Ein älterer Blogeintrag
erwähnt Dicks Misstrauen gegenüber der deutschen Übersetzung von
The Man in the High Castle. Weitere Recherchen dazu haben mich zu Dicks
Aufsatz How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later von 1978 geführt. Dicks Biograph Lawrence Sutin schreibt in seinem
Standardwerk The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, dass der Text
als Rede geschrieben sei, die vermutlich nie gehalten wurde. In dieser Rede berichtet Dick von einem anderen deutschen Übersetzungsproblem. Es heisst in der Rede, gegen Ende (fett jeweils von mir):
If any of you have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity or
mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar
commercials and winds up saying:
I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the
worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here,
I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them.
I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one
knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name.
I am. I shall always be. It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it
specifically says that it is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the
German translation, there is one of the most wonderful lapses of correct
understanding that I have ever come across; God help us if the man who
translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine
Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the
sentence "I am the word." That puzzled him. What can the author mean by
that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the
Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the
German edition, the Absolute Entity that made the suns, made the worlds,
created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself:
I am the brand name.
Had he translated the Gospel according to Saint John, I suppose it would have
come out as:
When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt
with God, and what God was, the brand name was.
It would seem that I not only bring you greetings from Disneyland but from
Mortimer Snerd. Such is the fate of an author who hoped to include theological
themes in his writing. “The brand name, then, was with God at the beginning,
and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without
him.” So it goes with noble ambitions. Let’s hope God has a sense of humor.
Or
should I say, Let’s hope the brand name has a sense of humor.
Da kommt die deutsche Übersetzung von
Ubik an aber nicht gut weg –
das ist wirklich böse Schelte, zumindest für diese eine (wichtige) Stelle. Der „Mann“, der da so versagt hat, ist Renate Laux, deren Übersetzung von
Ubik im Jahr zuvor, 1977, bei Suhrkamp erschienen ist. Vermutlich
hatte Dick die Ausgabe nicht lange zuvor in der Hand und seine Emotionen haben
direkt Eingang in sein Essay gefunden.
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Ubik (von links):1. Auflage Suhrkamp (1977), 5. Auflage Heyne (2003) und 1. Auflage Fischer (2014) |