Out of the realm of the senses

Word of the week: übersinnlich

Queen Guinevere bidding farewell to Sir Lancelot by Emil Teschendorff (source)

Earlier this week I attended a performance of Bach’s “Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir.” The English translation given in the program was in rhyme, and for rhyme’s sake it rearranged the syntax so much that sometimes a German line in the left column no longer corresponded at all with its English counterpart in the right.

This has, as it turns out, dangerous spiritual consequences. For as my eye shifted idly between the paralleled lines “Und weil ich denn in meinem Sinn” and “A miserable sinner I,” I found myself mentally attempting to equate them with one another—and, I am sorry to say, I lost the sense of Sinn.¹

But seriously, folks.

Sinn means “sense”—it it capable of expressing all the meanings of the English noun sense.² Its derivative sinnlich can therefore translate multiple adjectives derived from sense: sensual, sensous, and sensory.³

It’s worth noting the range of meaning in those English words. Sensual, everyone knows.⁴ Sensuous was coined by John Milton as a chaste alternative: classical music can be appreciated sensuously but not sensually (unless we’re talking, like, Tristan und Isolde). Sensory is colder still: an objective, scientific term.

Again, sinnlich can mean any of these!

As a German prefix, über- is similarly multi-sided: it can, per Wiktionary, be translated as over-, super-, supra-, preter-, or meta-.

So if you wanted to get at the meaning of übersinnlich, you could begin by constructing a table of possible combinations. In fact, I will do just that:

The words in boldface have entries in the OED, all with basically the same first definition: the super- and supra- family are all defined as “[t]ranscending the senses,” and the preter-’s as “[b]eyond what may be apprehended by the senses.”

Of course, language cannot really be snapped together from pieces like this; just as the component parts of übersinnlich are more complex than the three and the five, übersinnlich itself can be translated in all manner of ways. Reverso Context gives psychic, supernatural, and transcendental as its top three present-day translations. None of those appear on the list above, and only supernatural can be gotten at by a similar compounding process.

A famous use of sinnlich and übersinnlich turns up in Goethe’s Faust,⁵ when Mephistopheles, taunting a lovesick Faust, says

Du übersinnlicher sinnlicher Freier,⁶
Ein Mägdelein nasführet dich.

The OED, in its entry for English supersensual, explains:

The expression plays on the most common associations of German übersinnlich supernatural and sinnlich (sexually) sensual, and their more general senses denoting things beyond and within the realm of the senses, respectively.

A cursory look at some englished Fausts shows translators generally preferring super/sensual, sometimes super/sensuous. This, I suppose, is a safe choice for covering the bases of meaning,⁷ though it’s imperfected a bit by the fact that supersensual can also mean “[e]xtremely or unusually sensual.” (We’ll get back to that.)

Subsequent books have referenced or alluded to this line. In Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Vivien observes the “supersensual sensual bond” between Guinevere and Lancelot. And in Venus im Pelz, Severin quotes (slightly misquotes) the Goethean line and repeatedly describes himself as übersinnlich.

And here, the second and incompatible meaning of English supersensual makes things hard for translators all over again. The widely disseminated Fernanda Savage Venus in Furs (1921) consistently uses supersensual for übersinnlich. Given that the book was already being treated as quasi-pornographic by the time it was translated, I fear the ambiguous meaning may have been intentional—or, worse, unintentional (it is, as I have learned only lately, a translation with other flaws).⁸

Two other translations I have at hand—one by George Warner in 1925,⁹ one by Joachim Neugroschel in 2000—take different approaches.

Warner uses super-sentimental, and gives the quote from Faust as:

Thou super-sentimental, sensual lover,
A slip of a girl leads you by the nose!¹⁰

This is at the beginning of the book. By the end, he has switched to translating the same word as ultra-sensual!

Neugroschel uses suprasensual consistently (or, at least, uses it in all the places I checked). A nice choice in my opinion, as supra- unambiguously indicates transcendence instead of suggesting (as super- and ultra- can) mere intensification. His rendering of the misquoted couplet is both scrupulously literal and pleasing to the ear:

You suprasensual sensual suitor,
A woman leads you by the nose!

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1. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but: Sin and sinner in German are Sünde and Sünder*in. Sinn is a false friend.

2. To which it is—ehm—not exactly related. The full story of English sense has to do with Latin and Germanic roots getting stirred up together in the cauldron of French.

3. Although these three words are the ones I’m going to be playing with, they’re far from the only possible translations. Here is the full definition of sinnlich found in my 1906 Cassell’s German Dictionary:

affecting the senses; material, physical, sensuous; perceptible; sensual, voluptuous; sentient (Philos.)

4. Though it didn’t always mean that; and it is equivalent to sensuous in some of the derivatives discussed below.

5. A… complicated… poem—and one I have not read in its entirety. Being myself rough in expression and vulgar in sensibility, and seeing Protestantism as a greater temptation than Paganism, I find Marlowe is close to my speed.

6. Freier meant, at the time, “suitor.” Today it means “john.”

7. I would be tempted to go with something like “supernatural, all-too-natural,” but that’s because I’m always tempted to do something cute.

8. Indeed, as Severin’s Übersinnlichkeit is such a focus, and as I have only read the novel in its entirety in the Savage translation and before learning anything about this word, I suspect my understanding of the story is still incomplete.

9. Which appears to be nowhere in print, nor on Project Gutenberg, although it is in the public domain. The parts I have read of it are less stilted than the Savage version, which could go a long way toward compensating for whatever flaws it does have. “Variety of translations is profitable” for profane books as well as for the Scriptures, I think.

10. It seems he either pulled these lines from another translation, or else was presumptuous enough to treat the misquotation as an error, for Severin’s variation of the line doesn’t speak of a “girl” but of a Weib.