In a translation, one language, and one particular user of that language, reads another.
Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
If I am reading Friedrich Hölderlin’s German in German, the language will be trying to understand itself. Out of the number of words which German offers, Hölderlin has chosen these, and I can let them ring in my head as if heard. “With yellow pears hangs / And full with wild roses / the land in the lake.” Easily said, less easily understood, because the order of the words is—well—wild as the roses are.
These lines, first of all, send me to experience. I remember how, when heavily fruited, the fruit tree’s branches are bowed; and I remember how, in the clear fall light, flowers, bushes, trees are oddly reflected in still water as if actually upside down, and directly beneath themselves, an optically odd apparition. Then I may read the poem’s title (“Hälfte des Lebens”) again, and realize that the pears and their image are halves of one real, unreal whole.
The land, heavy with fruit and flowers, hangs down into the lake, where object and reflection are joined. I ask myself why the natural order is interrupted. Shouldn’t it be: “With yellow pears, and full of wild roses, the land hangs down into the lake”? But then the word hänget wouldn’t hang.
Every line of fine literature forms a secure, seemingly serene, yet unquiet community. As in any community, there are many special interests and the groups which promote them; there are predominating concerns, persistent problems; and, as in the psyche of any individual, or in the larger region of the body politic, there are competing aims, anxieties, habits, anticipations, perplexities, memories, needs, and grievances. When the line is a good one, their clamor is stilled because its constituents are happy, their wants appeased, their aims fulfilled.
When the line is a good one, there is a musical movement to its meaning which binds the line together as if it were one word, yet at the same time articulating, weighing, and apportioning the line’s particular parts the way syllables and their sounds and stresses spell a noun or verb, while throwing down a pattern of rhythm and meaning like a path to be pursued deeper into the stanza, and resonating with what has preceded it, if anything has. These are not naturally harmonious functions: looking forward, listening back, uniting and differentiating.
Half of life has been lived. Heavy with its succulent fruit, that life looks down upon its future, but it is a future in which this present, now past, can only be remembered. The reflection in the water resembles reality almost exactly, yet it is just that—a picture. And you and I then, adopting the poet’s position, can halve ourselves to see what we are now as well as what we shall become: illusory.
What a beautiful idea: earth, solid and settled, flesh rosy and trim, life full and accomplished, altering into water, into remembrance, into image.
Upon this water swans are swimming so calmly the reflection of the land they float upon is undisturbed. “You lovely swans, and drunk from kisses you dip your heads into the holy sobering water.” There is another interruption of the normal order here which exactly parallels the first (“and full with wild roses”). It is the habit of swans to do a bit of necking, and bill dipping too. This information comes to us from some swan watching. That the swan (most notable for its raucous, peacock-like scream) is supposed to sing a sweetly accepting song at the point of death is handed down to us from myth.
It is likely that English speakers will have already read Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole,” which opens upon a similar landscape and at the same time of year.
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
And there is no reason at all why we should have to forget, reading Hölderlin, everything we know that came after him. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
Rilke’s extraordinary Leda poem will get written later, as well as his charming though more modest lyric titled simply “The Swan.”
We struggle through the undone and the yet-to-do
as though our legs were shackled, hobbling on and on
with the awkward waddle of the swan.
And dying—to lose our footing on the ground
we daily counted on to hold us—
is like the anxious swan’s surrender
to the water which receives him with all honor,
drawing aside like a curtain in the wind,
receding wave on wave to shape his wake,
while he, stately, still, remote, assured,
majestically indifferent and composed,
condescends to glide.1
In the Elegies Rilke won’t find death likely to offer such easy sailing. There will be much undoing to get done, much past life to leave.
Hölderlin’s swan, sailing between earth and water, its own image riding beside it, and drunk with the kisses which convey the primeness of life, sobers itself by sipping from the cup of consequence: that the first half of one’s history will linger on in the second half only in recollection.
Translating is reading, reading of the best, the most essential, kind. The adjective “gracious” barely hides what the German is franker about—the poem’s religious allusions—for the swans are dipping their heads ins heilignüchterne Wasser. That heilignüchterne is one helluva word. Christopher Middleton, in his fine version, says “you gracious swans” and then ends “into the holy lucid water,” while Michael Hamburger, in his equally excellent try, writes “you lovely swans” to close with “into the hallowed, the sober water.” “Gracious,” unfortunately, doesn’t mean “graceful,” and “graceful” doesn’t mean “full of grace” anymore. But if the swans are lovely (as I’m certain they are), they’re only lovely, which isn’t enough. The cool fall water will have a sobering effect, to be sure, but I’m not convinced it should be like a splash in the face. I don’t dare do “holy sober” either. There’s no place for that kind of pun in this poem. So I’m going to take a chance and push the religious undertones up a little. And I have to remember to hold off on hanging the land.
With yellow pears, the land,
and full of wild roses,
hangs down into the lake.
You graceshaped swans,
drunk from kisses,
you dip your heads
into the holy solemn water.
The swans are graceful and lovely, and the water is lucid and sobering and solemn, hallowed and holy. In this case, one does not “opt,” but one must choose.2
It’s been frequently said that translation is a form of betrayal: it is a traduction, a reconstitution made of sacrifice and revision. One bails to keep the boat afloat. However, we don’t have to give up everything. Neither swans themselves, nor their symbolic significance, is uniquely German. We won’t have to replace them. The season and its meaning, the reflective power of a pond: these things are easily retained. The central ideas of the stanza, provided we have a proper hold on them, can be transported without loss. When the poem asks a question, we can ask one; when it asserts or describes or avows, we can follow. The general shape of the sonnet can be repeated too, but the poem does not want to be squeezed into its form like an ill-fitting suit; it hopes to flower forth in fourteen lines as if all its genes said, “Bloom.” The sonnet shape is as powerful as a right-wing religious group, however, conservative to the core, and snooty to boot. The meter wants to march five abreast across the page, arm swinging smartly up to strike the chest, eyes must move right at the right time; rhyme waits like a tympanist, sticks poised above the paper and the tightened lines it would make resonate; alliteration wants to twist the tongue as much as assonance would soothe it; there is the short word which sounds long, like “oboe,” and the thin tight-lipped ones like “pit,” to be played against those of generously open ends like “oboe” again, and of course, “Ohio,” as well as words long in print but short of sound, or hissies such as “Mississippi,” lovely liquids like “hallelujah,” and undulating beauties such as “Alabama.”
Moreover, the right sorts of sacrifice are essential. We had better lose the poem’s German sounds and German order, because we are trying to achieve the poem Hölderlin would have written had he been English. We can’t make it move too smoothly and go whistling along. Here is my version of its closing seven:
Where shall I, when
winter’s here, find flowers,
and where sunshine
and shadows of earth?
Walls stand speechless
and cold, in the wind
weathercocks clatter.
Middleton has “weathervane,” but I must follow Hamburger here, not only for a better sound, but because I want to call quietly for the cock who discomfited Peter. The German con cludes Klirren die Fahnen, and could be interpreted as “flags flap,” but nationalism has not had any presence in the preceding lines.
What we get when we’re done is a reading, a reading enriched by the process of arriving at it, and therefore, really, only the farewells to a long conversation.
What must not be given up, of course, is quality—quality and tone. If the translation does not allow us a glimpse of the greatness of the original, it is surely a failure, and most of us fail that way, first and foremost, last and out of luck. Tone, too, is a very tricky thing. Recently Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy translated Rilke’s Book of Hours for Riverhead Books. Here is a sample. The poet is presumably addressing his god, but we know the divinity in question is actually Rilke’s quondam lover, Lou Salomé.
Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.
And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name.
Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I’ll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.3
I feel that the tone of my version is fiercer, more ardent, but it is perhaps more a love poem now than a religious one.
Put my eyes out: I can still see;
slam my ears shut: I can still hear,
walk without feet to where you were,
and, tongueless, speak you into being.
Snap off my arms: I’ll hold you hard
in my heart’s longing like a fist;
halt that, my brain will do its beating,
and if you set this mind of mine aflame,
then on my blood I’ll carry you away.4
It will usually take many readings to arrive at the right place. Somewhere amid various versions like a ghost the original will drift. Yet our situation is no different if we are trying to understand English with English eyes. Hardy begins his great poem about love rendered-as-rhyme with this nine-liner:
If it’s ever Spring again,
Spring again,
I shall go where went I when
Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen,
Seeing me not, amid their flounder,
Standing with my arms around her;
If it’s ever Spring again,
Spring again,
I shall go where went I then.
Try “translating” Hardy’s English into your own. “I shall go where I once saw the moor-cock and his mate splash down, locked in one another’s wings. I notice them but they do not see me standing nearby with my arms around my own beloved.” I must not omit the awkward beauty of the refrain, “I shall go where went I when,” and any change I make will reinforce the rightness of the original. If I lose the rhymes, I lose the poem, for there are four in a row before the couplet, and then three more returns of the initial sound. There is a reason for this rhyme scheme which Hardy subsequently reveals.
Summer-time,
With the hay crop at the prime,
And the cuckoos—two—in rhyme,
As they used to be, or seemed to,
We shall do as long we’ve dreamed to,
If it’s ever summer-time,
Summer-time,
With the hay, and bees achime.
To read with recognition (not just simple understanding) is to realize why the writer made the choices he or she made, and why, if the writing has been done well (suppose I’d said “well done”?), its words could not have been set down otherwise. Our translations will make a batch of botches, but it will not matter, crush them all into a ball and toss them to the trash. Their real value will have been received. The translating reader reads the inside of the verse and sees, like the physician, either its evident health or its hidden disease. That reader will know why Hardy couldn’t come right out and say: “Someday we’ll have a roll in the hay.”