Back in March, an encounter with the Taishо̄-era mountaineer Kitagawa Jun’ichirо̄ on Shikoku’s Ishizuchi-san left me with a problem. Where to find a good English version of a half-forgotten essay on alpine aesthetics that Kitagawa-sensei once translated from the original German into Japanese?
I did think of buying my own copy of this weighty tome (0.7 kg) but Amazon’s asking price was a hefty £118 or about 130 Swiss francs. Oof! And the one review on Mr Bezos’s online emporium was far from compelling:
Useless, self-complacent and boring: A useless book. Written for a cultured and self-complacent elite in their culture. A bad copy of Mountains of the Mind by McFarlane (sic). An anthological collection of boring texts not so much because they are ancient but because they are not inserted in a general narrative context that speaks more specifically about the mountains. In this work it is not so much the mountain that is at the center of the topic, but the literary virtuosity on the subject. (Translated from the Italian by Amazon)
Again, oof! But is it really fair to compare a sourcebook of translations from various authors with Robert Macfarlane’s scholarly yet readable Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination? Which is best described as a highly personal account of how the Brits and a sprinkling of other Europeans changed their minds about mountains between the middle ages and the present.
In a way, the reviewer does have a point. Macfarlane’s masterpiece may have started out as a doctoral thesis, yet it was so well re-imagined and recast that it now regales a popular readership from the shelves of the world’s airport bookshops.
By contrast, Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner, 1541–2009 is a collection of thirteen translated texts spanning nearly five centuries of the German-speaking peoples’ engagement with mountains. Together these essays show how mountains have served as sites of scientific inquiry, aesthetic reflection and nationalist ideology. And, moving into our own times, as amphitheatres of self-validation and promotion.
Many of the texts included have either never been translated into English before or have not been available in modern editions. Each set of essays is preceded by a short but useful translator's introduction that gives the historical and literary context.
The time frame too is well chosen. The first translated author is the Zurich-based polymath Conrad Gessner (1516-65), whose writings about Mt. Pilatus give the lie to the myth that mountains were neglected as a subject for study and enjoyment before the eighteenth century. He’s been translated before, but this lively new version helps to reveal that Gessner was the true originator of “Type Two fun”:
“But walking itself and weariness are unpleasant; there is also danger in the difficulty of high places and precipitous drops; the comforts of food and bed are wanting.” Say all this is so, but it will be a joy afterward to remember these labors and risks, and to turn these things over in the mind and recount them to friends.
And so we proceed via Johan Jakob Scheuchzer’s “Natural History of Switzerland” (1716) to travel diaries by Sophie von La Roche (1787) and G W F Hegel (1796), and so to Alexander von Humboldt (1802) and Hermann von Barth, the pioneer of the Karwendel range (1874).
And then to the above-mentioned Georg Simmel (1895 and 1911), who may never have climbed any mountains but was able to sum up at least a century’s worth of thinking about them. On the way through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mountains morph before our eyes into objects of the Romantic sublime on the one hand, and into “vertical laboratories” for the academicians on the other.
Moving into the twentieth century, the editors’ selection of texts begins to raise some questions. Eduard Pichl’s “Autobiographical Sketch” (1914) and “The Alpine Association and German Purity” (1923) are surely a logical place to start an overview of this troubled era – at the least, these essays show where the rot set in.
But one could ask whether Leni Riefenstahl’s “Struggle in Snow and Ice” (1933) sheds light on anything much except Riefenstahl’s alpine-sized ego. Deeper insights into that dangerous nexus of nationalism and mountaineering might have been drawn from the writings of Paul Bauer or Luis Trenker, neither of whom makes the cut here. Even without these figures, though, the editors adequately document the era they lived in.
Standing in for the postwar period is Reinhold Messner, who has published his own idea of what a mountain anthology should include. His essay “Westwall: The Abyss Principle” (2009) records a climb on a rapidly disintegrating face of the Ortler. This essay too is well chosen: at times, Messner could be speaking for almost any contemporary alpine climber:
The light of the high afternoon sun briefly light up the ice wall above me and my fear increases. Global warming and a strong solar radiation – it’s hard to stomach! If I could only pass on this experience! But what good would it do to convince people that the glaciers are dwindling? They are not afraid….
As the Amazon reviewer suggests, Mountains and the German Mind is inevitably a heavier read than Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind. But then again, it was designed to be – here we have scholarly translations of the original texts rather than a synopsis. Readers are left to draw their own conclusions. Ideally, one should read both books – Macfarlane for a British viewpoint, Ireton and Schaumann's compilation for those of a different language and culture.
Speaking of which, English-speakers could benefit from similar collections selected from several other mountaineering cultures. If only such anthologies existed, they would broaden our horizons, just as Mountains and the German Mind undoubtedly will. What about France? Or Poland? Or Slovenia? Or - come to think of it - Italy?
I’m sorry that the Amazon reviewer was disappointed with her purchase – but one day might she consider providing us with a Mountains and the Italian Mind? If she does, Project Hyakumeizan looks forward to reviewing it here. And he promises to be sympathetic....
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