A Translator’s Perspective on Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar

Summary

Some of you may be familiar with Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Having Philip. But only if you are Bohemian. Or Moravian. That's the Czech translation of The Importance of Being Earnest. You can imagine the dilemma facing the translator: there isn't a Czech word with the twin meanings of “Earnest”—but there is a Czech expression “to have Philip” which means to be serious. It's a curious solution, but I have great sympathy with the translator. After all, a translator has to resolve all difficulties somehow: it isn't really possible to leave a gap. Which means, among other things, that a translator has to read the original very carefully and know precisely what's going on.

I’m going to comment on Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar from the perspective of translation, in the hope of casting light on two fundamental questions: why has it taken sixty years for a translation of this work to be available in English, and what was Brecht trying to do? Could his aims, or rather a negative perception of them by particular commentators, explain this delay? It should be borne in mind that the act of translating permeates this work in a variety of ways: Brecht translated Latin terms into German, which have now been translated into English, and there is also the historical translation from the conditions of ancient Rome to 1930s Germany (and to our time).

The novel features a narrator who journeys to the home of Caesar's former banker, Spicer, twenty years after Caesar's death in the hope of obtaining a diary kept by Caesar's secretary slave, Rarus: the narrator wants to write a biography of his idol, the “great man.” The majority of the novel consists of extracts from this diary, framed by sections “in the present” in which Spicer provides the narrator with explanations of the period covered by the diaries, and there are brief conversations between the narrator and individuals who also knew Caesar: a former legionary, a lawyer, and a poet.

At one part of his diary Rarus describes a mob attacking Caesar's house (he always refers to Caesar as “C”):

In the darkness I shove C. behind a filing cabinet. Then they’re inside the room, waving storm lanterns from the atrium … They kick the amphora over, and it smashes. Then they push the filing cabinet to one side.