A sort ofOn the way to WG Sebald’s book “The Rings of Saturn”. One of the three mottos of “A British Pilgrimage” disappeared from German to English. The original version was published in 1995 and was translated by Michael Hulse three years later. The author probably deleted it himself. It quotes the famous quote of John Milton, one of the greatest classics in English literature. The front of the German version is untranslated: “The good and evil as we know it in the realm of this world grow together almost inextricably.” This sentence is considered to be a quote from “Paradise Lost”. Obviously it is wrong, because he does not fit the rhythm of the epic.
Part of the mystery in this little loss story is whether Sebald went the wrong way.Success will be sustainable because spelling errors can still be found in recent secondary literature, such as Work monograph Written by Uwe Schütte in De Gruyter. But if Sebald wants to mislead the reader, why should he save English from trial? This is closer to the hypothesis that the error was the reason for the deletion of the inscription-because according to David Ramsden, Sebald might initially be interested in proposing the theme of depravity at the beginning of his literary pilgrimage.
This sentence actually comes from Areopagitica, which is Milton’s paper against book censorship published in 1644. If you look for it in context, you will actually meet Adam and Eve, because in his fictional parliamentary speech, Milton changed his amazing sociobiological picture, where the good and the bad grow and form together An organic unit, embodied through the Bible: the knowledge of the quality of a tasted apple jumped into the world like a pair of twins hugging each other. David Bromwich, who teaches literary studies at Yale University, now claims that 25 years later, the political content of this poetic prose can be found again in Milton’s theological world poems. Does Sebald’s mistake have a higher truth?
Opposition to leftist censorship
Bromwich is the biographer of Edmund Burke and William Hazlitt, and he is a staunch defender of the concept of absolute freedom of speech that is traditionally protected by the U.S. Constitution.His comments on American politics have been frequently published in the London Review of Books, and recently appeared in the more explicit weekly left-wing magazine. nation. exist persuade, An online magazine founded by Yasha Mounk, defending the scope of free thought and opposing moral and political unreasonable demands, Bromwich turned to Milton for help and put forward arguments against his inclination to the concept of left-wing censorship.
After being asked to comment on the educational condemnation of the use of the term, Donald McNeil, the editor of The New York Times, lost his job with one sentence. According to Bromwich, in such incidents, the “religious theory” of language is used: dangerous words or ideas are believed to have the power to defile the person who speaks or possesses them. Against this magical concept of language, Bromwich cites what Adam said in Milton’s epic to comfort Eve as an anti-magic. Eve ate the forbidden fruit in a dream: “Evil enters the mind of God or humans/may come Go and go, so unapproved, and leave/no taint or blame.” According to Bromwich, Adam talked about Milton of Areopagitica, who used the image of an apple to illustrate that moral reasoning has a cleansing test Nature: People need bad thoughts to distinguish good from them.
Bromwich’s radical liberal views on freedom of speech and unconditional separation of speech and deeds have strong political reasons. As far as his interpretation of Milton is concerned, one of the difficulties in downplaying these two heavenly scenes is that Eva’s dream in Adam’s interpretation is by no means a process of weighing thoughts, but an unconscious test of critical ability. Adam said that he recognized the idea from the conversation between him and her in the dream report, but the whole thing should have no consequences.
Manfred Weidhorn was in Harvard Theological Review The verses in the fifth book are placed in the context of a theological discussion about whether dreaming is a sin. He cited Milton’s contemporaries, who did not want to exclude unconscious activity completely from attribution. Just as fascinating as Bromwich’s idea is that bad words leave no trace in the mind: this liberal innocence comes at the cost of a lack of ideal images. According to Thomas Browne, dreams can provide material for “the night book of our sins.” “The Ring of Saturn” is the night book of our sins.
