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Italian to English: Website of the Video Game "Face Noir" (MadOrange Inc.) General field: Marketing Detailed field: Games / Video Games / Gaming / Casino
Source text - Italian http://www.facenoir.com/
Translation - English http://www.facenoir.com/
English to Italian: The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens. General field: Art/Literary Detailed field: Poetry & Literature
Source text - English Yes. The old fireside had smiled upon that same sweet face; it had passed, like a dream, through haunts of misery and care; at the door of the poor schoolmaster on the summer evening, before the furnace fire upon the cold wet night, at the still bedside of the dying boy, there had been the same mild lovely look. So shall we know the angels in their majesty, after death.
The old man held one languid arm in his, and had the small hand tight folded to his breast, for warmth. It was the hand she had stretched out to him with her last smile--the hand that had led him on, through all their wanderings. Ever and anon he pressed it to his lips; then hugged it to his breast again, murmuring that it was warmer now; and, as he said it, he looked, in agony, to those who stood around, as if imploring them to help her.
She was dead, and past all help, or need of it. The ancient rooms she had seemed to fill with life, even while her own was waning fast--the garden she had tended--the eyes she had gladdened--the noiseless haunts of many a thoughtful hour--the paths she had trodden as it were but yesterday--could know her never more.
'It is not,' said the schoolmaster, as he bent down to kiss her on the cheek, and gave his tears free vent, 'it is not on earth that Heaven's justice ends. Think what earth is, compared with the World to which her young spirit has winged its early flight; and say, if one deliberate wish expressed in solemn terms above this bed could call her back to life, which of us would utter it!'
Translation - Italian Sì. Il vecchio angolo del focolare aveva sorriso allo stesso viso dolce; aveva attraversato, come in un sogno, i tormenti della miseria e degli affanni. Nella casa del povero insegnante in quella sera estiva, davanti al focolare nella notte fredda e piovosa, al capezzale immobile del ragazzo morente, c'era stato lo stesso mite, amorevole sguardo. Così dovremmo immaginare gli angeli nella loro maestosità, dopo la morte.
L'anziano stringeva una delle languide braccia di Nell nella sua e teneva la piccola manina stretta forte al petto, come per riscaldarla. Era la stessa mano che lei gli aveva teso con il suo ultimo sorriso – la mano che lo aveva guidato in tutti i loro vagabondaggi. Di tanto in tanto la premeva contro le sue labbra, poi la stringeva nuovamente al petto, mormorando che adesso era più calda; e, mentre lo diceva, guardava angosciato tutti coloro che erano intorno a lui, come per implorarli di aiutarla.
Lei era morta, e lungi da ogni possibile aiuto, o dalla necessità di riceverlo. Le vecchie stanze che sembrava aver riempito di vita, anche quando la sua si stava velocemente estinguendo, il giardino che aveva curato, gli occhi che aveva allietato, i cantucci silenziosi di molte ore pensierose, i sentieri che sembrava aver calpestato appena ieri, non l'avrebbero più rivista.
« Non è... » disse l'insegnante, chinandosi per baciarle la gota e dando sfogo alle sue lacrime, « ...non è sulla terra che finisce la giustizia Divina. Pensate a cosa sia la terra, paragonata al Mondo verso il quale il suo giovane spirito ha spiccato il volo prematuro e dite: se un desiderio deliberato, espresso in termini solenni di fronte a questo letto, potesse riportarla in vita, chi di voi lo esprimerebbe? »
Italian to English: Le Antigoni, George Steiner. General field: Art/Literary Detailed field: Philosophy
Source text - Italian N/A for copyright reasons.
check:
Steiner G. [1984], Le Antigoni, Milano: Garzanti, 1a ed. 1995, pages 37-46
Translation - English The extreme complexity of this text does not just result from the fact that an essentially political-immanent discourse is imposed on a transcendent symbolism, hovering between Hegelian currents of thought which go back to the Bern and even Tübingen period, on the one hand, and the still vague language of that which will be the Hegelian philosophy in its mature form, on the other hand. Its obscurity is also the result of the reciprocal influence of two very different literary sources. The ontological-symbolic nebulosities and the motif of the divine involvement in human disputes – a central motif in Hölderlin – call to mind the Eumenides. The background of conflict between Kriegstaat and Privatmensch derives directly from Antigone. In addition, this latter pervades the context of Hegel's discourse and is implicit everywhere in the text, even when allusion is made to the Aeschylean drama.
Just before the passage we have considered, Hegel makes a very important assertion: Sittlichkeit – 'ethics', the 'morality grounded in custom' – concedes a significant portion of its rights to the 'underground powers', by renouncing and sacrificing to them something of itself. This concession and offering fulfils a complex double function: to recognize the Recht des Todes - the 'Right of Death' – and, at the same time, to distinguish and distance this right from the ethical-political arbitration of the living. Subsequently, in Hegel's essay, we learn that the family is the most perfect totality 'of which nature is capable' and that to give birth to children within the family is the modality in which the 'totality' reproduces itself, a modality which is continuously and legitimately thwarted by the ideals of war of the state. All of this does not refer to the Eumenides, but rather to Antigone. And the same goes for the hypothesis proposed in the most opaque point of the cited passage, according to which only the death of the tragic hero can make intelligible – produce? - the unification of the split nature or of the duplicity of gods when they are enfolded and disseminated in the mortal fight - 'in die Differenz verwickelt'.
In other words: when, in 1802, Hegel is writing about natural law, he is totally absorbed in specific themes regarding the conflict between nation-state and family, between the rights of the living and the rights of the dead, between legislative decrees and ethics grounded in custom, themes that will be fundamental in the Phenomenology. And it is in Sophocles' Antigone that those conflicts are expressed in primordial way. It is possible, as Lukács asserted, that the reference to the Eumenides and the obscurity in the text that follows represent a last attempt to 'dehistoricize' the political issues and to establish that continuity between ancient and modern that Hölderlin was striving to realize. However, after 1802, a 'dehistoricization' in these terms is not possible for Hegel. The Napoleonic adventure, to which the german philosopher assigns an absolute metaphysical singularity, has in fact turned the new nation-state into an Apollonian Lichtgott, a 'god of light' that must find his fulfilment and renewal in war. Taking Napoleon as a parameter, polemos is the public glory of man. But what are the rights belonging to the underground and nocturnal powers of the family and of death within this imperial model? The tragedy originates from the postulation and negation of such antinomies. The logic of revelation in tragic form is perfect in Antigone.The passage from the Eumenides to Antigone is therefore neither accidental nor essentially autobiographical, but rather articulates the essential transition from Hegel's early works to the Phenomenology.
Despite the presence of Antigone has been often detected in the Phenomenology, it has never been studied in detail. Yet that incorporation of a work of art into a philosophical discourse is not less remarkable than the one made by Plato with Homer or by Kierkeegaard with Mozart's works. Taken in isolation, the way in which Hegel makes use of Sophocles is not only directly pertinent to the study of Antigone's motif in the Western thought: it illustrates the whole central issue of hermeneutics, nature and conventions of comprehension. Here, in the face of a force of appropriation seldom equalled, we can try to follow the life of a great text within another great text and the metamorphic exchanges of meaning that such incorporation produces. If the Phenomenology itself has, especially in the first six sections, a dramatic structure, it is to a large extent due to the fact that it has exactly a great drama as central reference.
With an indirectness worth of Henry James, Hegel mentions Antigone only two times. But the presence of the heroine is vivid from section V (C, a), where Hegel states the existentialist axiom.
The being is a pure 'translation' - reines Übersetzen- of the potential being into action, into the 'doing of the fact' - das Tun der Tat. No individual can achieve an authentic knowledge of himself 'ehe es sich durch Tun zur Wirklichkeit gebracht hat' – until that knowledge has been realized through action. It is a translation 'from the night of possibility into the day of presence'; it is an awakening into the dawn of the action of that which was latency, the sleep of the 'self'. It begins Antigone's day and action. The purpose of the existential act must be configured as a real accession to the being, as such a central realization which cannot be reduced to a mere external 'effectiveness' (eine Sache). If action is only an end in itself, if to act is only 'to try hard', 'others will rush headlong into it as flies in a cup of fresh milk' - Ismene seems to enter the discourse through this image. The authentic act of realization of our personality is equivalent to the sittliche Substanz – to the 'ethical substance' or to the 'morality seen as substantial realization'. To investigate on the justification or on the importance of that ethical substance, to call into question its action in the name of external criteria, is vanity. Creon enters. Nevertheless, the ethical action is the 'intelligible general action of the state' – das verständige allgemeine Tun des Staats – 'in its purest and most meaningful form', in its most evident rationality. Its result is an ambiguity of the necessary guilt. The translation into an authentic individual being requires the existential action. Man is nothing, apart from 'l'oeuvre qu'il a réalisée' – the work he has realized. But, inasmuch as the individual action is not the one of the rational state, it might acquire a substancial reality or not and might be justifiable or not. Since the individual's action is quintessentially his own, it will induce him to clash with the rational norm of the purpose realized in the state – the 'political programme'. The state will thus react opposing the law – Gesetz – to the inner imperative – Gebot. Where the opposition is forced to its limits, there will be a violent emptying or a mere 'formality' in law, and a self-destructive autonomy and an imperative in itself and for itself in the individual. Let Sophocles' tragedy begin.
The clash has its actual origin in two dialectical moments. The first one consists in 'the sacrilege or tyrannical sin which makes a law out of obstinacy' and which would force the ethical substance to obey this law. The second one is a subtler evil: 'challenging the law' by means of 'the sacrilege or sin of knowledge' – Frevel des Wissens is an awful phrase – 'which breaks free from the law' and considers this latter a contingent and extraneous abuse. It should be noted the deliberate ambiguity of Hegel's formulation. If the first moment refers without doubt to Creon, the second concernes both Creon and Antigone, although the verb räsonieren indicates Creon rather than Antigone. This indication casts a vivid beam on Antigone's portrait with which section V of the Phenomenology ends.
The ethical substance can only be grasped by self-consciousness; it can only become peculiar substance in the individual human person. The ethical substance and the personal being become tautological in men and women who are 'lucid with themselves, not split, unitary spirits'. Such men and women are 'makellose himmlische Gestalten, die in ihren Unterschieden die unentweihte Unschuld und Einmütigkeit ihres Wesen erhalten'. The sentence is marked by an exalted significance and a theological tone which its translation conveys with difficulty: 'immaculate, celestial types or presences, who preserve in their differences and divisions from the self the never deconsecrated innocence and integrity of their being'. Such men and women simply are – 'Sie sind, und weiter nichts' is a lapidary clause which contains the core of Heidegger and Sartre's ontology. Now, for the first time, Hegel mentions and cites the tragedy – lines 456-457. And repeats: 'Sie sind'. For such men and women, the right – das Rechte – is the absolute and disinterested substance of their existence. The section ends with an imperative tone: 'dieses aber ist ihre Wirklichkeit und Dasein, ihre Selbst und Willen' – but this [right] is their actual reality , their being, their entity and their will. Antigone stands before our eyes, present as she has never been after Sophocles.
We are dealing with a Hegelian Antigone, of course. Transparent with herself, master and victim of her action which is identified with her being, this Antigone lives the ethical substance.
In her, 'the Spirit finds its actual realization'. But the ethical substance which Hegel's Antigone embodies – Antigone is pure ethical substance -, represents a polarization, an inevitable partiality. The Absolute is subjected to a division in the moment in which it enters into the necessary but fragmented dynamic of the human and historical condition. The Absolute must descent, so to say, into the contigent specificity, which is limited by the individual human ethos, so that ethos can find its full realization and make its return journey towards the ultimate unity. But in the process of 'descent', of polemical deconstruction, the ' ethical world' is split between two poles, the immanent and the transcendent – die in das Diesseits und Jenseits zerrissene Welt. 'Sie spaltet sich also in ein unterschiedenes sittliches Wesen, in ein menschliches und gottliches Gesetz' – it divides itself and crystallizes around the antinomies of the human and divine law. Since this splitting takes place in man, he must suffer the agonistic nature of the ethical- dialectical experience and be destroyed. But this same destruction, Hegel reminds us, constitutes man's main value and allows him to advance towards the unification of consciousness and Spirit 'on the other horizont of history'.
Hegel's next step is not mainly logical; it is an essential conjecture to his poetics of individuation and historicism. The division between divine and human laws does not take the form of a direct confrontation between men and gods, as it could be said with reference to Aeschylus' Prometheus or Euripides' Bacchantes. Since the ethical substance is now totally immanent to the human condition, it polarizes its values and its imperatives between state and family. It is within the family that the divine law assumes a triple statute: it is 'natural', 'unconscious', it belongs to the 'world of people' – key expressions are: 'natürliches Gemeinwesen', 'bewusstloser Begriff' and 'das Element der Wirklichkeit des Volks dem Volke selbst'. This statute is in inevitable opposition to that of the divine law in its application to the religion of the polis. 'La Famille s'oppose à l'État comme les Pénates aux Dieux de la cité' – Family is opposed to the State as the Penates to the gods of the city. The fundamental expression of this opposition is the burial of the dead. Hegel concentrates now around this motif and its dramatization in Antigone, the existential dualisms of man and society, living and dead, immanent and transcendent, which lie at the bottom of the Phenomenology. Within the family, the prevailing forces of consciousness regard the relationship with the individualized particularity. The specific person is seen as a totality. To this person is assigned a value of presence denied to the 'generalized individuality' of the citizen considered in the perspective of the state. Death, so to say, 'specifies this specificity' at its highest level. It is the extreme realization of the unique – as in Kierkegaard and Heidegger's postulate on the peculiar, inalienable death of the individual. 'Death is the supreme realization and work' a man might ever undertake. As we will see, this 'accomplished totality' might be, indeed should be, expressly civic as in the case of death in war, serving one's country. But in death the individual comes back 'immensely' – the adverb must suggest here the radical vehemence of Hegel's view – to the ethical dominion of family. Moreover, the polis 's'intéresse au Tun, á l'action de l'individu, tandis que la Familie attribue une valeur á son Sein, á son être pur et simple' – the state 'is interested in doing, in the individual's action, while Family assigns a value to his being, to his pure and simple existence. The primacy of the burial is determined by this radical difference between a political judgment and the ontological one. In this primacy, the issue of the actual preservation of the corpse – the unburied body of Polyneices – from decay plays a fundamental role:
'The dead individual, who has detached and liberated his being from action or negative unity, is a particular empty, who exists only passively for something else, at the level of the lower and more irrational organic forces. The family wards off from the dead the dishonour caused by the appetite
of unconscious organic forces and by abstract [chemical] elements. It acts in place of them and joins the relative with the womb of the earth, the elemental presence that does not die out. So the family makes the dead a member of a community -eines Gemeinwesens – which rules and establishes its control over the forces of the single material elements and of the lower living creatures, which wanted to take over the dead and destroy him... This supreme duty constitutes thus the complete divine law or the positive ethical act towards the single individual'.
The esoteric concreteness of Hegel's view awakenes, as no other comment on Antigone does, the age-old fear of decay, of the desecration of the corpse by dogs and birds of prey, that is at the centre of the tragedy. It connects the family with that which are exactly the two sources, the two motives for Antigone's action: 'the essence of divine action and the underground realm'. Within the family, Hegel proceeds, there is a privileged relationship, placed above the others by virtue of the directness and purity of its ethical substance: the relationship between brother and sister. Once again, Hegel's lyrically concise argumentation is permeated with Antigone's presence. Brother and sister have the same blood, wife and husband not. There is no sexual pressure between them or, if there is – Hegel implicitly allows this possibility, it has been overcome. Between parents and children there is a relationship of complementary selfishness - parents seek to reproduce themselves and provide continuity to their being – and inevitable alienation. Moreover, this relationship is inevitably organic. Brother and sister front each other in the disinterested purity of their free human choice. Their affinity transcends the biological to become elective. Womanliness itself, Hegel stresses, finds its highest expression, its moral quintessence, in the sororal condition – Das Weibliche hat daher als Schwester die höchste Ahnung des sittlichen Wesens. The sister has, as nobody else, an ontological view of her brother: she assigns to his being, to the existence in itself and for itself of her brother an irreplaceable value. Proportionately, there cannot be a superior ethical duty to that of the sister towards her brother.
But in the fulfilment of his identity of citizen, in the accomplishment of the actions which realize his virility, the brother must leave the sphere of family. He leaves the hearth (oikos) for the world of the polis. The woman drops behind him as the 'householder and guardian of the divine law', exactly because this law is polarized in the household gods, the Lares and Penates. The ethical realm of the woman is the one of the 'immediately elementary'. It is the realm of the responsible custody – of 'negativity' according to Hegel's particular terminology – which is necessarily in contrast to the destructive positivity of the political. 'La loi humaine est la loi du jour parce qu'elle est connue, publique, visible, universelle : elle règle non pas la famille mais la cité, le gouvernement, la guerre; et elle est faite par l'homme (vir). La loi humaine est la loi de l'homme. La loi divine est la loi de la femme, elle se cache, ne s'offre pas dans cette ouverture de manifestation (Offentbarkeit) qui produit l'homme. Elle est nocturne...' - The human law is the law of day because it is known, public, visible and universal: it does not rule the family,but rather the state, the government, the war; it is made by man (vir). The human law is the law of man. The divine law is the law of woman, it hides itself, it does not come forward to this opening of appearance – Offenbarkeit – which man produces. It is nocturnal... -. Derrida's comment is meaningful, but it reflects also a common misunderstanding: the conflictual encounter between the 'human' and 'divine' laws takes place merely on the 'historical' level. The polarization simply 'phenomenalizes' the internal splitting of the Absolute. If divine is present among the household gods, under the custody of the woman, it is also found among the gods of the state and the laws instituted around them by masculine power. Hence the tragic ambiguity of the conflict.
Hegel is now ready to embark on his last dialectical step. In death, the husband, the son or the brother leave the dominion of the polis to come back to that of the family. This 'return' is, in a specific and actual way, a return into the primeval custody of the woman – wife, mother, sister. Since the burial rites literally confine the dead in the space of earth and in the imaginary sequence of generations which lie at the bottom of the world of family, they are a specifically feminine task. When this task is up to a sister, whether the man has neither a mother nor a wife to bring him back to the guardian earth, burial rites acquire the highest holiness. Antigone's act is the holiest a woman might ever perform. It is also ein Verbrechen: a crime. There are indeed some situations in which the state is not ready to renounce to its authority over the dead. There are some circumstances – political, military, symbolic ones – in which the laws of the polis extend to the corpses the binding obbligation of honours – funeral services, monuments – or of punishment which is usually applied only to the living. Hence the final and supreme conflict between the masculine and feminine world.
The dialectic of the conflict between universal and particular, between the spheres of the feminine hearth and the one of the masculine forum, the polarities of the ethical substance, which crystallize around the values of immanent and transcendent, are now compressed into the struggle between a man - Creon- and a woman -Antigone- over the body of the dead -Polyneices-. Due to the only fact that this struggle takes place, the guilt of the woman is defined before the eyes of the polis. 'La Femme est la réalisation concrète du crime. L'ennemi intérieur de l'État antique est la Famille qu'il détruit et le Particulier qu'il ne reconnaît pas; mais il ne peut se passer d'eux' - Woman is the actual realization of the crime. The internal enemies of the ancient state are the family, which it destroyes, and the private individual, which it does not recognize; but he cannot do without them -.
It is not possible to conciliate innocence with human action; but only in action moral identity can be found. Antigone is guilty. Creon's edict is a political punishment; for Antigone it is an ontological crime. Polyneices' guilt towards Thebe is totally irrelevant with respect to the existential feeling which Antigone has towards the unique and irreplaceable I of her brother. The Sein of her brother cannot, in any way, be modified by his Tun. Death is, precisely, the return of the action into the being. By accepting the inevitable guilt of the action, by opposing the feminine-ontological to the masculine-political, Antigone is beyond Oedipus: Antigone's 'crime' is fully conscious. It is a self-mastery act, even before being an acceptance of destiny.
At this point, Shicksal (fatum) enters the Hegelian reading of the play. Both Antigone and Creon must die because they have abandoned their being to the inevitable partialities of action. It is exactly in this sense that personality, that individualization is destiny. 'The reciprocal opposition between the ethical powers and the process through which individualities make these powers act in life and death, have reached their true end only inasmuch as both parts undergo the same destruction...The victory of a power alone and the personality which represents it, the defeat of the other, would be then only the partial and incomplete work which moves forward continuously until a balance is reached. It is in the equal submission of both parts that the absolute right is first realized and that the ehtical substance – as negative force which consumes both parts or, in other words, as omnipotent and right Destiny – makes its appearance'. To identify this reading with the schematic triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is an oversimplification - this triad is more Fichtian than Hegelian. Despite this, we recognise in the metaphysics of the fatal balance the essence of Hegel's concept of dialectics, of historical progress through pathos in tragedy. Kojève's synthesis brings the distressing rigour of Hegel's 'Antigone' back.
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