The real significance of “The Death of Virgil” was borne upon the translator more than a year before she undertook the English version, through her reading and translation of the five elegies on fate. These elegies stand at the intellectual as well as actual center of the work, crystallizing both its meaning and method.
It is conceded that no poem is entirely translatable, and “The Death of Virgil” is a poem, although neither in the sense of a single lyrical outburst nor a sequence of poems on a single theme, yet one that sustains its tension through nearly five hundred pages. The form of this poem, whose subject relates it to the antique epics, is consequent upon two inherent characteristics: Most salient, of course, is its poetical unity in which the fullness of expression lies not alone in the words themselves but quite as much in the spaces between. For in a poem the words are less integers than points in a configuration: indeed, one might well describe the structure of the lyric (and the nature of this work is unquestionably lyrical) as the expression of the interval. The second aspect is the musical composition of the work as a whole: the four main parts of the book stand in the same relation to each other as the movements of a symphony or quartette, and somewhat in the manner of theme and variations the successive part becomes a lyrical self-commentary on the parts that have preceded it.
The style of this book is the inevitable outcome of its structure, since style itself is only the outer and inseparable manifestation of method. But it is with the concretization of method that the translator must directly deal. It may be of interest briefly to summarize a few problems that arose from the style.
Broch’s syntax, which is an essential element of his work, had faithfully to be preserved, despite far-reaching and radical differences in German and English modes of expression. This syntax emerged from the functioning of two main ideas which are indissolubly connected, deriving on the one hand from the musical structure of the work, on the other from the inner monologue. The narrative proceeds in the third person, but it is soon discerned that for all its comprehension of multiple levels of experience, both internal and external, it is from first to last an inner monologue, into which even the book’s conversational scenes are drawn. Although these conversations are reproductions of outer events and actual dialogues, their inclusion into the inner monologue gains for them an abstract quality, in a measure reminiscent of Plato, and certainly far removed from the effort at naturalistic representation. From such a monologue, however, arise its own stylistic demands, but Broch’s syntax fully meets these when—retaining the musical analogy—the four symphonic parts of the book press on through the various tempi, from the Andante of the beginning to the Maestoso of the end. The more headlong the tempo, the shorter the sentence, the slower the tempo becomes, the more complicated the sentence structure; the sentences in the Adagio of the second part are probably among the longest in the world’s literature; undoubtedly they put a strain upon the translation. Broch’s syntax, which he considers purely functional, and which may be summed into the principle: “one thought—one moment—one sentence,” permits him to gather within a fleeting moment of consciousness all the thought-groups of the inner monologue, whose emotional and philosophical contents are often of a highly disparate nature. Yet the force of this principle pervades the book, sustaining its poetic and musical unity. While complicated, the sentences are never confused: mirroring the feverish yet lucid thoughts of the dying poet, in their great rocking rhythms they reproduce the sensation of the floating journey on which he is being carried by the bark of death.
It was not easy to capture this rhythm and these long sentences in the English language, whose genius more often finds expression in a shorter line. Nor was this the only difficulty. The greatest challenge sprang from intrinsic differences in the two languages. With its mass of composite words, and especially with the emphasis which Broch gives to the substantive, German achieves a concentration of meaning which, both in its associations and grammatically, permits of a many-dimensional expression; a German sentence may have at the same time a concrete and a metaphysical meaning. While no language, rightly understood, can be called one-dimensional, and above all the English language with its rich inheritance of poetry, nevertheless a clear and unequivocal expression has always been held a virtue of English writing. If the long sentence with many subordinate clauses has been used with great power by eminent English writers of the 18th Century, and with extraordinary subtlety by Henry James, it is not characteristic. As a rule, richness has been achieved by the exfoliation of the subject in a successive and natural development, rather than by trying to sound multiple levels of meaning at one stroke. Certain modern poets, it is true, have sought subtlety and complexity through a wealth of allusion, sometimes so abstruse and esoteric that communication is largely imperilled. Joyce, who like Broch, was searching for a language of many dimensions, often ignored the tradition and, dismissing syntax and grammar, formed new words in combinations hitherto untried.
Such experimentation is admirable in the daring innovator, who, of course, assumes sole responsibility for his work; it is impermissible and impossible for the translator. To have substituted rhythms different from those of the author would have been to misrepresent him; to have taken greater liberties with the English language would have been a double betrayal. The translation has adhered as much as possible to the shape of the original German sentences, to the general rhythmic pattern, and to the maintenance of as many levels of meaning as the language would allow. Instead of representing the ever-recurring ideas by constant repetition of the key-words, in the manner of the leit-motif, an accretion of nuances was sought through the use of synonyms in order to approximate the multi-meanings of the German composita. Broch uses the symbol of the rainbow throughout the work. This iridescence, this glowing and fading and merging of color, tone and meaning, gives the book a kind of natural magic, spanning symbolically the new world that seems always to be arising out of the elements to which the existent one is being constantly reduced. The translator has endeavored with all her resources, following the author scrupulously, to carry the spell unbroken from one language to the other; the method was identical with that used in the translation of a lyric.
One radical departure was made, in deference to the psychological and grammatical differences of the two languages. Virgil enunciates his philosophical insights and revelations in the present tense; the truths of life seem to burst upon him fully only in the hour of death; his illumination assumes the accent of prophecy. In German the present tense, which Broch consistently employs in these passages, is not only natural but often mandatory. Yet, if prophecy is akin to memory, as this book hints, both may be considered as phenomena of the stream of consciousness. English usually represents that stream in the past tense, treating it grammatically as a form of indirect discourse. Therefore, in recording the data of consciousness, the simple past tense was in most cases substituted: to have done otherwise would have imparted an unbearably didactic character improper to the poem. And seeing that a thought which has found its form in words must already have occurred in time, even though its truth may have an immediate as well as a timeless cogency, the translator deems herself to have been faithful to the author’s spirit.
Translation is always a hazardous enterprise; translating poetry even quixotic. But poets must have more of courage than of common sense, and in so far as she is a poet the translator dares to hope that her labor has not been vain; that her admiration for this work and her identification with it these past years have, for its sake, afforded “to every power a double power.”
At various times help has been given the translator in reading the more difficult passages, and it is her pleasure to thank for their services the following: Mrs. Josephine Kahler, Dr. Viktor Polzer, Dr. Wieland Herzfelde, and for more continuous help, Mrs. Marianne Schlesinger. She also desires to express her gratitude to Roger Sessions and Paul Rosenfeld for their sympathetic reading of the first English drafts; most of all she acknowledges her deep indebtedness to Jule Brousseau, who read the complete English manuscript and gave generously of her gifts as writer and friend.
J. S. U.