Despite (or perhaps because of) its remarkable success, Rosner’s
Siddhartha has attracted sharp criticism. In 1998, Stanley Appelbaum,
Siddhartha’s first retranslator, singled out Rosner’s version in the introduction to his own edition: “Although this pioneering effort, first published in 1951, did not meet high standards of accuracy, completeness, fidelity to the tone of the original, or even proper English, it did yeoman service in introducing
Siddhartha to the English-speaking world.”
1Stanley Appelbaum, “Introduction,” in Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha: A Dual Language Book, ed. and trans. Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), xiii. This excoriation paired with faint praise is perhaps a little unfair, given lack of response to Rosner’s suggested edits. Yet a brief comparison of Appelbaum’s and Rosner’s opening sentences illustrates just how stripped-back Rosner’s version is:
Hesse:
Im Schatten des Hauses, in der Sonne des Flußufers Booten, im Schatten des Salwaldes, im Schatten des Feigenbaumes wuchs Siddhartha auf, der schöne Brahmanen, der junge Falke, zusammen mit seinem Freunde, dem Brahmanensohn.
2Hermann Hesse, Siddharta, in Sämtliche Werke, 20 vols., ed. Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001–2007) [=SW], vol. 3, 373.Rosner:
In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddhartha, the handsome Brahmin’s son, grew up with his friend Govinda.
Appelbaum:
In the shadow of the house, in the sunshine of the riverbank by the boats, in the shadow of the sal-tree forest, in the shadow of the fig tree, Siddhartha grew up, the handsome son of the Brahman, the young falcon, together with Govinda his friend, the Brahman’s son.
Appelbaum’s restoration of tripartite repetition (three repeats of shadow for three of Hesse’s Schatten, etc.) and his inclusion of what Rosner had omitted (young falcon for Hesse’s junge Falke etc.) is typical of this and subsequent retranslations. Similarly, Appelbaum is cautious to omit nothing, restoring adverbial clauses, matching Hesse item for item, while Rosner opts for paraphrase, attenuating the elaborate stylistic devices and pushing the genre away from Dichtung and towards the novel. Consider Rosner’s rendition of Siddhartha’s thoughts in the seventh paragraph of the section entitled “Awakening” (Erwachen) compared with the five print retranslations:
Hesse:
Schön war die Welt, bunt war die Welt, seltsam und rätselhaft war die Welt.
Rosner:
The world was beautiful, strange and mysterious.
Appelbaum:
The world was beautiful, the world was full of variety, the world was strange and puzzling!
Neugroschel:
Beautiful was the world, colorful was the world, bizarre and enigmatic was the world!
3Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Penguin Compass, 1999).Chödzin Kohn:
The world was beautiful, full of colors, strange and enigmatic.
4Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Sherab Chödzin Kohn (Boulder, CO: Shambala, 2005).Bernofsky:
How beautiful it was, how colorful, how strange and mysterious!
5Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: The Modern Library, 2008).Lesser:
The world was beautiful, the world was particoloured, strange and quizzical.
6Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Rika Lesser (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2007).A detailed comparative study is beyond the scope of this discussion, but the above examples represent well the attempts of retranslators to match Hesse’s style. Later retranslators, while not emulating the German word order as Neugroschel does (“Beautiful was the world”), nevertheless seem cautious of omission. This is reasonable, since omissions are often the first things that critics of translations seize upon. But it seems Rosner was not encumbered by equivalence anxieties when translating Siddhartha in the Lake District for her own interest and as a labor of love. Certainly it was a mark of inauthenticity for others. American Germanists and other bilingual readers who wrote to New Directions in the 1960s and 1970s were less judicious in their criticisms than Appelbaum was in his 1998 introduction.
One such letter reached New Directions in 1966. It is not included in the files but referred to in a reply to an Erica Nimeh, who had sent a harsh critique of Rosner’s rendition and offered her own translation as a replacement. MacGregor gives a trump-card defense, one that he would repeat in response to every such letter over the next decade: namely, the approval of the author himself. He writes: “at the time we first published it in the early 1950s, it had been seen by Hermann Hesse himself who didn’t know English very well, and by his wife who did and does and they approved of it wholeheartedly.”
7MacGregor to Erica Nimeh, February 4, 1966. Hesse File, Folder 4. The most strident criticism came from a Germanist at the University of Michigan by the name of Barbara Firger, who calls Rosner’s translation “careless and disgraceful,” “nearly twenty years old,” and “couched in language which insults the original.” She refers to the omission of Hesse’s subtitle
eine indische Dichtung (an Indian Poem) which, she claims, is “cavalierly excised” from Rosner’s “plodding version.” Like Nimeh, Firger then offers to send her own translation as a replacement.
8Barbara Firger to MacGregor, January 7, 1971. Hesse File, Folder 9. MacGregor’s response is pointed:
the vehemence of your attack on it amuses me, because again and again over the twenty years since it was first published, this translation has been cited by important as well as sensitive writers as a marvel of modern translation … Mr. Hesse himself felt that it had approximated his “poetic intentions,” to use a phrase of your own, in a rare and remarkable way. That Miss Rosner left out the subtitle in the German was evidently a conscious decision and one which Hesse approved. Certain other excisions, which Miss Rosner thought Germanic … were also made with the author’s approval.
9MacGregor to Firger, January 7, 1971. Hesse File, Folder 9.In the same letter, MacGregor refers to the enormous success of the rendition and expands on the complexities of translation in general. He reflects on his thirty years of working with translators and the jealousy and nastiness they display in talking about each other’s work. Once again, MacGregor forwarded Firger’s letter (and his response) to Rosner, who replied: “I am sorry you have had to spend some of your valuable time in answering an abusive letter at length. … There is nothing I can do about it and you will no doubt act as you see fit.” Then, referring to a scathing review of Richard and Clara Winston’s translation of Hesse’s
Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game) in the English press, Rosner reveals an ethics of solidarity: “it affected me much more deeply than the unpleasant letter …. It is so evident that it is easier to be destructive than to create.”
10Rosner to MacGregor, January 15, 1971. Hesse File, Folder 9. Hesse’s German publishers did not have any such doubts about Rosner’s work. Siegfried Unseld, head of Suhrkamp, wrote to MacGregor regarding
Siddhartha in 1971: “I guess I am right in assuming that it brought you the highest earnings of all books that have been published by New Directions … Now you get the reward for it that you, from the very beginning took care to publish only a good translation.
Siddhartha, is one of the works by Hermann Hesse, perhaps the only one, that was published right away in an adequate translation in USA.”
11Siegfried Unseld to MacGregor, January 20, 1971. Hesse File, Folder 9.