Re-Orienting the Weimar Theater: Enlightenment and Empire in Schiller’s Turandot DAVID D. KIM M ICHIGAN S TATE U NIVERSITY In his seminal study of German colonial discourse, Russell Berman has sorted through the contentious legacy of Enlightenment principles only to complicate further the task of German postcolonial studies; and rightly so. With a title that «is posed ambivalently around the double meaning of the conjunction, suggesting simultaneously an alternative (a choice) and an equivalency,» his Enlightenment or Empire cautions its readers to consider more meticulously how historical experiences have intervened in theoretical propositions (6). As Berman argues, this dialectical relationship is visible in the double process whereby universal conceptions of humanism and rationality facilitate the denigration of alternative, non-European epistemes, as well as the mobilization of anticolonial subversions from within. Yet, he goes on to say, Derrida, Foucault, and Sartre do not take this duality into consideration. Their «[b]road-brush attacks on colonialism or on the role of intellectuals, Eurocentrism, or Enlightenment in it» offer no pragmatic critique of European imperialisms (204). Berman’s adamant critique of postcolonial oversights with poststructuralist inflections comes at a time of transition as a new wave of cultural critics has put forth alternative conceptions of postcolonial cosmopolitanism. As Pheng Cheah has recently argued, metropolitanand migrant-focused enunciations of cultural hybridity no longer capture the material dynamics of postcolonial nationalisms because the vast experiences of the subaltern subject in decolonized spaces demand a more complex articulation of intercultural agencies than what Homi Bhabha and James Clifford have said with their «general postcolonial perspective» (93). In the age of globalization, as Cheah asserts, there are only catachrestic transpositions of the old (Bildung, Europe, modernity, and Natur) to the new (cosmopolitanism, Asia, postmodernity, and Kultur) while capitalism, citizenship, human rights, and technology have set real boundaries around the finitude of human beings. Dipesh Chakrabarty has echoed this need for materialist translations between an imaginary Europe and the political modernity of postcolonial India, or what he calls a certain «provincialization» of secular visions of the human, to redress local issues 112 David D. Kim of social justice and equity. Berman is surely making an argument that is different from Cheah or Chakrabarty’s when he launches his critique of «antiintellectual» limits of postcolonial reason from the other side of the color line, but what they do have in common is a valid concern for postcolonial enunciations in which disjunctive world communities are flattened out across cultural nuances or historical particularities (EE 206). Such theoretical abstraction is what Berman has elsewhere identified as «the very necessary consequence of the more general post-colonial theory, current in contemporary debate, that, barely tarrying with specific material, quickly rushes to the level of a grand generalization of a conflict between ‹Europe› and ‹Other,› as if there were one Europe and all the ‹Others› were the same» («German» 28). In other words, just as there is no amorphous Empire, there is no singular Enlightenment project and critics must be attuned to the heterogeneity of colonial and postcolonial landscapes to intervene effectively in these political spaces. For postcolonial scholars, undermining reductionist arguments with historical data or differentiating certain notions of Kultur from aporetic claims about Eurocentrism is indeed an urgent task, but Berman’s propositions are quite problematic for their own reasons. They hardly do justice to the theoretical complexity of the three French philosophers when he equates their critique of discursive practices or logocentric valuations with ad hominem attacks: «If the intellectual, as the agent of Enlightenment, is presumed guilty for colonialism (since colonialism is allegedly generated by intellectuals engaging in Western metaphysics), then an occasion for anticolonialism is as fine an opportunity as any to go after the intellectual» (EE 206). If this radical accusation stems from an unclear definition of what anti-intellectualism means or who qualifies for an intellectual, the next gesture of his is even more sweeping. By acknowledging W.E.B. Du Bois as an exemplary instance of «the positive engagement of nonwhite intellectuals with the cultural legacy of Europe,» Berman points to the possibility of normalizing the troubled relationships between the West and the Rest (EE 208). Yet, this unique example does not suffice to revise the role Western cultures have played in disrupting the course of indigenous cultures around the globe. Berman also remains silent about the fact that, in light of the Nazi Holocaust, Du Bois shifts from a delimited sense of the color line and a naïve manifestation of Germanophilia to «a more general form for the expression of particular relationships between minority and majority culture and between victimization and survival» (Rothberg 131). His singular case subverts any attempt to simplify what European intellectual traditions mean for communities of color. Berman refrains from engaging explicitly with those who have convincingly documented the extensive cross-pollination between theories of alterity and Re-Orienting the Weimar Theater 113 representations of the other in the age of empires and thereafter. 1 His carefully selected case studies do not take issue with the ways in which Enlightenment ideals of freedom and sovereignty have not been immune to imperialist perversions since Herder’s ethnocentric division of world cultures and Kant’s polygenic ranking of racial types although these teleological narratives of Bildung and Kultur later play a foundational role in seeing non-Western landscapes as organic mimicries of the West or in denying colonial subjects the status of cultural equivalence. And without subverting the affective drive for colonial mistranslations, Berman hopes to salvage a particular manifestation of the West (German Kultur) from the Rest (the rest of the West) when he writes, «German culture is a term that ought to be comparable to Hispanic culture - suggesting a network of references, meanings, and values that stretch across national borders. This more permeable national identity allows for the greater hermeneutic openness to other systems of meaning» (EE 222). Isn’t aligning German identities with the plethora of Spanish-speaking cultures itself a gross overgeneralization if one includes the Americas and northern Africa in the equation? And don’t postcolonial interventions take shape in the conceptual, as well as political, deconstruction of such imprecise comparisons? In other words, what is lost here is a more conscientious dislocation of Eurocentric aspirations right where Enlightenment and Empire appear to be the furthest apart, seemingly excluding each other from their own endeavors. In many ways, then, postcolonial scholars have to settle this matter of complicity. But rather than examine Berman’s slanted critique of anticolonial thinkers any further, I want to turn to this conflicted relationship between Enlightenment and Empire in another way, that is, by way of Schiller’s much neglected translation of Carlo Gozzi’s Turandot (1762) into the German language and onto the Weimar theater. If Goethe was right to define «Weltliteratur» as a «geistiger Handelsverkehr» whereby travel literatures circulated in translation between European communities, Schiller’s Turandot (1802) gave shape to world literature in a number of ways (42, 186-87). 2 Yet, this work of translation did not occur in an ideological vacuum; nor was its aestheticism disconnected from contemporary imaginations of the Far East. In his organic rendition of the deadly princess from the East, Schiller transformed Gozzi’s Chineseness into a Persian product of enlightened empires that was, at the same time, an aesthetic response to contemporary debates on genre and modernity. Here, then, Enlightenment and Empire did not appear as homologies of the West; rather, Schiller resorted to aesthetic prototypes and imperial thoughts without being able to account for them. While responding to Berman’s study by way of Schiller’s aesthetic education, this study takes its cues from Tejaswini Niranjana’s meticulous focus 114 David D. Kim on the bidirectionality of signifying practices, which has shown how «translation in the colonial context produces and supports a conceptual economy that works into the discourse of Western philosophy to function as a philosopheme» (2). As Niranjana shows, enlightenment discourses on the «‹free acceptance› of subjection» thus serve Sir William Jones to justify the violent transplantation of British culture and the English language to the Muslim world while German minds like Goethe and Herder are influenced by his Orientalist translations of Persian grammar (11-12). This is not to say that such discursive cross-pollinations make all Enlightenment thinkers into intellectual agents of European empires; nor do they reduce Enlightenment projects into cultural imperialisms. Instead, Jones’ perversion of Enlightenment principles reveals the political economy in which translating and translated languages, source and target cultures, engage with each other as nonequivalent values - one coming from above, the other coming from below - and this impossible measurement of intercultural judgments gives birth to the problematic affiliation between Enlightenment and Empire. Around 1800, distant readers were certainly aware of what was at stake in mistranslations. In response to a recent German translation that the philologist Karl August Kütner had done of Horace, Goethe noted that «Ungelehrte» had little knowledge of ancient history or of classical mythology and the new translation thought, had failed to transmit the author’s poetic elegance for the uninstructed audience. The result was the following: «Der große, feurige, edele, gefühlvolle Dichter, der uns durch die Gewalt seiner Lieder dahin reißt, erhebt, begeistert, der wird unter der Hand unserer Übersetzer ärger als ein Gratulant» (334). Kütner’s unskilled manipulation had deprived the Roman poet of his spiritual depth and stylistic mastery, transmogrifying him into a felicitator; and unless scholars had lost «allen Geschmack,» it was meaningless to prefer the original to «eine gefolterte, wässerige, geschmacklose Übersetzung» (334). In translating Gozzi’s commedia dell’arte, Schiller, too, faced this challenge of engendering an elegant afterlife, but the task took a strikingly different shape because, in contrast to Goethe’s concern with intercultural appreciation for the original, Schiller’s was to make just a few improvements to the Italian play. As Schiller confessed to the friend and publisher Christian Gottfried Körner on November 2, 1801, Turandot was meant to be nothing more than a pastime without «große Anforderungen» (WB 12: 585). Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801) had just premiered in Leipzig with great success and, while recovering from a catarrh, he wanted to work on «eine neue Bearbeitung eines Gozzischen Mährchens, Turandot, für das Theater» (583). But the ill poet also saw another opportunity with this translation. After Christoph Wieland Re-Orienting the Weimar Theater 115 and Wilhelm Schlegel’s separate translations of Shakespeare had amply demonstrated what a decisive mark foreign literatures could leave on German stages, Schiller hoped that Gozzi’s work would benefit his fellow citizens in a similar fashion: «Auch wird dadurch für die deutsche Bühne ein neues und interessantes Theaterstück gewonnen» (583). He later expanded this point by using a more forceful language, this time suggesting that Weimar theater was in need of foreign intervention: «Zunächst bestimmte mich das Bedürfniß unsres Theaters dazu, wir brauchen ein neues Stück und wo möglich aus einer neuen Region; dazu taugt nun dieses Gozzische Mährchen vollkommen» (585). Since foreign cultures had unfamiliar stories in store, translating Turandot into German would be ideal for complementing the repertoire of German theaters. Once begun, though, the translation took more time and effort than Schiller had expected, and the crux of the problem was in overcoming the structural rigidity of the original. In another letter to Körner, he explained this issue as follows: Es [Gozzi’s Turandot] ist mit dem größten Verstand componiert, aber es fehlt ihm an einer gewißen Fülle, an poetischem Leben. Die Figuren sehen wie Marionetten aus, die am Draht bewegt werden, eine gewiße pedantische Steifigkeit herrscht durch das Ganze, die überwunden werden muß. Ich habe also wirklich Gelegenheit mir einiges Verdienst zu erwerben, und die 6, 7 Wochen die auf dieses Geschäft gehen mögen, werden nicht verloren seyn. (B 585) Though Kleist would only eight years later describe «Marionetten» as ideal embodiments of «Ebenmaß, Beweglichkeit, Leichtigkeit,» Schiller’s analogy had a wholly different connotation (2: 341). Here, «Marionetten» were scientific products of «ein mechanisches Werk, wo die Teile, leblos für sich selbst, dem Ganzen durch ihre Zusammenstimmung ein künstliches Leben erteilen» (WB 8: 684). To translate Gozzi’s work was to overcome this malaise of the original, meaning that he needed to infuse Gozzi’s somewhat lifeless characters with Anmut and Würde, two aesthetic qualities that would transform the awkward play into «ein organisches Produkt, wo nicht bloß das Ganze lebt, sondern auch die einzelnen Teile ihr eigentümliches Leben haben» (684). This would ameliorate the original by veiling Gozzi’s creation «wie ein Königsmantel in weiten Falten», to borrow Walter Benjamins metaphorization of the work of translation. (Benjamin 14). Benjamin refers to translations in those majestic terms as he grappled with the work of translation as a maturation process. «Übersetzungen,» he wrote in his preface to the German translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, «die mehr als Vermittlungen sind, entstehen, wenn im Fortleben ein Werk das Zeitalter seines Ruhmes erreicht hat. Sie dienen daher nicht sowohl diesem, 116 David D. Kim wie schlechte Übersetzer es für ihre Arbeit zu beanspruchen pflegen, als daß sie ihm ihr Dasein verdanken. In ihnen erreicht das Leben des Originals seine stets erneute späteste und umfassendste Entfaltung» (11). As such, translations were no lesser copies of the original; nor did they amount to interlingual, intralingual or intersemiotic border-crossings only because the emphasis did not rest on transmitting content. 3 Rather, they provided the original with an incessant process of self-revelation and unraveling. 4 Benjamin’s deliberations are helpful to think through one way in which Schiller conceives of his translation as a translational means of lifting up Gozzi’s work, that is, adapting the latter «zum Weimarer Ton» (Ingenkamp 992). 5 This meant that, though the original was written in three Italian dialectics to designate the three social classes (royal, aristocratic, and common), Schiller’s translation transformed everyone on stage into equally educated citizens, all speaking a common, major language. Their mode of speech was also written in «Jamben,» a metrical foot that was conventionally associated with classical Greece and its subsequent high cultures (Schiller, WB 12: 585). Despite his limited knowledge of eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte and the Italian language, Schiller’s gaze remained focused on Gozzi and, in that sense, on an original. Yet, this difficult negotiation with a source text was inflected by a number of mediating paratexts. For example, Schiller assumed that incomprehensible matters of the synchronous were measured in the diachronicity of history. As such, his deliberations on universal history followed a particular procedure whereby foreign cultures were located in relation to familiar cultures in the present. Entitled «Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? », his 1789 lecture before the faculty of Jena exemplified how this historicist method of intercultural understanding placed non-Europeans in a Eurocentric conception of historical time. As Schiller noted, the sight of «Wilden» elicited «nur Ekel oder Mitleid,» but «[s]o waren wir. Nicht viel besser fanden uns Cäser und Tacitus vor achtzehn hundert Jahren» (HS 417, 418). Accordingly, non-Europeans were located at a level that was inferior to European cultures while the past of European selves corresponded to the present of non-European others. This was the reason why travelogues were educational and entertaining. The following paragraph, though a bit lengthy, made the point quite clear. Die Entdeckungen, welche unsre europäischen Seefahrer in fernen Meeren und auf entlegenen Küsten gemacht haben, geben uns ein eben so lehrreiches als unterhaltendes Schauspiel. Sie zeigen uns Völkerschaften, die auf den mannichfaltigsten Stufen der Bildung um uns herum gelagert sind, wie Kinder verschiednen Alters um einen Erwachsenen herum stehen, und durch ihr Beispiel ihm in Erinnerung bringen, was er selbst vormals gewesen, und wovon er ausgegangen ist. Eine weise Re-Orienting the Weimar Theater 117 Hand scheint uns diese rohen Völkerstämme bis auf den Zeitpunkt aufgespart zu haben, wo wir in unsrer eignen Kultur weit genug würden fortgeschritten sein, um von dieser Entdeckung eine nützliche Anwendung auf uns selbst zu machen, und den verlornen Anfang unsers Geschlechts aus diesem Spiegel wieder herzustellen. Wie beschämend und traurig aber ist das Bild, das uns diese Völker von unserer Kindheit geben! und doch ist es nicht einmal die erste Stufe mehr, auf der wir sie erblicken. Der Mensch fing noch verächtlicher an. Wir finden jene doch schon als Völker, als politische Körper: aber der Mensch mußte sich erst durch eine außerordentliche Anstrengung zur Gesellschaft erheben. (416-17) Schiller betrayed a profoundly disturbing ordering of world communities where non-Europeans performed no role other than instructing Europeans of their bygone days while the present of the non-West did not go any further than Europe’s past. Instead of being a significant part of world events and planetary transformations, whatever took place outside Europe only amounted to a «Schauspiel,» an object of scholarly inquiries and a spectacle for curious spectators. 6 At the same time, Schiller’s Jena was certainly no stranger to the long history of European encounters with «the Orient,» the earliest of which had taken place in the middle of the thirteenth century with the Franciscan priest Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, the brothers Nicolo and Maffeo Polo, and the young Marco Polo’s journeys to the imperial court of Mongolia. In the subsequent centuries, Jesuit priests like Matteo Ricci, Nicholas Longobardi, and Martino Martini expanded the knowledge of China and formed, among others, Leibniz’s conception of that expansive place as a culture to be «read,» and not «seen» (Tautz 35, 39). By the time Hermann Hesse ventured through East Asia in the first half of the twentieth century, Europeans had therefore gathered so many impressions of the Chinese, that the latter seemed confused, psychotic, sly or untrustworthy. For instance, Hesse described Chinese men as «hübsch,» «zart,» and «nett,» only to note a few pages later that their effeminate appearance masked their true essence: «Grausamkeit» (11, 22, 67). According to Eric Hayot, this fixation on Chinese brutalities had been in construction since George Henry Mason’s publication of The Punishments of China in 1801, shifting China’s image from «a country of wisdom» to an «object of fear, contempt and Western arrogance» (Hayot 66; Trampedach 81). One figure was particularly subject to intense European imaginations: the Chinese emperor. Christopher Columbus had fantasies about delivering the royal edict to the Great Khan of Cathay while crossing the Atlantic. Though China was known to be quite distant from his final destination, which was India, the mythical figure embodied everything the Italian explorer was striv- 118 David D. Kim ing for, including gold, silk, spices, and other material wealth. In Histoire de la cour du roy de la Chine (1615), Michel Baudier offered a more detailed, though equally fantastic, account of the Chinese emperor whose «so vast a Greatnesse…will take up no less, than four whole Dayes» to see (7). And in a language no less grandiose, Hegel referred to the emperor as «das gewalthabende Individuum über Menschen und zugleich über die Natur und die natürlichen Dinge» (296). The layered architecture of the Forbidden City later made its way into «Die kaiserliche Botschaft» (1917), providing Kafka with a hermeneutic space in which the emperor’s message was suspended in midway. Far from focusing on individual portraits then, these works and others conceived of the Chinese emperor as a malleable prototype of thisand otherworldliness. Schiller inherited a distorted vision of the Chinese in two significant ways. First, recalibrating non-European cultures in universal time was considered integral to Enlightenment historiography and prefigured what was to come in the colonial era: «the denial of coevalness as the allochronism of anthropology» (Fabian 32). Second, translating Gozzi’s China necessarily engaged these ideas of time and history on aesthetico-philosophical levels. Together, these tasks rendered the Orient into a manageable object of Enlightenment writings because the civilizational advancements of the West facilitated spatiotemporal movements. In other words, it was the opposition of «the West’s mobility, science, and (modern) progress» to «the historical and geographical stasis of ‹the Rest›» that explained Schiller’s ugly celebration of European travelers (Smethurst 1). It also created the force field within which all European versions of Turandot could stage Calaf/ Kalaf, a dethroned prince from an imaginary kingdom somewhere to the west of China, as the ultimate savior putting an end to the degenerative practices of that locale. There was more, though. Strictly speaking, Gozzi’s play was neither an original nor the only original because the mythic origin of the Chinese princess lay in François Pétit de la Croix’s Les Mille et un jours: contes persans, turcs, et chinois (1712). In his preface, the French Orientalist noted that the source of those tales, including «Histoire du prince Calaf et de la princesse de la Chine,» was a Dervish, named Mocles or Moqlas, whom he had met during his stay in Isfahan around 1675. In the Middle East, this legend of the Chinese princess had been told for generations, until it arrived to French readers in translation. And it was again half a century later that the Venetian playwright Gozzi, hoping to set up a counter-stage to Carlo Goldoni’s dramatic celebration of reason and secularization, adopted the popular story, which had already begun to rival the more widely read Les Milles et un nuits (also known as Arabian Nights, 1704-17). More comical than coercive, more entertaining Re-Orienting the Weimar Theater 119 than educational, Gozzi’s theatrical tale was to reestablish a Christian world stage while taking advantage of contemporary fascinations with the Far East, as well as of prominent figures in the Venetian comedy. 7 Friedrich Werthes then translated Gozzi’s Turandot into the German language by layering, on top of those Orientalist manipulations, his own predilections for, universal reason, a restrained sentimental affect, and interpersonal dynamics. This German translation offered Schiller one more subtext for a new retranslation. 8 If Gozzi wrote his fiabe teatrali in alignment with Orientalist fantasies, on the one hand, and in opposition to Enlightenment tendencies, on the other, Schiller conceived of his translation of that work as a unique opportunity for intervening in the significant changes that were happening to German writers. Shortly before Friedrich Schlegel announced the coming of a new era with «eine progressive Universalpoesie,» Goethe and Schiller had been debating on matters of genre with the hope of salvaging their vanishing present (37). In December 1797, they began exchanging a series of letters in which they put their concern as follows. «Es ist mir dabey aufgefallen,» Goethe first wrote, «wie es kommt, daß wir Modernen die Genres so sehr zu vermischen geneigt sind, ja daß wir gar nicht einmal im Stande sind sie voneinander zu unterscheiden. Es scheint nur daher zu kommen, weil die Künstler, die eigentlich die Kunstwerke innerhalb ihrer reinen Bedingungen hervorbringen sollten, jenem Streben der Zuschauer und Zuhörer, alles völlig wahr zu finden, gefällig nachgeben» (Schiller, WB 8: 1566). According to Goethe, writers regrettably abandoned genre distinctions because modern desires for the «vollkommen Gegenwärtigen» were dismissive of poetic orders and imaginative creations and this blurring of genre boundaries was lamentable. Clinging onto the legacy of classical Greece, he came to the following conclusion: Diesen eigentlich kindischen, barbarischen, abgeschmackten Tendenzen sollte nun der Künstler aus allen Kräften widerstehen, Kunstwerk von Kunstwerk durch undurchdringliche Zauberkreise sondern, jedes bey seiner Eigenschaft und seinen Eigenheiten erhalten, so wie die Alten gethan haben und dadurch eben solche Künstler wurden und waren. (1567) As mimetic forms of the natural, the lyric needed to be kept apart from the epic. The poet once again needed to follow the ancients and eradicate any impurities that had come from scandalous genre crossings. Though sympathetic with Goethe’s anxiety of modern realisms (not to be confused with the Realism of the second half of the nineteenth century), Schiller had a slightly different response to contemporary developments. A neat differentiation between genres, he answered, was simply impossible because no work included every element of the genre to which it belonged. 120 David D. Kim Ihr jetziges Geschäft, die beyden Gattungen zu sondern und zu reinigen, ist freylich von der höchsten Bedeutung, aber Sie werden mit mir überzeugt seyn, daß, um von einem Kunstwerk alles auszuschließen, was seiner Gattung fremd ist, man auch nothwendig alles darin müsse einschließen können, was der Gattung gebührt. Und eben daran fehlt es jetzt. Weil wir einmal die Bedingungen nicht zusammenbringen können, unter welchen eine jede der beyden Gattungen steht, so sind wir genöthigt, sie zu vermischen. (1573) In other words, genre policing was impossible because every organic product was inherently impure. And since there was no conceptual framework in which the lyric could neatly be separated from the epic, it was equally impossible to produce generically pure works. For Schiller, then, to retranslate Turandot was precisely to demonstrate how that necessary border-crossing did not have to be irreconcilable to Enlightenment ideals especially because the origin of a material did not matter: «Nicht das Gebiet aus welchem der Gegenstand genommen, sondern das Forum vor welches der Dichter ihn bringt, macht denselben tragisch oder komisch» (745). To put it differently, transforming the Italian commedia dell’arte, that fiabe teatrali, into a German «tragikomisches Märchen» would give flesh to a universal poetics that was grounded in the Aufklärung, and not in the Romantik. According to Karl Guthke, Schiller’s tragicomedy is modeled after a dramatic synthesis that does not juxtapose elements of the two genres: «Schillers Turandot ist gegründet auf das Phänomen des Tragikomischen und suggeriert dem Zuschauer das komplex-einheitliche ästhetische Erlebnis des auf komische Weise Tragischen und auf tragische Weise Komischen, derart, daß die Komik die Tragik in demselben Maße steigert wie die Tragik die Komik» (GP 91). The comic and the tragic complement each other, producing an organic wholeness that Schiller has originally envisioned for his work. That explains why Turandot’s definition of love is also inscribed in an ambivalent relationship with individual pride. Since true love complements the two lovers, she needs to work through a dilemma between what she thinks love is and what Kalaf is offering her. Kalaf, too, mirrors these struggles by going back and forth between love and independence, grief and elatedness. Yet, Guthke does not go far enough in uncovering Schiller’s substantial manipulations to impart readers with «das komplex-einheitliche ästhetische Erlebnis.» For instance, Gozzi’s text reads that Calaf’s parents, the former king and queen, have voluntarily ended their humiliating lives in exile. In his remembrance of familial miseries, Calaf highlights their human frailties (46). In Schiller’s rewriting, Kalaf paints a wholly different picture of his parents. Instead of succumbing to their tragic fate, he says that the king and the queen have gracefully endured all hardship: «Sie leben. Und wisse Barak! In der Not Re-Orienting the Weimar Theater 121 allein / Bewähret sich der Adel großer Seelen» (WB 1.1: 73-74). Schiller’s princess is also concerned with issues of public honor and personal pride whereas Gozzi’s work is centered around gender inequality - a social matter that western cultures have historically associated with Chinese culture. And Schiller’s Turandot is only critical of her adorers while Gozzi’s protagonist is indiscriminately hostile to men. These specific transformations allow Schiller to present the Oriental other as being neither absolutely familiar nor wholly foreign. Schiller translocates Gozzi’s Turandot onto Weimar theater by adding pathetic «Götteranrufungen» as well (Ingenkamp 992). For example, Gozzi’s original reads: «May the wisdom of Confucius and his priests descend upon us all» (54). 9 At another point, the emperor announces: «Ah, barbarous daughter, you were born to torment me! Who cursed me with this terrible affliction? Who forced me to decree this accursed edict that must make even Confucius tremble? » (56). And later, he says: «What a law! What torment! That I vowed to the great Confucius to follow it! » (63). In Schiller’s translation, these apparently cultural references are no longer present. In lieu of Confucius, the German translation refers to «Götter» and «Himmel» (WB 9: 402, 403). Whereas Gozzi’s play deliberately distorts Confucius into a comical, as well as divine, figure, Schiller makes no mention of that foreign name; only twice does he refer to a much less known mythical figure, named «Fohi» who appears in Confucian texts (391, 392). Schiller adopts Gozzi’s «chinesisches Setting mit einer deutlichen Tendenz zur gesamtorientalischen Anbindbarkeit,» but omits any markers of Chineseness to produce an equivalently Orientalist Persia (Polaschegg 210). Without confusing his audience, Schiller’s Weltbühne makes that transfer to demonstrate a universal paradigm on stage. 10 Nowhere else is this paradoxically Germanocentric universalization of the Oriental other more apparent than in the transubstantiation that the masked figure Pantalone undergoes from Gozzi to Schiller. If the Italian courtesan plays an iconic role in the former’s fable, the latter transforms him into a «bieder-komische Nürnberger der Meistersingerzeit» who resonates with contemporary German audiences (Ingenkamp 1006). Gozzi’s Pantalone also says the following in response to Calaf’s attempt to solve Turandot’s riddle: Dear master, wisdom is no help here. Where I come from we don’t have these peculiar laws. We don’t have these edicts. There, for example princes don’t fall in love with pictures, and they don’t get their heads chopped off by trying to marry the subjects of pictures. And we don’t have females who hate men the way Princess Turandot does. We don’t even have creatures of her type, not even in our nightmares…I was a man who was stupefied to find people wearing these funny costumes, to discover these ridiculous oaths, to find these strange kinds of princes and these peculiar princesses. I don’t understand the oriental mind. (56-57) 122 David D. Kim The incommensurable gap between the Italian courtesan and the Oriental mind results in a complete breakdown of intercultural understanding. It does not matter how much time Pantalone has spent in the Chinese court, the oddity of Chinese cultural practices and imperial laws is so great that they border on freakishness. Moreover, princesses like Turandot are categorized as «creatures» because they refuse to serve their husbands in marriage. Now listen to the words in which Schiller universalizes this statement according to Enlightenment aspirations. China and Venice, human beings and genders, Christianity and tyranny are clearly differentiated from one another for a particular reason. Rat, Majestät? Hat sich da was zu raten! / Bei mir zu Hause, in der Christen Land, / In meiner lieben Vaterstadt Venedig, / Schwört man gar kein Beispiel und Exempel, / Daß sich die Herrn in Bilderchen vergafft, / Und ihren Hals gewagt für ihre Mädchen. / Kein Frauensmensch bei uns geboren wird, / Wie Dame Kieselstein, die alle Männer / Verschworen hätte - Gott soll uns bewahren! / Das fiel uns auch im Traum nicht ein…/ Und jetzt erstaun ich über alle Maßen / Daß ich so kuriöse Bräuche hier / Vorfinde, so kurjose Schwüre und Gesetze, / Und so kurjose Fraun und <junge> Herrn. (WB 2.3: 547-69; my emphasis added) The initially constructed gaps are closed in the midst of thisand otherworldly customs as Turandot is called a «Frauenmensch» - that is, first and foremost, a human being and, then, a woman. Turandot’s wickedness is also traced to a sense of guilt, and not to some kind of «senseless» refusal to be a woman in preparation of marital life. Moreover, Chinese culture is «curious» rather than «strange,» «peculiar,» and «ridiculous.» These differentiations are then extended to metaphors describing Turandot as «Schlange» and «Sphinx» whereas the Italian original refers to her as «tigress,» «viper» or «tyrant» (WB 2.3: 585; Gozzi 51). If, according to Friedrich Schleiermacher, there only exist two methods of translating - either leaving the author in peace and moving the reader toward him or leaving the reader in peace and moving the writer toward him - Schiller’s Turandot speaks in a forked tongue that does both because it was neither a nostalgic recovery of past texts nor a strictly modern crossing of genre boundaries (49). It replaces, as Schiller himself writes, the «Kosten der Erfindung» with «ein gewißes Gefühl von Selbstthätigkeit und Kunstfertigkeit» (WB 12: 592). That is precisely what Schiller tells Körner when he says that, with a bit of «poetische[r] Nachhülfe,» the original will acquire «einen höheren Werth» on German stages (585). The translation takes a life of its own, crossing genre boundaries and intermixing mimetic forms without undermining Enlightenment orders of the world. Though grounded in specifically German concerns with aesthetics, genre, and history, Schiller’s translational task inherited a thick network of Europe- Re-Orienting the Weimar Theater 123 an imaginations of the Orient where China functioned «as a limit or potential limit, a horizon neither of otherness nor of similarity, but rather of the very distinction between otherness and similarity, and thus, because what is at stake in the era of modernity in the West is the dream of the universalization of culture, as a horizon of the very idea of horizons, a horizon, that is, that marks the limit of the universal as a transcendental field» (Hayot 8). What Gozzi had done with the Chinese to mock the limits of contemporary dramas on Enlightenment secularization and reason thus made its way, though not faithfully, into Schiller’s imagination of Enlightenment principles, genre boundaries, and things Persian. In that intricate webbing of aesthetic commitments, ideological predilections, intercultural projections, and transregional relocations, Schiller’s task was to catapult a revised, higher form of something old into the new century. It also meant re-orienting Weimar theater against the backdrop of Orientalist depictions of the Chinese and Persians. In such an Enlightenment project, then, the empire was complicit without being delimited to one European culture. Works Cited Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, ed. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002. Baudier, Michel. The History of the Court of the King of China out of French. London: H.B. for Christopher Hussey, 1682. Benjamin, Walter. «Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.» Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 2.1. Ed. Tillman Rexroth. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972. 7-21. Berman, Russell A. «German Colonialism: Another Sonderweg? » The European Studies Journal 16.2 (1999): 25-36. -. Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Cheah, Pheng. Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. 4th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. «Des Tours de Babel.» Difference in Translation. Ed. John F. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 165-207. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Weimarer Ausgabe I. Ann Arbor, MI: Chadwyck- Healey, 1997. 124 David D. Kim Guthke, Karl S. Goethes Weimar und «Die große Öffnung in die weite Welt.» Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz in Kommission, 2001. -. Geschichte und Poetik der deutschen Tragikomödie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961. Hayot, Eric. The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion. Berlin: Hegel-Institut, 2002. Hesse, Hermann. Aus Indien: Aufzeichnungen, Tagebücher, Gedichte. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1980. Ingenkamp, Karl-Heinz. «Struktur und Gehalt.» In Friedrich Schiller, Werke und Briefe. Vol. 9. Ed. Karl-Heinz Ingenkamp. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1995. 981-1014. Jacobs, Carol. «The Monstrosity of Translation: Walter Benjamin’s ‹The Task of the Translator.›» MLN 90.6 (1975): 755-66. Jakobson, Roman. «On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.» The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2004. 138-43. Kleist, Heinrich von. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Ed. Helmut Sembdner. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001. Lukoschik, Rita Unfer. Der erste deutsche Gozzi: Untersuchungen zu der Rezeption Carlo Gozzis in der deutschen Spätaufklärung. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang 1993. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Polaschegg, Andrea. Der andere Orientalismus: Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Rothberg, Michael. Mutidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 25th anniversary ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2003. Schiller, Friedrich. Werke und Briefe. 12 vols. Ed. Otto Dann et al. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2004. -. Historische Schriften und Erzählungen. Ed. Otto Dann. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2000. Schlegel, Friedrich. Kritische Schriften. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1938. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. «On the Different Methods of Translating.» The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. trans. Susan Bernofsky. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2004. 43-63. Smethurst, Paul. «Introduction.» Empire, Form, and Travel Writing. Ed. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst. New York: Routledge, 2008. 1-20. Tautz, Birgit. Reading and Seeing Ethnic Differences in the Enlightenment: From China to Africa. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. 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Notes 1 Just to give a few examples, Mary Louise Pratt has written about Humboldt’s imperialist gaze on the Amazon during his trip through the Americas; Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin have collectively produced a series of anticolonial and postcolonial inquiries in light of European cultural legacies; and Edward Said has explored discursive manipulations of «the Oriental other» in nineteenth-century France. 2 In What Is World Literature? David Damrosch has also turned to Goethe to deduce this translational definition of world literature, that is, world literature as «a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies of material, available for reading established classics and new discoveries alike» (5). 3 Roman Jakobson identifies three kinds of translation whereby «intralingual translation» means rewording within the same order of signs, «interlingual translation» is translation proper, and «intersemiotic translation» connotes the movement from verbal signs to non-verbal signs (139). 4 I refer my reader to three helpful readings of Benjamin’s essay: Paul de Man’s The Resistance to Theory, Jacques Derrida’s «Des Tours de Babel,» and Carol Jacobs, «The Monstrosity of Translation.» 5 Ingenkamp’s reading provides my study with an informative foundation, but I shall be complementing his work with a focus on Schiller’s politics and poetics of translation in light of cultural and literary debates. 6 I want to direct my reader’s attention only for a moment to a paradigmatic moment in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where Schiller’s overlapping of Enlightenment and Empire repeats itself in colonial Africa, yet with a paradigm-shifting turn. While sailing down the Thames, Marlow uncannily echoes Schiller’s words by saying how the English river invokes grand memories of past heroes - that is, heroes whose unprecedented bravery have taken them to unknown ends of the earth. Yet, this sight does not lead to the same sentimentalism. Marlow is critical of re-envisioning Africa’s present savagery as Britain’s past wildness: «And this also,» said Marlow suddenly, «has been one of the dark places of the earth….I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago - the other day…Light came out of this river since - you say Knights? Yes, but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker - may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday» (Conrad 5-6). For Marlow, what is deemed civilizational depends on temporal conditions, which redefine the present of a past (the Roman attitude toward the Celts) into a past of the present (the British attitude toward Africans), so that the Roman traveler discovers: «Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery. The utter savagery had closed round him - all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men… He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination - you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the long to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender - the hated» (6). 7 For a detailed examination of this intracultural conflict, read Winter’s Von illusionärer Wirklichkeit und wahrer Illusion. 126 David D. Kim 8 Friedrich August Clemens Werthes’ translation of Gozzi’s commedia dell’arte became available in five parts between the years 1777 and 1779. According to Karl Guthke, Friedrich Rambach dramatized Werthes’ translation with the title Die Rätsel (90). This event caused «ein ebenso heftiges wie kurzlebiges Gozzi-Fieber» in German-speaking cultures (Lukoschik 153). Meanwhile, Werthes himself had spent nearly a decade unsuccessfully following Wieland’s footsteps, taking minor teaching positions and improving his foreign language skills like Italian. After Wieland’s Erfurt lectures had planted the seeds for Werthes’ pursuit of Italian literature in 1774, the latter traveled, among other places, to Italy where he also acquainted himself with Gozzi. See Lukoschik 157-64. 9 I owe my English translation of Gozzi’s work to John Louis DiGaetani’s translation. 10 For more information about Weimar’s claim to cosmopolitanism, see Guthke, Goethes Weimar.