The Mediator Between The Head And The Hands Must Be The Heart

A Tribe Essay on Translation, "Metropolis" and Heart Space

I’ve been spending a lot of time with “Metropolis” lately - both with the 1927 film as well as the 1925 novel edition in its original German version (brushing off my 6 years of German studies in school!) and its English version. There is an epigraph at the beginning of the book from the author, Thea von Harbou, which says a lot about the nature of the film. I was surprised to find that the original German epigraph wasn’t translated for the English novel in quite the way I would have expected. In German, it reads:

Dieses Buch ist kein Gegenwartsbild. Dieses Buch ist kein Zukunftsbild. Dieses Buch spielt nirgendwo. Dieses Buch dient keiner Tendenz, keiner Klasse, keiner Partei. Die­ses Buch ist ein Geschehen, das sich um eine Erkennt­nis rankt: Mittler zwischen Hirn und Händen muß das Herz sein.

The English version of the novel translated it as such:

This book is not of today or of the future.

It tells of no place.

It serves no cause, party or class.

It has a moral which grows on the pillar of understanding:

"The mediator between brain and muscle must be the heart."

I find this to be an… okay translation: It does get the meaning across, however it does feel slightly too derivative in some places (“It has a moral which grows on the pillar of understanding”), and perhaps too literal in others (“The mediator between brain and muscle”). I had a go at re-translating it myself, and came up with the following:

This book is not a picture of the present. This book is not a picture of the future. This book is not set anywhere we know. This book serves no political leaning, no class, no party.

This book tells of an event which grows around a realization - that the mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart.

To me, this is far closer literally to the German translation while still being enjoyable to read in English. For the last line, I went for an almost identical translation to the one used by the English version of the film - going with the literal translation of “hands” for “Händen”, but switching to “head” rather than the literal translation of “brain” for “Hirn”. While in context the meaning is pretty much identical, it allows the alliteration of the three H’s to be preserved in English, keeping this poetic element the original German line had that gives it a nice flow and ring when reading it.

Having an accurate translation of this last line is critical: it’s one of the most important lines in “Metropolis”, repeated by numerous characters at numerous points. The film in particular makes a big deal out of it, being the final line that the film ends on.

Today, I want to use this piece to talk about this very idea of heart space. It seems that the heart and its domain of “feeling” is being pushed aside in favour of focusing on purely the “thinking” and the “doing”, as it pertains to a broader context difficulties I see society currently grappling with. I’ll be pulling on some of the ideas from “Metropolis” in examining this, and hopefully show why it is that the mediator between the head and the hands really must be the heart.

And yes, some spoilers for Metropolis are involved. Seeing as the whole film is available for free online, it makes sense to watch it first if you haven’t already, then to continue on.