On Translating – and Being Turned On By – Gustav Fechner

In this paper, I reflect upon my experience translating the mystically-inspired book Nanna, Or On the Soul-Life of Plant by the 19th century German thinker Gustav Fechner. Though Paul Ricœur describes translation as an openness to the other, a practice of extending “linguistic hospitality,” I recount my translation experience as one of seizure by the other in a way that blurred the boundaries between 1848 and 2024, plant and human, Gustav and me. And because language is formed in the body, translation meant embodied occupation; in short: my experience of translation is a fleshy and fully erotic affair. More fundamentally, I will share how what seized my body, through the text of Nanna, was the same thing that seized Fechner to write it —the ever-reaching plant soul, breaking through matter into mind and mind into matter, spiraling ever outward, encircling everything in its indiscriminate green grasp. I'll reflect on what is at stake for scholars translating texts inspired by mystical experiences, and how translation itself can be considered an ecstatic practice.

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His vision haunts my periphery like the faint hue that lingers after staring into a bright light. I see it, sometimes, reflected in the dark gloss of a snake plant. I see – no, feel – it in the hidden force that unfurls an orchid, that unceasing spirit that compels each flower. And on days of abyssal aloneness, when at once I am seized by an inexplicable kinship with oaks, I feel how he was too, and recall that this seizure became his survival.

After years of blindness, Gustav Fechner suddenly saw it everywhere – call it mind, call it soul – and what he saw healed his sight.

So began an essay on Gustav Fechner I emailed Jeff Kripal last year.

“Publish it.” He responded. “You seem to relate to him on a psychospiritual level.”

“Is my affection that obvious?” I replied, somewhat emberassed but unsure why. After all, are scholars allowed to be emotionally involved with historical subjects, now long-dead?

I had spent the greater part of eight months translating Fechner’s untranslated book Nanna, Or On the Soul-Life of Plants from German to English. I awoke with his words in my mouth like marbles; I fell asleep with his books ascance on my bed. In Nanna, Fechner champions the idea, unpopular then as now, that plants have souls – that they are self-experiencing beings with feelings and desires. Plants delight in the sun as we might delight in a wholesome meal. The world strikes them with pleasure, pain, and even meaning, just as it does us humans. But he could only write this book, he reveals, after a mystical experience one October day when the souls of plants revealed themselves to him in his Leipzig garden, healing the then-blind man’s sight. 

I could tell you I began translating Nanna because I am interested in reviving forgotten ancestors within Western intellectual history who defend the aliveness, agency, and consciousness of more-than-human beings. I could tell you that I co-lead an initiative on “Thinking with Plants and Fungi” at Harvard. I could tell you I am interested in the ways Fechner pre-empted the current “plant neurobiology” movement that argues that plants have minds even if they don’t have “brains.” I could tell you I am interested in the ethical possibilities of Fechner’s sweeping cosmic pantheism. And all of this is true.

But really, if I am honest, I began translating – and kept translating – because I was posessed by Fechner, enamored, beholden. I felt at times that the plant soul that seized him had rooted in me, pushing its fleshy meristems up out through my mouth, wanting to overtake my English tongue like a wild garden.

Paul Ricoeur describes translation as a practice of linguistic hospitality, a mediation between guest and host languages. This implies a polite and functional diplomacy, a retaining of boundaries between self and other, translator and original author. But the more I read Fechner, and the more I translated him, the less I could distinguish between his experience and mine. Was this his voice in my throat? His eyes in my skull? 

In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Cason says, “eros is an issue of boundaries” – maybe translation is too. Trans- after all, means to go across, beyond – sharing a root with words we understand to imply some metamorphosis of subjectivity: transcendence, transformation, transfiguration. In translating a book rooted in transcendence, I was doubly crossed over, turned around, implicated. 

In my paper, I'll share my personal experience of translation to reflect more deeply on how the practice of translation blurs the boundary between subject-object in a way that resonates with ecstatic practices, and what is at stake for scholars who find themselves in translation's unforgiving throes.