The quote, “Tradition ist die Weitergabe des Feuers und nicht die Anbetung der Asche” — is often falsely attributed to Gustav Mahler (1860–1911).^[1] Sometimes other spurious attributions are given: to Benjamin Franklin, Ricarda Huch, and to Pope John XXIII. In the sparse legend of Mahler’s transmission, he was only offering a German paraphrase of a line in English by Sir Thomas More (1478–1535): “Tradition is not to preserve the ashes but to pass on the flame.” This detail would appear to give more credence to Mahler’s role, but regardless, the attribution to More is mistaken; nothing of the kind was written by him. However, that the line was said to be someone’s paraphrase of someone else — in another language — does suggests that the phrase was already “in the air” of literary culture.

A similar statement, albeit in French, was recorded by a French socialist leader and anti-war activist in speeches given before the Chamber of Deputies of the French parliament in Paris on the 10th and 24th of January 1910 (several years after Mahler’s death): “Messieurs, oui, nous avons, nous aussi, le culte du passé. Ce n’est pas en vain que tous les foyers des générations humaines ont flambé, ont rayonné ; mais c’est nous, parce que nous marchons, parce que nous luttons pour un idéal nouveau, c’est nous qui sommes les vrais héritiers du foyer des aïeux; nous en avons pris la flamme, vous n’en avez gardé que la cendre.” —Jean Jaurès (1859–1914).^[2] In English, “Gentlemen, yes, we too have a cult of the past. It is not in vain that all the hearths of human generations have blazed, have shone; but it is we, because we march, because we fight for a new ideal, it is we who are the true heirs of the hearth of the forefathers; we have taken the flame, you have kept only the ashes.”

This is all well and good but from where did Jaurès inherit this turn of phrase? Where did the quote actually originate?

The quote began its life with lines by Sir John Denham (1615–1669). Far removed from Jaurès’s political declaration, Denham’s statement concerned the activity of translation: “A new and nobler way thou dost pursue / To make translations, and translators too; / They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame, / True to his sense, but truer to his fame” (in a preface to a translation of Il Pastor Fido by Giovanni Battista Guarini, 1647). Rather than an admonition against elevating “tradition” as a ruin to be romanced for its own sake, the line originated as an exhortation against overly literal translations. (Learning this was particularly touching after searching for the origin of a quote through four hundred years of German, French, and English translations, paraphrases, and paraphrasings of translations, and whose original language was unknown!)

Denham’s lines were, in turn, quoted by John Dryden (1630-1700) in his Preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680), as explicated by “Mark” (a Zitate-online forum contributor) in an erudite response offered back in 2010:

In his first discussion of translation, Dryden indicates but does not explicitly acknowledge the impact Denham had on him. Several times he refers to Denham’s theories, twice quoting from him at some length. The first quotation comes as he reiterates the Horatian[ref]In the style of the Roman lyric poet Horace (65-8 BCE) warning against word for word translation: ‘Too faithfully is indeed pedantically: ’tis a faith like that which proceeds from Superstition, blind and zealous: Take it in the Expression of Sir John Denham, to Sir Rich. Fanshaw, on his Version of Pastor Fido.’ He then quotes the relevant lines from Denham’s poem:

That servile path, thou nobly do’st decline,
Of tracing word by word and Line by Line;
A new and nobler way thou do’st pursue,
To make Translations and Translators too:
They but preserve the Ashes, thou the Flame,
True to his Sense, but truer to his Fame. (1:115)

In 2017, Gerald Krieghofer attempted to disentangle the threads leading to the misattribution to Mahler. The error can be traced back to a statement in 1992 by the Austrian theater and opera director and actor, Nikolaus Bachler, who had then been recently appointed director of the Vienna Festival. Krieghofer writes in Wiener Zeitung [translated from German]:

Before 1910, there is no version of this metaphor in English, French, German or Italian. Only decades after Jean Jaurès coined it was it falsely attributed to Benjamin Franklin or Thomas More – always without an exact source being given.

How did Gustav Mahler get the honor of this quote? The Austrian singer, television presenter and cabaret artist Herbert Prikopa wrote in 1999: “In an interview in May 1992, [Vienna Festival director] Klaus Bachler had already quoted a wonderful sentence by Gustav Mahler: ‚Tradition ist Weitergabe des Feuers ohne Anbetung der Asche’ [‘Tradition is the passing on of the fire without worshipping the ashes’].” Before 1990, our quote was never attributed to Gustav Mahler (according to searches on Google Books, in newspaper archives and at research centers), but in the German-speaking world (except correctly: Jaurès) it was often attributed to Pope John XXIII. The quote could therefore have been mistakenly attributed to Gustav Mahler via a misremembered, misattributed papal quote in an interview; Gustav Mahler perhaps also because his name has long been associated with a sarcastic saying about tradition: “Tradition ist Schlamperei” [“Tradition is a mess”]. His stage designer Roller reproduced Gustav Mahler’s statement in 1920 in a somewhat more differentiated way: “Was Ihr Theaterleute Eure Tradition nennt, das ist Eure Bequemlichkeit und Schlamperei.” [“What you theater people call your tradition is your laziness and sloppiness”].

Mahler’s point on the messiness of Tradition is shown true where a quote, misattributed to him, becomes the familiar one, reified by a legion of Internet meme-ifiers and copyists attracted more to the profundity of its message than the accuracy of its origin.

1. If Mahler did say or write this somewhere, then that source has yet to be discovered. If you do have actual evidence of this quote offered by Mahler, please leave a comment or contact me.[↩]
2. Find Jean Jaurès, “Pour la Laïque (Prononcé les 10 et 24 Janvier 1910 à la Chambre des Députés)” (1910). This reference comes, with gratitude, from this 2020 post [in French] — « La tradition n’est pas le culte des cendres, mais la préservation du feu », and from this 2017 post [in German] by Gerald Krieghofer — “Tradition ist die Weitergabe des Feuers und nicht die Anbetung der Asche.“ Gustav Mahler (angeblich)[↩]

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

• View all posts by Aharon N. Varady →
• website
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+

“On the origin of the popular quotation, “Tradition is not to preserve the ashes, but to pass on the flame.”” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.