| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: correct, as "abundance of the heart" is not German, not any more
than "abundance of the house, "abundance of the stove" or
"abundance of the bench" is German. But the mother in the home
and the common man say this: "What fills the heart overflows the
mouth." That is speaking with the proper German tongue of the
kind I have tried for, although unfortunately not always
successfully. The literal Latin is a great barrier to speaking
proper German.
So, as the traitor Judas says in Matthew 26: "Ut quid perditio
haec?" and in Mark 14: "Ut quid perditio iste unguenti facta est?"
Subsequently, for these literalist asses I would have to translate
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne: for us to cross the bridge on foot, and let the train come after!"
But no one heard this sage reflection, nor would anyone have acknowledged
its justice. The passengers resumed their places in the cars.
Passepartout took his seat without telling what had passed.
The whist-players were quite absorbed in their game.
The locomotive whistled vigorously; the engineer, reversing the steam,
backed the train for nearly a mile--retiring, like a jumper, in order
to take a longer leap. Then, with another whistle, he began to move forward;
the train increased its speed, and soon its rapidity became frightful;
a prolonged screech issued from the locomotive; the piston worked up and down
twenty strokes to the second. They perceived that the whole train, rushing
Around the World in 80 Days |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: effervescence,--which may be compared to the irritation and uneasiness in
the gums at the time of cutting teeth,--bubbles up, and has a feeling of
uneasiness and tickling; but when in like manner the soul is beginning to
grow wings, the beauty of the beloved meets her eye and she receives the
sensible warm motion of particles which flow towards her, therefore called
emotion (imeros), and is refreshed and warmed by them, and then she ceases
from her pain with joy. But when she is parted from her beloved and her
moisture fails, then the orifices of the passage out of which the wing
shoots dry up and close, and intercept the germ of the wing; which, being
shut up with the emotion, throbbing as with the pulsations of an artery,
pricks the aperture which is nearest, until at length the entire soul is
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