Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann is a Subpar Translation

First and foremost, I would like to thank my German teacher for gifting me this book! I’m really grateful for your kindness and mentorship, and I look forward to discussing the story in-depth with you!

Long before I began to review books, I had heard stories of Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, the two main characters of Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Measuring the World. I first became aware of the naturalist first at a German-immersion summer camp, where counselors portraying him and his partner Aimé Bonpland described the different parts of a tree to a crowd of curious English-speakers. The mathematician, meanwhile, was a recurring figure in the anecdotes of my father, whose dissertation determined the invertibility of Gauss maps and whose valiant efforts helped me survive the Wisconsin public school math curriculum. As my Algebra 2 teacher introduced the concept of summation, a classmate and I compared different versions of the Gauss Anecdote behind our school-issued chromebooks. And most recently, English writer Andrea Wulf’s Humboldt biography The Invention of Nature became one of my favorite nonfiction books. 

It’s not surprising that Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann chose the contemporaries as subjects for his novel: both Gauss and Humboldt were giants in their fields, and their lives contain many intriguing parallels and intersections. Measuring the World begins at the 1828 German Scientific Congress, where the world-renowned scientists first meet. Both exhibit exceptional intelligence and unselfconscious arrogance, but while Gauss uses his mathematical precocity to escape the fate of his peasant father, Humboldt grows up in a castle, overshadowed by a seemingly-angelic older brother but tutored by the brightest minds of the Enlightenment. On his famous expedition to South America, Humboldt navigates the Orinoco river and climbs Mount Chimborazo in the name of scientific discovery. Gauss stays in Göttigen and performs calculations which revolutionize human understanding of the universe. The mathematician visits prostitutes, marries twice and sires several children, while the explorer remains a confirmed bachelor. Both rise to international prominence during the tumultuous decades of the early 19th century, and both have succeeded in “measuring the world” in vastly different ways.

“[Gauss] had been sent into the world with an intellect that rendered almost everything human impossible, in a time when every task was hard, exhausting, and dirty. God had tried to make fun of him” (82)

Measuring the World is the story of two geniuses, and it is perhaps inevitable that the novel reckons with the nature of genius itself. 21st-century media worships a certain type of masculine genius: despite belittling and rejecting the people around them, figures like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Gregory House are beloved by millions of viewers for their intuition and unshakable confidence. I’m guilty of this worship too; books like Logicomix and The Invention of Love, which examine the lives of “irritable geniuses” through a fictional lens, are among my favorites, and although I didn’t care much for Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle I read all 2100 pages of it because I loved its portrayal of Isaac Newton. These characters are not popular because they’re unkind, but because they are convinced of their own exceptionality and because the narrative almost always proves them right.

But Gauss and Humboldt are wrong. Often. The former tries to poison himself by ingesting curare, which is not deadly when consumed, while the latter subscribes to contemporary ideas about ether and phlostigen even as he confidently disproves the theory of Neptunism and founds the discipline of Environmental Science. The scientists’ personalities also comment on the portrayal of geniuses. Gauss experiences revolutionary epiphanies from an early age and berates his son Eugen for perceived mediocrities, but he is far from romanticised—the narration clings so tightly to his perspective that readers are familiar with his lusts and his toothaches. Humboldt, meanwhile, lets his actions speak for him and remains quasi-mythic as his reputation swallows him whole. In one of my favorite chapters his companion Bonpland narrates the adventures of the indefatigable “Baron Humboldt,” who, the consummate explorer, braves bees and altitude sickness to scale Chimborazo. Shutting off interior distractions like discomfort, fear and lust—at first I thought he was a grumpy asexual like myself—allows Humboldt to travel the world unencumbered and become “the Second Columbus.”

Luckily this “Second Columbus” does not attempt to duplicate the reprehensible actions of his predecessor. Nor does Kehlmann try particularly hard to characterize black and native characters beyond sex objects or superstitious guides, but perhaps this is due to Humboldt’s own singlemindedness. On his journey across South America the naturalist regards slavery, imperialism and the everyday violance of Spanish rule with patrician disgust, but does not crusade to end them. Both he and Gauss are nominally-liberal Enlightenment figures overwhelmed by a rising Romantic tide, which takes hold both of the former’s illustrious brother and the latter’s lackluster son. 

“Because of you I wanted to become a minster, because of me you had to conquer the highest mountain and the deepest caverns, for you I founded the greatest university, for me you discovered South America, and only fools who fail to understand the significance of a single life in double form would describe this as a rivalry” (228)

One of my favorite parts of this book was the interaction between the main characters and their families. I wanted to know more about Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander’s older brother, who achieved great fame as an educator and diplomat but maintained a cordial distance from his globetrotting sibling. The letter quoted above, written by the elder brother to the younger, appears late in the story and is absolutely beautiful, if brief. I wish Kehlmann had written a chapter from Wilhelm’s perspective as he did for Aimé Bonpland and Eugen Gauss. Seeing the story through these characters' eyes revealed Humboldt’s and Gauss’ blindspots and developed the world they inhabit.

I loved many things about Measuring the World, but the book itself ended up as only so-so. And I suspect none of it is Kehlmann’s fault.

Measuring the World is a translation, and not a very good one. Originally published as Die Vermessung der Welt in 2005, it was translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway the following year. Janeway’s translation sandwiches clauses into sentences like it’s packing a too-small suitcase, and while this syntactic style was acceptable in the original German the necessities of English translation leave the content in a half-transformed mutant state. Additionally, words and phrases are sometimes misplaced—”hand movement” where it should be “gesture,” “punctual” where it should be “timed,” and so on. Perhaps it needs a retranslation: I’m still learning German with the goal of being a translator one day, and I would enjoy visiting Die Vermessung der Welt as my command of the language improves. The other Kehlmann book on my shelf, Tyll, was translated by Ross Benjamin and nominated for the Booker International prize. It will be amusing to compare the two books and determine the extent to which Kehlmann is responsible for his own prose.

Nevertheless, I’m very grateful for Herr Wags’ generous gift and look forward to learning more about these two figures. I suspect they will remain in my consciousness for many years to come.