Talk:Kleine Schriften

Short?

This article is misleading when it claims that "Kleine Schriften" means "short writings." It actually means "minor writings." Such writings are considered to be of less importance than the writer's major writings. However, their length can be very long.Lestrade (talk) 15:19, 19 September 2009 (UTC)Lestrade

Yes, I see what you mean that "minor" could be a translation — except that sometimes an essay or article is indeed more important or "major" than one or more of a scholar's book-length works, in terms of whether it's considered a "classic" piece of scholarship or a must-read bibliographical item on the topic. Length is not a criterion of importance in scholarship; it does appear to be a criterion for inclusion in Kleine Schriften. Solmsen's Kleine Schriften, for instance, is a multi-volume collection of most of his essays and articles (if any are excluded, it's precisely the most minor ones), not books. That's why the English equivalent is Collected Papers. Also, while it's true that essays or articles collected in a scholar's Kleine Schriften can vary greatly in length from "notes" of a couple of pages, to quite long articles of, say, 75 pages, I've never seen a book-length monograph included in its own separate volume of a collection called Kleine Schriften. Each volume of the collection (if it's multi-volume; many are single volumes) contains essays or articles, that is, "short" in relation to book-length works that were published as stand-alones. (Of course, I have seen an infinitesimal number of the collections so called, and please correct me if you have examples to the contrary.) Cynwolfe (talk) 17:19, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

I am looking at Schopenhauer's Kleinere Schriften,published by Suhrkamp Verlag. It contains On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (182 pages), On Vision and Colors (104 pages), On the Will in Nature (178 pages), and The Two Basic Problems of Ethics (333 pages). These are not works of a few pages. They are works that supplement or support his main work and are therefore of lesser importance. Lestrade (talk) 18:41, 19 September 2009 (UTC)Lestrade

Ah, very good. Schopenhauer is not a place I would go. I'm imagining from your description that this is a rather large multi-volume set. And I'm assuming these book-length works each gets its own volume, and that the set does not also collect essays or "papers" in this sense that were published in periodicals. Cynwolfe (talk) 00:28, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

"Short" is "kurze," not "kleine."Lestrade (talk) 11:35, 20 September 2009 (UTC)Lestrade

I think I'm starting to lose your point, nor did you confirm or deny my previously stated assumptions. I made changes to accommodate both "minor" and "short". I've granted that some collections may not be limited to "papers" in the usual sense that I know from examples of Kleine Schriften I've seen, and have included the concept of "minor."

If we are about to debate the philosophy of translation, I'm not sure I'll be willing to pursue that argument past the following:

I'm well aware that Eine kleine Nachtmusik, for instance, doesn't mean "A Short Piece of Night Music." As I'm sure you know, translation is a matter of usage and context, not simply replacing dictionary definitions one to one; certainly not a matter of simply plopping in the first definition from the source language regardless of usage in the target language. That's why most opera companies even in the Anglophone world present Così fan tutte, and not the bland "So Do They All," which in contemporary American English should be more like "That's the Way They All Act" (yuck). Not the same zing to it. This is also why if you use Yahoo Babel Fish, or Google Translate, you often get nonsense. In English, we would call a thousand-page tome a "big" book in terms of length; we would also call (regrettably) The Da Vinci Code a "big" book in a more figurative sense. The thousand-page book we would also call a "long" book; Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach we would call a "short" book if we wanted to describe its relative page count, or a slim book if we wanted to emphasize its non-monumental quality, or a small book if we wanted to characterize its self-imposed restraint and circumscribed aims.

In other words, some essays collected in Kleine Schriften are indeed works of "major" scholarly importance in their field. I'm taking your word for it that book-length works of minor importance can also be published under the title. The equivalent of the Kleine Schriften of Solmsen, for instance, is certainly the Collected Papers of Ronald Syme, which are the collected essays and articles, along with some unpublished materials, some of which were to have been developed as a book, but (in the case of both scholars) nothing published as an individual book. If an English title were to be used for the collections of Burkert and Solmsen, that title would be "Collected Papers". Obviously kleine doesn't mean "collected" — but that isn't how translation works. So since I'm obviously not understanding your point, I'm afraid you'll have to do the editing. My understanding is that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary; it explains things and concepts, not simply word correspondences. I've accepted your point, or at least I thought so: the title Kleine Schriften may be chosen because it accommodates "minor" works in addition to the scholar's "shorter" writings to which the English "papers" is limited. To use words like "misleading" and "claims" is unduly combative. A person reading even the original article would not have come away diabolically and calculatingly "misled" about what she would find if she picked up a volume called Kleine Schriften. Cynwolfe (talk) 14:14, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Sorry to sound contentious. "Klein" can never mean "short." "Kurz" means "short." My copy of Wittgenstein's major work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is only 49 pages long. It is short. It is "kurz." We should use the words "kleine schriften" to mean only "lesser," or "minor" writings. The word "short" should not appear in the article. But don't mind me. Almost everything that I put forward on Wikipedia is contested. The article looks pretty good to me, except, of course, for that one word. Vive valeque.Lestrade (talk) 18:36, 20 September 2009 (UTC)Lestrade

Off topic: Doesn't Così fan tutte mean "they all do it"?Lestrade (talk) 03:25, 21 September 2009 (UTC)Lestrade

Yes, but I've never seen an opera company perform it under that title (though they might; I can imagine what would transpire under such a title in a postmodernist staging); I have, however, seen it woefully anglicized as So Do They All, for reasons beyond my ken — hence my point about the vagaries of translation. Cynwolfe (talk) 16:31, 21 September 2009 (UTC)