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Lost in Translation: Heidegger and Ski Jumping in Slovenia

100%

Kreft L.

Physical Culture and Sport. Studies and Research

2010

vol. 49

issue 1

13-20

Heidegger developed his non-concept Gelassenheit after World War II. Its meaning remains uncertain and controversial, something different from notions of everyday conversation. In Slovene, however, it has been translated as sproščenost, which is parallel to English ‘relaxedness’, thus producing hybridity between notions of relaxedness, relaxation and releasement, which is, together with letting-go, a proper English translation of Gelassenheit.This hybridity was (ab)used for political slogans during the 2004 elections, when Heidegger's term was repeated on and on, until it entered popular discourse as well as other domains such as the economy, culture, and media. This phenomenon was examined by Boris Vezjak in The Relaxed Ideology of Slovenes (The Peace Institute, Ljubljana 2007). Relaxedness-releasement entered sport jargon as well, but Vezjak's book did not cover this field. At first abundant, this term more or less disappeared later. With one exception: in ski jumping, where it became one of the main words used to explain what was missing from Slovenian ski jumping during 2004-2009 period. In Slovenia, ski jumping is a national sport, and the absence of excellence during this long period created additional pressures on athletes and the whole ski jumping commonwealth.To examine the numerous cases where releasement was used to explain what is wrong with ski jumpers, or what they finally achieved in rare examples of success during that period, the only Slovene sport daily, "Ekipa" (The Team), was consulted for research. This study revealed that releasement was indeed lost in translation, appearing in ads as a signifier without any certain signified, and functioning as a je-ne-sais-quoi of sport performance and excellence. Through cases of repeated use of releasement as mystical and at the same time scientific (instead of relaxation) and colloquial notion (which is relaxedness, even carelessness), we get at inoculation of kinesiological mechanicism and psychological technique with philosophical mysticism.

Hook to the Chin

100%

Kreft L.

Physical Culture and Sport. Studies and Research

2009

vol. 46

issue 1

70-78

Within historical avant-garde movements from the beginning of the 20th century, a curious taste and fascination for boxing burst out, and developed later into the claim that art must become more similar to boxing, or to sport in general. This fascination with pugilism in the early stage of its popularity on the continent included such charismatic figures of the Parisian avant-garde as Arthur Cravan, who was Oscar Wilde's nephew, a pretty good boxer and an unpredictable organizer of proto-dada outrages and scandals.After WWI, the zenith of artists' and intellectuals' love for boxing was reached in Weimar Germany. One of the well known examples connecting boxing with art was Bertolt Brecht with his statement that we need more good sport in theatre. His and other German avant-garde artists' admiration for boxing included the German boxing star May Schmeling, who was, at least until he lost his defending championship match against Joe Louis, an icon of the Nazis as well. Quite contrary to some later approaches in philosophy of sport, which compared sport with an elite art institution, Brecht's fascination with boxing took its anti-elitist and anti-institutional capacities as an example for art's renewal.To examine why and how Brecht included boxing in his theatre and his theory of theatre, we have to take into account two pairs of phenomena: sport vs. physical culture, and avant-garde theatre vs. bourgeois drama. At the same time, it is important to notice that sport, as something of Anglo-Saxon origin, and especially boxing, which became popular on the European continent in its American version, were admired by Brecht and by other avant-garde artists for their masculine power and energy. The energy in theatre, however, was needed to disrupt its cheap fictionality and introduce dialectical imagination of Verfremdungseffect (V-effect, or distancing effect). This was "a hook to the chin" of institutionalized art and of collective disciplinary morality of German tradition.

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Lost in Translation: Heidegger and Ski Jumping in Slovenia

Hook to the Chin