Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
was clearly able to perceive that the first shocks were vertical, then however
with an indescribable movement they became horizontal.'”
125
The Swiss Commission thus set itself the task of bringing “the existing
macroseismic and the new microseismic observations into the closest pos-
sible relationship, to exploit them as reciprocally as possible.” using a meta-
phor of “interpreting” or “translating” between instruments and humans,
Swiss scientists pursued the question of “how in general objective and sub-
jective conclusions can be translated [
umgedeutet
] into one another.” The
metaphor of translation is revealing for what it did
not
imply: it was not a
matter of repackaging scientific conclusions for public consumption. In-
stead, in this nineteenth-century central European context, translation could
refer to a writer's capacity to mediate the relationship of man to nature in
an urbanizing world. As literary scholars note, this was the goal of the
Hei-
matkünstler,
the “homeland artist”: to make a “native literature” accessible to
a population removed from the land. As a form of
Landeskunde,
nineteenth-
century seismology likewise confronted this need for mediation.
126
Earth-
quake observing provided one key for translating between urban experi-
ences of the built environment and perceptions of elemental nature. What
might sound like furniture being rearranged in an upstairs apartment could
be recognized as a seismic tremor; a heavy wagon on pavement became
seismic thunder. As Schardt's correspondence confirms, this particular skill
of translation was highly valued by the late nineteenth-century inhabitants
of a small European city like Neuchâtel. It offered them a sense of connec-
tion: to the surrounding countryside, to the earth and its raw elements, to
the cosmos, and even to each other.
