For once I will try to write an article that is not quite as long as most of the others, although I must admit I will probably not be too successful in this. It seems as if prolixity is my chief sin in writing, for which I am sorry.
Some time ago I read the book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke and liked it a lot. It is the first work by her and she is yet to write a second (save for some short stories), but is certainly an impressive debut. Currently Clarke seems to be working on a book that is basically a sequel to it (or at least claimed so once in an interview). Despite the fact that I am generally wary of authors that stop trying something new as early as after their first book (the short stories are set in the same universe as well), Jonathan Strange is so excellent I am probably going to give the sequel a try.
The book is set in alternative version of England during the Napoleonic wars, where real magicians have always existed in the world. I hesitate to call it an alternative history novel outright for two reasons. One is that in such a novel I would not expect magic. The other is that in a way it is much rather an anti-alternative history novel.
In a regular alternative history you have a historic event that happens differently from our history, usually called the point of divergence, which causes the whole subsequent history to be completely different (mostly it involves boring things like wars and certain nations attaining world domination). The craftier the author is, the more minuscule the point of divergence event will be.
Clarke subverts this method completely, by picturing a world with an entirely different history that still turns out, around 1810, to be just exactly the same as in our timeline. It has a history where England had been separated into two realms for centuries, one of which was ruled by a magician king, and still in 1907 Wellington fights Bonaparte in the Peninsular war, and Byron even writes the same poems. It is a most charming idea as long as it is not used too often or because of laziness. I imagine it would become stale quickly.
But so far all this was only introduction. I now want to talk about an amusing detail in the book.
In one of the final chapters of the book an Austrian gentleman addresses the magician Jonathan Strange in German as “der Hexenmeister des großen Wellington” (the sorcerer of the great Wellington). Apart from the fact that it is completely correct German (including spelling), which, sadly, is rare in books, which all too often are really careless with foreign quotes, it uses an interesting word.
In English there are quite a few terms for “magician”: magician, mage, wizard, sorcerer, conjurer, enchanter, warlock and a couple of other less common ones.
In German it is just the same: Magier, Zauberer, Hexer, Hexenmeister, Zauberkünstler, and others. In fact I feel most can be pairwise equated with English terms, e.g. Zauberer=Wizard, Zauberkünstler=conjurer, Magier=magician.
In the 21st century the most commonly used term is “Zauberer”. Gandalf is a Zauberer and so is Harry Potter. But Clarke used “Hexenmeister”. It is a perfectly correct word, but it is not the word a modern German speaker would use. It has a certain old-fashioned ring to it. (In fact the word, literally translated, means “witch-master”, master of witchcraft.) Of course it is possible that Clarke choose a quaintly old-fashioned term to match the setting of her novel, but I see a different reason that convinces me more.
There is a famous poem by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, titled Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer’s apprentice), equally famously made into an orchestral musical piece by Paul Dukas, and later into a Disney animated film. (I mentioned it in this article.) The poem begins with the lines
Hat der alte Hexenmeister
Sich doch einmal wegbegeben!
which is “Has the old sorcerer for once betook himself to some other place!”.
It is one of the most famous poems on magic there is, and it was written in 1797 (published in 1827). I am convinced it is completely impossible for Clarke not to be aware of the poem and not having had in it mind at some point. A novel about magicians in the early 1800s just cannot ignore the most famous poems about magicians from that exact period by one of the most famous poets of all times.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is laden with references to all kinds of contemporary things, including poetry, but there is none to Goethe or his poem. Well, the novel is set in England and nowhere even remotely deals with anything German, so there simply was no place for it. And after all it was published a little too late for the novel’s characters to know it (the novel ends in 1816). But, and that is my theory, Susanna Clarke chose to acknowledge Goethe’s poem by using, in that one passage, a term that was taken straight from the poem.
No comments:
Post a Comment