A Hastening While Read

In Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp visits a cousin with TB at a sanatorium in the Alps and ends up staying there himself for seven years. Late in his stay, he attends a seance, where a spirit named Holger is conjured. Holger is a poet who exists in a “tranquil state” of other-worldliness. When asked how long he’s been that way, Holger’s reply is “a hastening while.” The phrase is a bit unusual, but to me it perfectly describes that universal feeling of time having flown past, and in fact it aptly describes Hans’s stay at the sanitarium, even if Hans himself isn’t aware of it.

And how long had Holger been in this tranquil state? The answer to this was again something one would have never thought of, and dreamily answered; it was “A hastening while.” Very good. As a piece of ventriloquistic poesy from the Beyond, Hans Castorp, in particular, found it capital. A “hastening while” was the time-element Holger lived in: and of course he had to answer as it were in parables, having very likely forgotten how to use earthly terminology and standards of exact measurements.

Because of its strangeness, I wondered what the original German looked like. Perhaps it was one of those words, like schadenfreude, that doesn’t have an English equivalent. I remembered the word langweilig, which means “boring” but more literally might be long-whiling. Or so I suppose — I still have some rudimentary German from working in Vienna, but that was only for a few months 30 years ago. I had advanced to that dangerous state of pre-fluency where you can sort of understand, or just as easily misunderstand, what’s being said. I was too timid and shy to ever try to speak it unless it was absolutely necessary (my restaurant German is Sehr Gut, danke), but I used to watch the sitcom Alf, dubbed in German, and picked up useful phrases like Alf hat die Katze gefressen (Alf has eaten the cat).

I found the original version, Der Zauberberg, online, and was disappointed to see that the German phrase is simply eilende Weile, which translates to, well, “hastening while” (or the even more awkward, and less apt, “hurrying while”). I also noticed that there’s an inversion of the phrase, weilende Eile, which isn’t in the passage that I had read. See the bold text below.

Und wie lange Holger sich denn schon in seinem gelassenen Zustande befinde? — Jetzt kam wieder etwas, worauf niemand verfallen wäre, etwas träumerisch sich selbst Gebendes. Es lautete: »Eilende Weile«. -Sehr gut! Es hätte auch »Weilende Eile« lauten können, es war ein bauchrednerischer Dichterspruch von außen, Hans Castorp namentlich fand ihn vorzüglich. Eine eilende Weile war Holgers Zeitelement, natürlich, er mußte die Frager spruchweise abfertigen, mit irdischen Worten und Maßgenauigkeiten mochte er freilich zu operieren verlernt haben.

My book was handed down to me from my mother, who had read it in college. Her book was printed in 1949, but the translation, by H. T. Lowe-Porter, was originally published in 1927. A more recent translation by John E. Woods, published in 1995, does show the reversal:

And how long had Holger been in this serene state? And now came something else no one would have hit upon, something dreamily self-revealing. It was: “Hastening while.” Very good! It could just as easily been “whiling haste,” it was a bit of poetic ventriloquism from the beyond; Hans Castorp thought it splendid. For Holger, the element of time was a “hastening while” — but of course, he would have to deal with his questioners in a gnomic style, would sure have forgotten how to function with earthly words, and exact measurements.

A Chicago Tribune review of the John E. Woods version had this to say about the earlier translation:

And Helen Lowe-Porter, Thomas Mann’s lifelong English translator — and friend — has been maligned for errors and insensitivity to nuance, in particular for failing to understand certain idioms, old-fashioned in expression, and worse, having skipped lines that were seemingly too difficult for her.

The noun Eile does translate as haste, but weilende seems to be a “verbing” of Weile. I have no idea is such a thing is common in German. I couldn’t find wielende in any English-German dictionary, though these are somewhat abridged. Perhaps this was one of the aforementioned skipped lines. Or maybe it involves wordplay that is simply untranslatable. Whiling haste demonstrates the reversal, but doesn’t make much sense, or at least doesn’t seem to have the same meaning as hastening while. If you remove the modifier, “a while” sounds like a perfectly acceptable answer to the question How long have you been this state? whereas “a haste” does not. It could be that both the English nor the German are nonsensical, and that the author was using this to emphasize Hans’s obliviousness to his own condition.

The New York Times also criticized Lowe-Porter’s translation in their review of the Woods translation. It’s interesting that they referred to Lowe-Porter as a he (they missed Lowe-Porter’s gender), which undermines the authoritative tone of the review. Nobody’s perfect.

All the characters in Thomas Mann’s masterpiece THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (Knopf, $35) come considerably closer to speaking English in John E. Woods’s version than they did in its predecessor, by H. T. Lowe-Porter, first published by Knopf in 1927. Lowe-Porter’s apology — “better . . . an English version . . . done ill than not done at all” — was exaggerated, but his vocabulary was wholly Victorian, and he missed Mann’s voice.