part of
Everything Public Domain Foreign Language Translations Project
Translation of
Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden
About gradual producing of the thoughts when talking
Heinrich of Kleist (1805)
If you want to know something and cannot find it by meditation, then I advise you ,my dear and ingenious friend, to speak with the next acquaintance you meet, about it.
It does not even need to be a sharp-thinking person, also I do not mean it in such a way, as if you should ask him therefore: no! Rather you
should first tell it to him. I see you making large eyes, and answer to me, one gave you in former years the advice to speak of nothing as only from things, which you
already understand. At that time however you probably spoke to educate other people , I want you to speak from the reasonable intention of instructing yourself
and so , for different cases differently, both intelligence rules can perhaps exist well next to each other. The Frenchman says, l'appétit vient en mangeant, and this
experience record remains true, if one parodies it, and says, l'idee vient en parlant.
Often I sit at my business desk over the documents, and investigate, in a complicated litigious matter, from which criterion it would perhaps be liked to be
judged. I tend to see in the light then, being the brightest point, in the effort, on which my mind is struggling, to be cleared up. Or I look up,
if an algebraic function has to be solved, which first beginning, which equation that expresses given conditions, and from which the dissolution arises afterwards as a
result of calculation easily. And see there, if I talk with my sister about it, who sits behind me and works, then I find out, what I would not have brought by
breeding perhaps for hours. Not, as if she said it to me, in the actual sense ; she knows neither the law book, nor has she studied the Euler, or the Kaestner. Also she didn't
led me by skillful questions to the important point, altough the latter may be already frequently the case.
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This is the end for now. It is only a short part of the text. I tried to translate this, but I don't think it is readable or anything near english. /msg me