The folks at Perlentaucher have launched a new English language Web site: Sign and Sight. I guess this is supposed to be a clever play on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. The editors outline the mission of the new serivice in their manifesto:
It is time to break away from this fixed gaze, give
our necks a massage and focus on our own strengths. Germany for example
has the best feuilletons in the world! They not only reflect a unique
cultural landscape with first-class opera houses and museums in every
medium-sized city, they also offer also a unique forum for debate. Not
just cultural but also political and social debate takes place in these
pages. Demographers write about shrinking cities, medics about
biological ethics, Jeremy Rifkin on Europe and Gilles Kepel and Bernard
Lewis on Islam.(…)
Little
is known of all this outside of Germany, because the German language
has the status of a modern-day ancient Greek, and few people speak it
abroad. Isn’t it time to translate some of it into English? For the
benefit of Europe, and of course for China, Russia, India, Burkina Faso
and the USA?The sphere of public debate is becoming
increasingly international. Le Monde diplomatique is certainly at the
vanguard with its many spin-offs. Another upmarket example is the Lettre International, which appears in numerous European cities, and
promotes international cultural awareness with its Lettre Ulysses Award
for literary reporting. Eurozine uses the Internet to present English,
German, and French translations of cultural magazines from every
country. signandsight.com will present English translations of the
German-language feuilletons. Regional differences need the idiom of
globalisation to articulate themselves.
What is interesting is that Perlentaucher received € 1.4 million in federal funding from the Kulturstiftung des Bundes – an amazing sum for an online jounalistic venture (yes, I am very jealous). The question is, will this quasi-government endorsement impact the editorial integrity of the site? Heinrich Wefing also sounds a note of warning in the FAZ:
Der „Perlentaucher” und sein neuer
englischer Dienst jedenfalls werden gut daran tun, die inhaltliche
Distanz zu ihren institutionellen Förderern strikt einzuhalten. Und es
kann gewiß nicht schaden, wenn sie – ähnlich wie andere öffentlich
geförderte Institutionen, die sich seit jeher um die Vermittlung
deutscher Kultur im Ausland kümmern – möglichst unabweisbare Kriterien
für ihre täglichen Auswahlentscheidungen entwickeln.
Yes, some skepticism is certainly warranted, but this new forum for bringing German-language ideas and literature to the English-speaking world should be celebrated.
