Friedrich Nietzsche, Aphorisms on Love and Hate, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehman (Penguin, 2015).
This volume, no. 5 in Penguin’s Little Black Classics series, collects passages from Human, All Too Human (1878). I think what this passage says holds true for any relationship between partners.
In German:
Die Ehe als langes Gespräch. — Man soll sich beim Eingehen einer Ehe die Frage vorlegen: glaubst du, dich mit dieser Frau bis in's Alter hinein gut zu unterhalten? Alles Andere in der Ehe ist transitorisch, aber die meiste Zeit des Verkehrs gehört dem Gespräche an.DeepL: “Most of the time of intercourse belongs to conversation.”
Google Translate: “Most of the time spent in intercourse is devoted to conversation.”
The Penguin translation — “most of the time in interaction” — is less amusing. More idiomatic in English but not true to what Nietzsche wrote would be “most of the time together.”
comments: 2
I have to admit I like translations that retain ambiguity rather than picking one particular meaning (usually the simplest :) ). Obviously it's often not possible to capture the same range of meanings with a single original word in language A has, when rendering it in languages B, C and so on - it's a hard job. But as I understand it here, German Verkehrs can indeed indicate both interaction and intercourse (and indeed traffic), and intercourse in English has a very wide range of shades from chatter to intimacy, so to lose all those extra dimensions by focusing on "interaction" seems disappointing. But hey, different people have different goals in mind when it comes to translation, and my personal preference is to open up possibilities rather than narrow them down. It's never an easy choice, I think.
To my ear, “interaction” sounds too clinical for a relationship, and “intercourse,” in 2025 (or in 2015), sounds too much like a joke in this context. “Spending time together” sounds to me like a pretty capacious way to describe what people do in a relationship.
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