From the Translator's Wastebasket: Jean Paul and Martin Luther
With this newsletter, I’m beginning an irregular series based on my research and notes for various translation projects. The title is a play on the Sudelbücher of the 18th century physicist and mathematician Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. In these “waste books”, Lichtenberg would jot down aphorisms and philosophical musings alongside his scientific notes.
Erstling—German for a creative debut, for the firstborn or the first fruits—is a genial word. Its constituent parts can be directly rendered into English. The cognate Erst stands for first; the suffix -ling exists in both languages and carries the same meaning—a thing, typically a person, in which some characteristic is embodied. Erstling means firstling, the beginning of harvest, a first book or a first baby. The word also has theological implications. Martin Luther used Erstling in his translation of 1st Corinthians 15:20, “Nun ist aber Christus auferstanden von den Toten und der Erstling geworden unter denen, die da schlafen.” In this verse, the Apostle Paul writes of the Christ being, “the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep”, his resurrection both means and messenger for the general resurrection of the dead.
For my part, I came across Erstling while translating a passage for the early 19th century writer Jean Paul. A loose, elaborative stylist, delighting in wordplay and neologisms, JP—as my editor and I call him—requires close attention to associations and etymology. It’s fortunate that the Brothers Grimm often cite his work in their dictionary of the German language. Apparently, even native speakers needed help with understanding him. In a preface to The Invisible Lodge, Jean Paul writes of the novella being his “romantischen Erstling”, alternately his romantic debut, his romantic firstborn, his romantic first fruits. Uncharacteristically for him, the phrase is easy to parse. The difficulty comes in rendering the second half into a single word. Auf Englisch, there is also a strong conceptual link between artistic creativity and procreation, between artistic creativity and agriculture, between artistic creativity and spiritual redemption. We speak of cultivation. We speak of being inspired. Less commonly, more viscerally, we speak of birthing a song or a book. But nothing quite sums up those associations like Erstling, which Jean Paul drops with apparent ease, like an apple fully ripened, into his basket of verbiage, capacious and brimming with produce of every kind. Romantic first fruits it was.
