Dear All
I'd like your help in giving me your immediate and instinctive translation of the following sentence. It comes from a book by Jean-Luc Nancy (Corpus, 2006), where it is quoted in German and then given a French translation which seems to me wrong. It comes, Nancy says, from a posthumous note of Freud's. Voilà:
Psyche ist ausgedehnt: weiss nichts davon.
Could you, if you can bear it, decide what you think it means first and only then look at what I say below.
Thanks!
Naomi
Okay this is the dilemma. Nancy translates it as: "La psyché est étendue: n'en sait rien" (The psyche is extended: knows nothing of/about it). I am not so bothered about "the psyche/Psyche" since this is something Nancy plays around with, for the original it is genuinely ambiguous since it's the start of a sentence. What I'm interested in is the "weiss", also ambiguous. My first (and indeed second & third) reaction is that it is a first-person verb, ie Freud (who was very old & ill at the time, I assume) can't think further about this; Nancy takes it (without comment) that it's Psyche/the psyche that knows nothing. I'd like to see whether any of you, as native/near-native speakers agree with him.
Prof Naomi Segal
Director, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies
School of Advanced Study
Senate House, Malet St., London WC1E 7HU
tel: 020 7862 8739
fax: 020 7862 8762
sec: 020 7862 8677/8738/8966
website: http://igrs.sas.ac.uk <http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/>
email: [log in to unmask]
|