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Eleven books by a shoemaker of Görlitz who wrote, by his own account, because he could not help it. Ten of them stand here in the seventeenth-century English of John Sparrow, who translated Boehme within a generation of his death and whose prose is itself now four hundred years old; where that English has drifted out of reach, the facing pane carries a modern register — the same text with archaic inflection and spelling normalised by rule, never paraphrased. Nothing is reworded, and where no register appears beside a passage it is because the rules found nothing to change.
The eleventh book is not in English at all, and it is the reason this note exists.
Des trois principes de l'essence divine, printed at Paris in 1802, is the same work as Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence, which stands here as the second book — the same twenty-seven chapters in the same order, opening `Du premier principe de l'essence divine` against Sparrow's `Of the first Principle of the Divine Essence`. Its translator was Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, who gave the last years of his life to putting Boehme into French, and who has a shelf of his own in this Lycaeum.
That makes a closed circuit inside this archive, and it is worth naming plainly. Saint-Martin translates Boehme. La Iniciación, printed in Montevideo a hundred and forty years later, traces its own descent through Saint-Martin. A reader can therefore follow one thread from a German mystic of 1619, through the French philosopher who carried him into another language, to a Spanish-language monthly of the 1940s that claimed them both — and read every step of it in the original.
The two are shelved as one work rather than two because that is what they are. They are not set as facing panes: an English translation of 1619 and a French translation of 1802 are two independent readings of a lost German original, and pairing them line by line would assert a correspondence neither translator ever claimed.
1Curiously enough, so far as the Forty Questions and the Clavis go, the 1682 edition appears to be — as regards difficulties of spelling, and a few other details — more reliable on the whole than the edition of 1730, although the latter is now generally looked upon as the standard edition. This observation applies, of course, to the work, principally when viewed from the standpoint of a translator. In some instances, and on specially important points, the latest German edition, edited by Schiebler, has also been consulted. In further elucidation of certain expressions, St Martin's interesting translation of the Forty Questions into French has been referred to. This great mystic applied himself devotedly to a most minutely literal rendering of Bbhme's terminology; but as the French language does not lend itself well to this treatment, the result, as a whole, can scarcely be said to be happy. Nevertheless, since St Martin penetrated deeply into the spirit of Bbhme, his painstaking work is often illuminating, and many isolated expressions and special renderings are particularly apt and suggestive.
2In the making of these notes a few simple rules have been followed throughout as consistently as has been found possible. The abbreviation "lit." indicates a more literal, though generally a clumsier translation; the word "or" an alternative, though not necessarily a better, translation. When neither is used, there has been an attempt, made with all due respect, to improve, or make clearer, the original translation. In most of these cases the German text has been quoted for the benefit of the student, who can thus use personal judgment. When a single German word is quoted it is placed immediately after the corresponding English word.
3Further, it may be added that these emendations deal exclusively with word values; the endeavour has been to give the closest possible rendering of the author's own terms. A brief explanation has occasionally been given, but anything in the nature of free comment has been avoided. In many instances the note given may appear hypercritical and almost superfluous; but to the lover of Jacob Bohme no minute detail connected with the elucidation of his writings can be quite uninteresting. After all that has been said and written about the difficulties and obscurities of his phraseology, it is very certain that much help is to be gained from a study of his works in the original. His bold handling of words — in using a rootword for a root-idea, for instance, or coining graphic compounds, or eliminating a syllable to extract a buried meaning — is most suggestive and illuminating. In some cases the translator cannot hope to reproduce such expressions in all their originality and pointedness. For Bohme's genius gives the student the very pith and marrow of his mother-tongue. For the rest, these emendations are but a very unpretentious attempt towards helping the reader in the study of this volume. It is hoped that one of the results of their publication will be to emphasize the excellence of Sparrow's most admirable translation. D. S. HEHNER. X L. QVESTIONS Concerning the S O U L E. 'Propounded By Dr. Balthasar Walter. And Anfwered, By Jacob Behmen.
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
1Curiously enough, so far as the Forty Questions and the Clavis go, the 1682 edition appears to be — as regards difficulties of spelling, and a few other details — more reliable on the whole than the edition of 1730, although the latter is now generally looked upon as the standard edition. This observation applies, of course, to the work, principally when viewed from the standpoint of a translator. In some instances, and on specially important points, the latest German edition, edited by Schiebler, has also been consulted. In further elucidation of certain expressions, St Martin's interesting translation of the Forty Questions into French has been referred to. This great mystic applied himself devotedly to a most minutely literal rendering of Bbhme's terminology; but as the French language does not lend itself well to this treatment, the result, as a whole, can scarcely be said to be happy. Nevertheless, since St Martin penetrated deeply into the spirit of Bbhme, his painstaking work is often illuminating, and many isolated expressions and special renderings are particularly apt and suggestive.
2In the making of these notes a few simple rules have been followed throughout as consistently as has been found possible. The abbreviation "lit." indicates a more literal, though generally a clumsier translation; the word "or" an alternative, though not necessarily a better, translation. When neither is used, there has been an attempt, made with all due respect, to improve, or make clearer, the original translation. In most of these cases the German text has been quoted for the benefit of the student, who can thus use personal judgment. When a single German word is quoted it is placed immediately after the corresponding English word.
3Further, it may be added that these emendations deal exclusively with word values; the endeavour has been to give the closest possible rendering of the author's own terms. A brief explanation has occasionally been given, but anything in the nature of free comment has been avoided. In many instances the note given may appear hypercritical and almost superfluous; but to the lover of Jacob Bohme no minute detail connected with the elucidation of his writings can be quite uninteresting. After all that has been said and written about the difficulties and obscurities of his phraseology, it is very certain that much help is to be gained from a study of his works in the original. His bold handling of words — in using a rootword for a root-idea, for instance, or coining graphic compounds, or eliminating a syllable to extract a buried meaning — is most suggestive and illuminating. In some cases the translator cannot hope to reproduce such expressions in all their originality and pointedness. For Bohme's genius gives the student the very pith and marrow of his mother-tongue. For the rest, these emendations are but a very unpretentious attempt towards helping the reader in the study of this volume. It is hoped that one of the results of their publication will be to emphasize the excellence of Sparrow's most admirable translation. D. S. HEHNER. X L. QVESTIONS Concerning the S O U L E. 'Propounded By Dr. Balthasar Walter. And Anfwered, By Jacob Behmen.
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
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