Siddhartha

8342 mal gelesen

(C) WikipediaIm Jahr 2000 bat das Project Gutenberg in seiner Mailingliste um ein besonderes Buch: Die Erstausgabe von Hermann Hesses Siddhartha. Von dem Werk sollte zur Feier des 2500. EBooks des Projekts eine eigene Übersetzung angefertigt werden. Dazu sollte der deutsche Text als EBook 2499 publiziert werden. Hier der Aufruf:

> Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 07:42:26 -0600 (CST)
> From: „Michael S. Hart“ <hart@prairienet.org>
> To: Mike Pullen <globaltraveler5565@yahoo.com>
> CC: „Michael S. Hart“ <hart@pobox.com>
> Subject: Siddhartha
>
>
> Hi. . .I just reread Siddhartha over the weekend. . . .
>
> I think it is a great story, and it is very short.
>
> Would you please ask the members of the German Team
> if any of them would be interested in helping create
> a German Etext of the original 1922 edition, which
> I presume was in German, and I hope we can start
> on an English edition of our own, perhaps as a
> team translation. . .given the litigiousness of
> our era, I think we should create a list of the
> German >> English Dictionaries we use, and which
> were used for what chapter. . .that way I have an
> instant answer to any hassles we might get from the
> holders of the copyright for the popular
> English translation.
>
>
> Please forward this to the members of the German Team,
> and, please also remind me in a week or two to include
> a request for more volunteers for this effort
> in the Newsletter. . . .
> Yours. . .from Romania,
>
> Michael

Die Originalausgabe des Fischer-Verlags aus dem Jahr 1922 fand ich am 20 Januar 2000 in der Universitätsbibliothek Birmingham, wo ich gerade mein Auslandsjahr erleben durfte: http://findit.bham.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?docId=44BIR_TALIS_DS1230431

Nachdem ich das Werk ausgeliehen und in vielen Stunden mit einem alten Parallelportscanner digitalisiert hatte, konnte ich dann die zentrale Anlaufstelle für das EBook-Projekt eröffnen. Welche technischen Probleme es dabei damals noch gab, macht diese Passage klar:

As far as setting up some Grand Central Station for Siddhartha… we could also take advantage of Yahoo’s free 3 MB of space on their free homepages…

oder

I can also access stuff with my 56K modem, as well, it’s just
like drinking a malt shake with a cocktail straw.

Im PG-Newsletter vom 2. Feb. 2000 hieß es dazu:

The Project Gutenberg German team has taken on a
significant translation effort.  Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha
has cleared the copyright boundary and we are converting
the 1922 edition in the original German.  This work will be
finished shortly and will become available for proofreading
soon.

But the really exciting part is the flipside translation
into English of this book.  Yes, we know it has already
been translated, but those publishers hold very recent
copyrights to the English portions that won’t be released
for a long time.  So we will do our own translation!

We need your assistance to get this done.  We have
established a web page to manage this work-in-progress.
Volunteers are asked to check in with us for an assignment
so we know who is working on what and not overly duplicate
efforts.  Assignments run two pages at a time.  Contact
Stefan Langer (sl99@gmx.de), Amy Coulter
(acoulter@teleport.com) or myself
(globaltraveler5565@yahoo.com) for details and to get
started.

You can preview the work already done by using your web
browser to go to the web page
http://www.fortunecity.de/lindenpark/wallhalla/245/hesse/translation.htm

We look forward to working with you on this!  This will be
fun indeed!!

Mike Pullen

Leider gab es dann doch Rückschläge:

> We simply do not have
> enough volunteers. I just received three or four pages up
> to now, with the
> project two months running. I’m on the brink to declare
> the project as
> „dead“. – Sorry!

Dennoch schaffte es Mike Pullen, neue Übersetzer zu organisieren, und so können wir nun mit stolzgeschwellter Brust folgendes präsentieren:

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