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Here are two passages that struck me as ironic, with my
attempt at tranlations:
- Die geistige Bewegung, deren Fruechte unter vielen anderen
die Einrichtung des Ordens und das Glasperlenspiel sind, hat
ihre Anfaenge in einer Geschichtsperiode, welche seit den
grundlegenden Untersuchungen des Literarhistorikers Plinius
Ziegenhalss den von ihm gepraegten Namen "Das feuilletonistische
Zeitalter" traegt. Solche Namen sind huebsch, aber gefaehrlich,
und verlocken stets dazu, irgendeinen Zustand des Menschenlebens
in der Vergangenheit ungerecht zu betrachten, und so ist denn
auch das "feuilletonistische" Zeitalter keineswegs etwa geistlos,
ja nicht einmal arm an Geist gewesen.
The spiritual movement whose fruits include, among many other things,
the establishment of the order and the Glass Bead Game, had its
origins in a historical period which, ever since the literary
historian Pliny Ziegenhalss did the fundamental research, has
borne the name he coined, "The age of journalists". Such names
are clever but dangerous, and they can induce one to be unjust
in observing the state of human affairs in the past; this
"journalistic" age was by no means soulless, nor even somewhat
lacking in spirit.
The joke here is that "The age of journalists" [I need to
check
that translation; I don't think it is exactly right] Hesse is
writing about is his own age. He is detaching himself by adopting
the voice of a writer hundreds of years in the future, then
deprecating himself and his coevals as journalists.
A note on Pliny Ziegenhalss' name -- I'm not sure what the
double-s at the end of the name does, but if there were just
one s the name would translate as "Goat-neck". Probably
meaningless but intriguing anyway.
- Es hat in unserem Leben teils die Rolle der Kunst, teils die der
spekulativen Philosophie uebernommen und wurde zum Beispiel zur Zeit des
Plinius Ziegenhalss nicht selten auch mit einem Ausdruck bezeichnet, welcher
noch aus der Dichtung der feuilletonistischen Epoche stammt und fuer diese
Epoche das Sehnsuchtsziel manches vorahnenden Geistes benannte, mit dem
Ausdruck: magisches Theater.
It [the Glass Bead Game] has taken on, in our life, partly the role of
art, partly that of speculative philosophy; in the time of Pliny
Ziegenhalss, for example, it was not infrequently referred to with
an expression which comes from the poetry of the journalistic epoch and
which, in this epoch, signified the object of yearning for many
a forward-looking soul; the expression: Magic Theater.
This could be a misreading on my part, due to my not having
some vital piece of information; but the passage seems to me like
a very broad joke, in which the "poetry of the journalistic epoch"
which Hesse is referring to is his own Steppenwolf.
I exchanged some e-mail with my German friend
Kai;
he says the word "Feuilleton" is used in Germany to
refer to "the section of the newspaper where
you read about highbrow culture". I have provisionally
changed my translation from "journalism" to "Arts and Leisure",
which I still think is not exactly right, but much closer.
For what I think is a good crystallization of what Hesse
was getting at by calling our era "the age of Arts and Leisure",
take a look at this paragraph.
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