Shengren – Chapter 3.6 – Die Sage (Folk Legend and Rumor)

Das deutsche Wort ‘Sage’ lässt sich im Grunde nicht übersetzen. Im Unterschied zu englisch ‚legend‘ betont es die mündliche Űberlieferung, das was ‚gesagt‘ wird.[1] [The German word ‘Sage’ in reality cannot be translated. Unlike English, ‘legend’ it emphasizes the oral tradition, that what is ‘said’.]

– Lutz Röhrich, Sage

The German accumulatio “Sagen, Lieder und Märchen” (Legends, songs, fairy-tales) referred to all literature that belonged to the realms of folktale, mythology and fiction. Such stories could be moral tales or legends or mystified historical accounts about the endurance, age, and immortality of kingdoms and the deeds of its heroes, for example the Walhalla Sage, the Nibelungenlied, or Grimm’s Märchen. A “Sage” was not a person in the German literature, but a genre (Gattung). In Heinz Rölleke’s Das Grosse Deutsche Sagenbuch (1996) the following translations/synonyms for German “Sage” were enlisted: “folk legend (English), legend populaire, cuento popular (Spanish), legenda, mif, predanije (Russian)”; likewise the Oxford Duden (1990) read: “Sage (f), Sagen; legend (altnordische); es geht die Sage, dass [legend has it that] (=Gerücht); rumor has it that…”. Since its meaning was close to the English word ‘legend’, the use of the German word “Sage” synonymous with “a wise man” was non-sensual.

But just because “Sage” was a ‘legend’ and not a person, that did not change the etymological fact that both the German “Sage” and the English “sage” originated from or bore reference to Latin sapientia [wisdom]. The original meaning of terminologies often alter significantly over the ages, and in Germany, the word “Sage” fulfilled now the meaning of legend, while “der Weise” [from wisdom] was used to convey – at least colloquially – what the English meant by “the sage”.

There were a few exceptions to this: Wisdom was sometimes exclusively linked to the Oriental and the magical. Like the magical Oriental sages in children’s books such as Friedhelm Moser’s Jim Knopf und die sieben Weisen: eine philosophische Einführung in den lummerländischen Lokomotivismus (1996).

Other Oriental and magical sages were the Biblical Magi (also known as the Three Wise Men or Kings of the East: Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar) whom the philologist Albrecht Dieterich called Die Weisen aus dem Morgenlande (1901); or “Weise Frauen” (wise women = witches) and “Die weise Frau” (The wise woman = midwife, an archetype described in Ludwig Ettmüller’s Die weisen Frauen der Germanen (1859). As a general rule, if “Weise” did not apply to Orientals or other (at that time) magical personae, it was usually a pejorative. The Inquisition of the Catholic Church punished the “wise women” (witches, from the devil possessed) with torture and worse. Ever since, “wise women” were associated with witchcraft, for example in Die Vernichtung der weisen Frauen (1985) by Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger. The Germans negative attitude toward wisdom and people who carried that strange disease was all-consuming and tiresome, and the only excuse for any Weisen of getting away with his wisdom was that he was also an Oriental at the same time. That explained why the story of the Nathan der Weise (1779) by the German Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was never controversial for its Oriental (Jewish) Nathan. Only if those Oriental sages crossed too much territory, for example when they infiltrated Christianity as the Weisen aus dem Morgenland,[2] the Germans usually cancelled out the un-German “Weisen”. All Christians in Germany say Heilige Drei Könige instead.[3] The Anti-Semitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903, original in Russian: Протоколы сионских мудрецов) in the German translation prominently featured “die Weisen”: Die Weisen von Zion (Friedrich, 1920; Rosenberg, 1933). The German text was later used by the Nazis to find legitimacy for the annihilation of the Jewish race. Here the common foreign language titles[4] of the book (the German one later added “Protokolle” to it, like the others):

Russian: Протоколы сионских мудрецов

English: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

German: Protokolle der Weisen von Zion

French: Protocols des Sages de Sion

Spanish: Los protocolos de los sabios de Sión

Chinese: 犹太人贤士议定书

Japanese: シオン賢者の議定書

The Russian original – a conspiracy about a Jewish world control – said мудрец or sage. So, the translators all needed to convey that meaning in their target languages. The Chinese and Japanese however, both coming from true sage cultures, did not translate sage 圣/聖sheng, but instead used 贤/賢xian: able and virtues persons. Forcing the East-Asians to translate “Die Weisen von Zion” as the “Shengren of Zion” would have been a similar act of terror than forcing the Germans to translate it “Die Philosophen of Zion”. That was because “Die Philosophen von Zion” would have sounded like a positive title for a negative book, while “Die Weisen von Zion” sounded just like that: a negative title for a negative book. The English, by the way, just like the Chinese and Japanese thought “sages” to be an inappropriately positive term and instead used the patriarchic “elders”. The Germans could of course use pejorative die Weisenfirst because the Jews were Orientals and second because the plotting Jews in that book were not exactly nice people.