Sphinx

One of the obvious disadvantages in having as a research interest the place of antiquity in the modern world is the regular flow of new material – and, still more, the expectation of a regular flow of new material, so that I now scour every op-ed article on Iran for traces of Thucydidean power-politics that I can then anatomise. Since I’m a great admirer of Peter Handke as a writer I’d be reading interviews with him anyway – but I now find myself leaping on every passing reference to something classical, even if it’s nothing to do with Thucydides, and worrying away at it. I can’t claim that this is legitimate research activity, e.g. for a piece on his broader reception of ancient texts like Homer or tragedy, as I don’t remotely have time for that at the moment. Instead it feels like a peculiar sort of cyber-stalking…

From an interview with Handke and Luc Bondy in this week’s Die Zeit: Handke has been saying that the best path of development an individual can take is to remain the child that he is:

Es gibt einen Spruch von einem Vorsokratiker, den könnte ich sogar auf Griechisch sagen, aber ich will nicht, dass es dann wie eine Angeberei à la Sloterdijk dasteht. Also, der Satz lautet: Der nicht leidende Mensch bleibt nicht Kind. Das wird allgemein immer so übersetzt: Der Mensch, der nicht leidet, wird nicht erzogen. Ich übersetz es mir so: Der nicht leidende Mensch bleibt nicht Kind. Alec Guinness hat schon recht: Man ist eigentlich ein Fälscher. Man spielt den Macher, den Erwachsenen, den Schriftsteller, die öffentliche Person…

There’s a saying of a Pre-Socratic, I could say it in Greek but I don’t want to, as it’ll seem like showing-off à la Sloterdijk [= Peter Sloterdijk, philosophy professor and television personality]. The saying is: The non-suffering man doesn’t remain a child. That’s generally always translated: The man, who doesn’t suffer, isn’t educated. I translate it like this: The non-suffering man doesn’t remain a child. Alec Guinness is right: One is always a fake. One plays the role of the doer, the grown-up, the writer, the public personality…

Hmm. A quick Google reveals that it’s not a Pre-Socratic philosopher but a fragment from Menander (422, according to one internet site): Ὁ μὴ δαρεὶς ἄνθρωπος οὐ παιδεύεται (with apologies for the dodgy font). This was used (in the original Greek, but without attribution) by Goethe as the epigram for his autobiographical work Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit, and is clearly concerned with corporal punishment in school rather than suffering more generally: anyone who hasn’t been beaten won’t be educated.

As for Handke’s translation and interpretation, I can’t quite make sense of it, and not just because of his shift from ‘punishment’ or ‘beating’ to ‘suffering’ in a more general and abstract sense. Has he simply got too many negatives? The idea of a shift from “Anyone who doesn’t suffer doesn’t grow up” to “Anyone who doesn’t suffer remains a child” makes a sort of sense, refiguring ‘education’ as the process of compelling children to cease to be children, and getting away from the idea that suffering is somehow ennobling and character-building. But how does “Anyone who doesn’t suffer doesn’t remain a child” work? If you do suffer, you do remain a child? Or, an adult is someone who has ceased to feel (and hence suffer) in the way that a child does, so that someone who is still able to suffer has managed to remain a child? And how exactly does that connect to the line from Alec Guinness, that then allows the conversation to continue without further interrogation of the quote?

Any suggestions gratefully received…