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Dear Sirs,
As Dr Yorke's recent paper in the International Review has informed your readers, I have been engaged to do a revised second edition of the Standard Edition of Freud's works. This not only incorporates the emendations listed in Volume 24 of the first edition of that work, but also takes note of various criticisms of Strachey's translation that have been published in your journals and elsewhere.
Although reluctant to enter the debate on how best to translate Freud, I think it may interest your readers (and give Strachey's critics pause for thought) if you will permit me to give one instance of what seems, at first, to be a mistranslation, but which proves to be another of Strachey's master-strokes.
In her excellent bilingual edition of the 'Original Record' of the Rat Man case, Madame Hawelka asserts (Hawelka, 1974, p. 125, note 224) that Strachey had read Kopf (head) instead of Knopf (button), as is quite clearly so in the manuscript. This puzzled me a good deal. How could Strachey translate the father's remark 'der Knopf wird dir schon aufgehen' as 'You'll get things into your head one day'? (Standard Ed., 10: 272). Then serendipity came to my rescue. As so often, Freud is lapsing into dialect. The colloquial expression 'der Knopf geht ihm auf' means, I find, 'At last he understands/The penny has dropped'. A few lines earlier the Rat Man refers to his wanting to bore a hole into his head and Freud suggests 'The Nuremberg funnel?' The funnel (Trichter) was not only a medieval torture of forcing water down the victim's throat, but was also, as Strachey later pointed out, humorously used to mean 'the royal road to learning'.
Far from mistranslating, Strachey, I suggest, has here again shown his genius as a translator.
Yours sincerely