A subtle but important difference.Bloomfield wrote:Googling suggest this Winnicott quote:
It is a joy to be hidden, but it is a disaster not to be found.
That "to be hidden" is tricky to translate because it is ambiguous between "being hidden through the efforts of another" and "the state of being concealed." In German, those would be expressed differently.
If the latter is right, here's how I'd render it in German:
Verborgen zu sein ist eine Freude, doch nicht gefunden zu werden eine Katastrophe.
I came across that Winnicott quote some years ago, but I remember it as, " . . ., but disaster not to be found" (as opposed to "a disaster . . ."), which is also a subtle but somehow important difference. I hear the former version as stronger than the latter, even though there's only one letter absent; the difference between a sort of lifelong disaster and a single disastrous event (I may be weird in seeing this difference, I realize). Would that subtle change affect the German rendering, at all?
(A quick Googling to see which version is right turns out to be no help at all, with at least three or four variations of Winnicott's phrase floating around out there:
"...but it is a disaster"
"...but it is disaster"
"...but a disaster"
"...but disaster"
are all out there.)
