influence. His reading of the Chinese novel he described to Eckermann, as noted, was

in French, and his further investigation of Chinese literature was on the basis of an English-

language text. I certainly do not mean to disparage Goethe’s linguistic ability, nor do I wish to

argue against the value of careful and knowledgeable translations. It is certainly preferable to

read works in translation than not to read them at all. As is frequently noted, translations are

always made from a point of view that is not that of the original author and of necessity

introduce a layer of meaning that may occlude what can reasonably be attributed to the author or

unwittingly introduce seriously distracting elements. As numerous contemporary commentators

have illustrated, in the least felicitous of situations, translations from minority languages may to

varying degrees be part of an agenda to extend cultural—and therefore concomitantly political—

hegemony.ii The possibility that the French translation of the Chinese novel was subtly and

perhaps inadvertently advancing French cultural norms in a Chinese disguise that Goethe either

did not recognize or acknowledge can at least be entertained. The long preface gives subtle hints

of such an agenda often couched in explanations of making the work more accessible to potential

readers. Although Goethe on several occasions argued that the Germans had much to gain from

his concept of Weltliteratur, he opined in a letter to Carl Friedrich von Reinhard (1829) that the

French were the most likely to profit handsomely from the concept and its derivative practices

given the expansive purview they were inclined to assert.iii

The conclusion, accordingly, that Goethe draws upon having read the French translation

continues to give me pause. In the French translator’s lengthy preface, he explains in

considerable detail that his translation is a kind of study in manners.iv Later he stresses the

difference in fundamental subject matter between Western novels and those of China: in the

West the plots may be highly varied, but in China belles lettres have to some degree the making

of a good marriage and social advancement as a foundation. But, more importantly, the Chinese

world is parsed and divided up in very different ways that can or in some cases must—sometime

intentionally, on other occasions unwittingly—be presented in a less than direct and readily

accessible manner. I would like to illustrate at least this point with some very broad

generalizations that in the present context must suffice: many distinctions are made in the

Chinese language that in the West are quite simply overlooked, and conversely and probably

much more importantly divergent Western concepts requiring rather detailed specification are

subsumed under a single and enticingly non-specific term or lexical form in Chinese. The

distinctions that Indo-European languages require to make sense are so fundamentally different

from those that the Sino-Burmese languages need that in translation into French, for example,

many features must be arbitrarily specified that were originally provocatively indeterminate.

Particularly during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Chinese familial and social

structures that are at the heart of Ju kiao Li ou les deux cousines were so different from those of

western Europe that it is difficult to grasp how Goethe could have seen them as much the same

as those he knew. I can understand Goethe’s view that characters think, behave, and feel in much

the same way as his contemporaries, but if no hint of a fundamentally divergent means of world

making can be observed, I would have serious queries to address to his strategy of reading the

translation. It is of course impossible to know with any degree of certainty just what factors went

into Goethe’s reaching the conclusion he did, but one has cause to wonder. As a basis for a

contemporary strategy for configuring world literature with exponentially more demands for

cultural recognition that need to be negotiated with utmost care, Goethe’s agenda is

commendable but his methods invite further interrogation.

A rather extreme view of the possibility of mutual understanding across large cultural and

linguistic gaps is forcefully—perhaps too encompassingly—presented in Heidegger’s intriguing

text: “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache zwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden.” In

brief, the problem that Heidegger perceived is not one of mastering of a non-native language in

the usual sense, but rather that of the fundamental structures of unrelated languages precluding

anything but superficial understanding. The intricacies of the entire dialogue go beyond the

scope of the immediate discussion, but Heidegger early in the discussion offers a kind of

summary metaphor.

<ext>I[nquirer]. Some time ago I called language, clumsily enough, the house of Being.

If man by virtue of his language dwells within the claim and call of Being, then we

Europeans presumably dwell in an entirely different house than Eastasian man.

J[apanese]. Assuming that the languages of the two are not merely different but are other

in nature, and radically so.

I[nquirer]. And so dialogue from house to house remains nearly impossible. (5)v</ext>

Goethe’s emphasis, however, on the homogeneity of the world-wide community of letters

rather than on its potential for sharpening one’s focus on the enriching alterity of the other is

articulated with even greater specificity in a letter to Sulpiz Boiserée written a few months after

his famous conversation with Eckermann. In this letter (October 1827), he explicitly articulates

his view that what he understands as world literature will arise when differences rather than

being acknowledged or celebrated are leveled or reconciled. He further notes that in this regard

Weltliteratur will most fully come into being when the differences that prevail within one nation

are leveled by the opinions and judgments of the others.vi Strikingly, Goethe again stresses the

resolution of national differences in character and fundamental perceptions as a grounding for

cosmopolitan literature rather than the fructifying and potentially expansive differences that

might well derive from them. Nonetheless, while I commend Goethe for the breadth and

inclusiveness of his thought at a time when such encompassing views were rare, his method of

engaging his concept of Weltliteratur must strike modern readers as at least slightly quaint and

naïve—surely for many arrestingly atypical of the sage of Weimar—and inadequate for direct

contemporary implementation.

This famous example of the transcultural circulation of a literary text translated into a

dominant cultural language during the early nineteenth century, though, is not significantly

different from the contemporary conception of world literature that sees texts moving beyond

their country of origin, often in translation, and being received and exercising an influence in a

new and often remote homeland. But what is important in this regard is the interrogation of the

mode and position of translations, the dynamics of circulation, the paths of reception and

incorporation, the respect for fundamental alterity, and a myriad of other related concerns that

are all formulated in different and sometimes contrasting ways. If the current emergence of

world literature is seen as the fulfillment of Goethe’s anticipation, it is in a mode that attends to

Goethe’s broadest intentions but avoids the major pitfalls that bedeviled his practical and non-

systematic application.

My reservations about Goethe’s position have their corollary not so much in the

compelling presentation of world literature by contemporary commentators, but rather with

reading, publication, and pedagogic practices that fail to acknowledge or better yet to stress

strategies for engaging alterities that world literature emerging from a globalized cultural context

has to offer. In many respects, these kinds of practices of cultural dissemination are the academic

parallel of the powerful consumer-oriented, commercial-driven forces at work in global

commodity markets. With the advancing institutionalization of world literature as an adjunct or

dynamic alternative to comparative literature—which I do not believe is dead—certain threats to

its intellectual integrity loom on the horizon. Whereas comparative literature departments have

traditionally been relatively small and have often only offered graduate programs because of the

extensive linguistic demands they should and typically do make, one of many possible and

felicitous relationships between them and world literature programs may involve beginning

studies in world literature tracks that investigate the circulation of literature in the world’s major

cultural languages leading to later and more focused programs requiring broader linguistic

expertise under the umbra of advance conceptions of comparative literature. English departments

in many universities, however, have implicitly claimed to be the institution’s most

accommodating home for courses dealing with alterity and identity formation: black studies,

women’s studies, subaltern studies, Native American studies, occasionally Chicano studies, and

Yiddish cultural studies. In addition many courses with titles like “Literature in a Global

Context,” “International Literary Studies,” and of course “World Literature” are increasingly

among English departments’ offerings. Too often these courses, however, are taught by

monolingual and monocultural colleagues, whose undisputed expertise and competence lies

elsewhere but have sometimes courageously and on other occasions timidly ventured into the

international arena. The result is that the excitement of students’ scholarly advancement being

led to genuinely new and competing ways of construing the world is diminished. I am concerned

when colleagues who know nothing of Greek’s first aorist to say nothing of the second or have

never gathered up the pieces of a Latin ablative absolute are teaching large courses with multiple

teaching assistants dealing with the classics of Western antiquity. Surveys of world literature

have become all too convenient places for installing the tenured faculty member who is left over

after the German Department, for example, is dissolved.

Publishers have also been only too happy to provide the lucrative textbooks that sustain

this agenda while scarcely doing more than paying lip service to internationalism with tiny

snippets from admittedly more varied authors than had formerly been the case. The tongue-in-

cheek description of these courses as presenting penetrating insight into everything from Plato’s

dialogues to NATO’s eastward expansion is not far from the mark. Lest we lapse into offering

homogenized and undifferentiated as well as minimally challenging courses on the world’s

literatures, the points of contact of the foreign with the familiar must be stressed and the nature

of the translations must be front and center.

I am not suggesting that every student should be viewed as a potential specialist in

literary studies who nurtures a fascination for the often-arcane minutia upon which many

comparatists thrive. Not all students will become enamored with tracing patterns of literary

reception to the extent, for example, that the popularity and wide dissemination across the vast,

frozen, but now rapidly melting tracts of Greenland of onkel Tomip igdlúngua—otherwise

known as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—will prove an engaging or a

pedagogically useful juxtaposition of the familiar and the foreign. Although these kinds of issues

are a professional staple, they may go well beyond what can and should be expected from even

the most dedicated undergraduate. A minimal degree of literary sophistication that leads to a

recognition of the absurdity of the observation that the English text of Handel’s Messiah is a

terrible translation of the German original is probably not an excessive expectation.

What I am suggesting, however, is that in welcoming world literature as a discipline that

is simultaneously a complement and a challenge to comparative literature, the bar must from the

beginning be set high. We must resist the temptation to allow world literature classes, even in so

far as they are general education courses, to be led by colleagues who do not possess at least

some genuine expertise in the international arena and are ideally prepared with at least some

access to the linguistic diversity they will be facing. We should be demanding from publishers

that market and profit from broadly conceived texts that the alterity of divergent cultures and

ethnic traditions be fully acknowledged and represented in ways that do not promote the cultural

hegemony of American English but open eyes and ears to the varied cadences of different

idioms. We must in so far as possible combat the tendency of administrators to see areas laying

broad claims to expertise as parking places for appreciated but otherwise displaced colleagues

without experience beyond a single national tradition.

Perhaps at this juncture, Goethe’s descriptions on July 15, 1827 to Eckermann, of a man

who for him was a particularly attractive proponent of world literature in a very engaging sense

would be enlightening. He observed that great value emerges from world literature and that it

will continue to become evermore apparent. He continues by explaining that Carlyle had written

on the life of Schiller and had judged him throughout in a way that would be difficult for any

German to do. By contrast the Germans have a clear conception of Shakespeare and Byron and

know how to understand their accomplishment perhaps better than the English themselves.vii

In more modern terms, the contemporary Chinese poet Bei Dao—who, since his exile

after the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, has lived in many parts of Europe and North

America—esteems the arresting power of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer from the

perspective of an outsider much as Carlyle regarded Schiller. Although his highly personal and

oneiric imagery has offered his readers interpretive challenges since the publications of his

earliest poems, his regard for his Nordic colleague’s mastery of self and implicitly of poetic

language in times of potentially disquieting experience can be seen even in a brief excerpt from a

poem he addresses specifically to Tranströmer.

<pext>和无头的天使跳舞时你保持住了平衡 (16)</PEXT>

I proffer the passage first in Chinese because the poet has insisted that translations of his works

be accompanied by facing-page versions of the Chinese original. This simple typographic

gesture would likely preclude most Western readers’ assessment from echoing Goethe’s view

that there was little exotic about the novel he was reading in 1827. Bei Dao’s strategy insists that

world literature acknowledges differences that might be glossed over when his misty lines（艨胧诗)，as they were once disparagingly called, are too facilely and completely contextualized with

reference to Western critical constructs and traditions. Although the translations—at least into

Swedish and English—are both largely accurate and often eloquent, the reader must always

allow the awareness that they arose from Chinese sources orient and moderate both judgment

and pleasure. Even in the case that none of the Chinese characters is familiar, they consistently

invite the reader’s awareness of dynamic and often fructifying tension that relates a work and its

translation, even when the reader is proficient in both languages. Common ground is found as a

poet expresses his high regard for a fellow poet from a different background and tradition, but

alterities and differences are at once not only stressed, but also celebrated. The English title of

the volume in which the poem appears, Forms of Distance, is the bridgeable but necessary

divergence that separates the source text from the translation. The explicit cognizance that the

two texts trace roughly parallel courses but are never coextensive grounds an interpretive tactic

that renders both Weltliteratur and comparative literature viable and mutually supportive

approaches to a richly varied canon in the twenty-first century. In David Hinton’s rendering of

these two lines, the linguistically familiar and the —in this case Chinese—invitation to expand

literary and cultural competencies smile at each other in a dynamic tension across narrow gap of

the gutter running down each and every opening.

<pext>dancing with headless angels

you kept your balance (17)</pext>

<aff>Brigham Young University</>

<bmh>Works Cited</>

<bib>Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2006. </bib>

<bib>Bei Dao [北岛]. Forms of Distance [Bilingual Edition] Trans. David Hinton. New York:

New Directions, 1994. </bib>

<bib>Bermann, Sandra, and Michael Wood. Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. </bib>

<bib>Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

</bib>

<bib>Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethes Werke: Weimarer Ausgabe. 143 vols. Weimar:

Herman Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1887–1919 (Reprint: München: Deutscher Taschenbuch

Verlag, 1987). </bib>

<bib>_____. Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens: Münchner Ausgabe. Eds. Karl

Richter, et al. 21 vols. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1986–98. </bib>

<bib>Heidegger, Martin. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Stuttgart: Neske, 1959. </bib>

<bib>_____. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper and Row,

1982. </bib>

<bib>Iu-Kiao-Li ou Les deux Cousine. Trans. M. Abel-Rémusat. Paris: Moutardier, 1826. </bib>

<bib>Iu-Kiao-Li: or, the Two Fair Cousins. London: Hunt and Clarke, York Street, 1828. </bib>

<bib>Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. Cleveland: John P.

Jewett & Company, 1852 [c. 1851]. </bib>

<bib>_____. onkel Tomip igdlúngua. Trans. [From Danish] Søren Kaspersen. [Godthåb]: Det

Grønlandske Forlag, 1975.</bib>

<bmh>Notes</>

i<en> For Eckermann’s report of this wide-ranging conversation see Goethe, Sämtliche Werke 19:205–

10.

ii The bibliography on translations and the theory of translation is immense, but two works that are of

particular interest in the present context are Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone and Sarah Bermann

and Michael Wood’s Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation.

iii “Sehr bewegt und wundersam wirkt freylich die Weltliteratur gegen einander; wenn ich nicht sehr

irre, so ziehen die Franzosen in Um- und Übersicht die größten Vortheile davon; auch haben sie schon

ein gewisses selbstbewußtes Vorgefühl, daß ihre Literatur, und zwar noch in einem höheren Sinne,

denselben Einfluß auf Europa haben werde, den sie in der Hälfte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts sich

erworben. Weimar den 18. Juni 1829” (Goethe WA [IV]. 45: 295).

iv “Les romans n’étaitent autrefois considérés que comme des compositions agréables, destinées à

l’amusement dest personnes désœuvrées : on en a su faire des livres utiles à l’instruction de ceux qui

sont trop occupés pour trouver le temps de lire l’histoire” (Iu-Kiao-Li: Les deux cousines, 1).

v “F[ragender]. Vor einiger Zeit nannte ich, unbeholfen genug, die Sprache das Haus des Seins. Wenn

der Mensch durch eine Sprache im Anspruch des Seins wohnt, dann wohnen wir Europeäer vermutlich

in einem ganz anderen Haus als der ostasiatischen Mensch.

J[apaner]. Gesetzt, daß die Sprachen hier und dort nicht bloß verschieden sondern Grund aus anderen

Wesens sind.

F[ragender]. So bleibt denn ein Gespräch von Haus zu Haus beinahe unmöglich” (90).

vi “Hiebey läßt sich ferner die Bemerkung machen, daß dasjenige was ich Weltliteratur nenne dadurch

vorzüglich entstehen wird, wenn die Differenzen, die innerhalb der einen Nation obwalten, durch

Ansicht und Urtheil der übrigen ausgeglichen werden” (WA IV, 43:106).

vii “Das ist der große Nutzen, der bei einer Weltliteratur herauskommt und der sich immer mehr zeigen

wird. Carlyle hat das Leben von Schiller geschrieben und ihn überall so beurteilt, wie ihn nicht leicht

ein Deutscher beurtheilen wird. Dagegen sind wir über Shakespeare und Byron im Klaren und wissen

deren Verdienste vielleicht besser zu schätzen als die Engländer selber (Goethe, Sämtliche Werke

19:237)</en>