On the way of WG Sebald's book “The Rings of Saturn.

An English pilgrimage ”from German into English, one of the three mottos has disappeared.

The original was published in 1995, the translation by Michael Hulse three years later.

The author is likely to have carried out the deletion himself.

It concerns a quote from one of the greatest classics in English literature, John Milton.

The German edition is preceded by untranslated: “Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably.” The sentence is identified as a quote from “Paradise Lost”.

Obviously wrong, because he does not conform to the meter of the epic.

Patrick Bahners

Features correspondent in Cologne and responsible for “humanities”.

  • Follow I follow

Part of the riddle of this little story of loss is the question of whether Sebald was on the wrong track. The success would have been lasting, because the misspelling can still be found in the most recent secondary literature, for example in Uwe Schütte's monograph at De Gruyter. But if Sebald wanted to mislead the readers, why should he have spared the English the trial? It is closer to the assumption that the error was the reason for the erasure of the epigraph - because Sebald, according to David Lumsden, may have originally been interested in raising the subject of the Fall at the beginning of his literary pilgrimage.

The quote actually comes from the Areopagitica, the treatise against book censorship published by Milton in 1644.

If you look for it in context, you will in fact come across Adam and Eve, because in his fictional parliamentary speech Milton varies his striking sociobiological picture that good and bad grow together and form an organic unit, through biblical concretization: From the peel of a single tasted apple the knowledge of good and bad jumped into the world like a pair of twins held together.

David Bromwich, who teaches literary studies at Yale, now claims that the political content of this poetic prose could be found again a quarter of a century later in Milton's theological world poem.

Was there a higher truth in Sebald's error?

Against the left censorship

Bromwich, the biographer of Edmund Burke and William Hazlitt, is a staunch defender of the absolute concept of free speech protected by the American constitutional tradition. His commentaries on American politics, previously printed regularly in the London Review of Books, have recently appeared in the much more explicitly left-wing weekly magazine The Nation. In Persuasion, the online magazine founded by Yasha Mounk, which defends the leeway of free thought against moral and political impulses, Bromwich falls back on Milton to develop an argument against tendencies that he brings to the concept of left-wing censorship.

Donald McNeil, an editor for the New York Times, lost his job after saying a word after being asked to comment on an educational reprimand for the use of that word. In such incidents, according to Bromwich, a "religious theory" of language is used: dangerous words or thoughts are attributed the power to stain the person who utters or has them. Against this magical conception of language, Bromwich quotes as a counter-magic what Adam says in Milton's epic for the consolation of Eve, who ate in the dream of the forbidden fruit: "Evil into the mind of God or Man / May come and go, so unapproved, and leave / No spot or blame behind. "According to Bromwich, Adam speaks of Milton of Areopagitica, who illustrates with the image of the apple,that moral reasoning has the character of a purifying test: one needs the bad thoughts in order to distinguish the good from them.

There are strong political reasons for Bromwich's radical liberal view of freedom of expression, the unconditional separation of words and deeds. As far as his interpretation of Milton is concerned, one difficulty in fading the two paradise scenes is that Eva's dream in Adam's interpretation should by no means have been a process of weighing up thoughts, an involuntary test of critical faculties. Adam says that he recognized thoughts from a conversation between him and her in the dream report, but the whole thing should have passed without consequences.

In 1965 in the Harvard Theological Review, Manfred Weidhorn placed the verses from the fifth book in the context of the theological discussion about the question of whether dreaming can be a sin. He cites Milton's contemporaries who did not want to completely exclude unconscious activities from the imputation. As attractive as the idea conjured up by Bromwich is that the bad word leaves no trace in the mind: the innocence of this liberalism is paid for with a lack of psychological imagination. According to Thomas Browne, dreams can provide material for “a nightbook of our iniquities”. "The Rings of Saturn" are such a night book of our iniquities.