Some Fun With Goethe

"What is this bullshit??"

In the spirit of Monday's thing at U Penn (for those who were there), a little something regarding translation.

So, today I was reading Robert Hass' book "Time and Materials" and came across this piece:

"After Goethe"

In all the mountains,
Stillness;
In the treetops
Not a breath of wind.
The birds are silent in the woods.
Just wait: soon enough
You will be quiet too.

-tr. Robert Hass

I had to smile because I recognized this as a pretty faithful translation of a short Goethe poem I'd taken a stab at translating myself about a year ago. After some searching I found the notebook I'd written it down in and was pleased to find that my two attempts were fairly close to Hass', although perhaps leaning a bit more towards literal accuracy or poetic license in either direction.

The more literal first gloss:

"Wanderer's Night Song"

Over all summits
is peace,
in every treetop
you sense
scarcely a breath.
The little birds are silent in the forest.
But wait, soon
you too will rest.

Second try:

"Traveler's Night Song"

All summits stand
in silence,
the sense of stillness
in every breathless treetop.
The little birds are silent in the forest.
Wait a moment- soon
you too will be at rest.

And here's the original:

"Wandrer's Nachtlied"

Uber allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spurest du
Kaum einen Hauch.
Die Vogelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

As you can see there's a lovely ABAB CDDC rhyme scheme in the original that is lost. Also notice the phrase "Spurest du Kaum einen Hauch." Spuren denotes a kind of active sensory awareness that isn't quite "feels" and isn't quite "senses" and isn't quite "intuits." It's a great word that loses something in the act of translation.

So there's my little foray into some of the issues we heard about earlier this week. I guess my point is that even at a largely amateur level, or in a rather casual attempt at even a poem as short and sweet as this one, you find yourself grappling with pretty sticky issues of meaning and form. 

Are any of the translations "good"? Well, that depends. As far as I'm concerned, all three give a fairly close account of the surface meaning of Goethe's original poem. None of them claim, for example, that "silence lay all around the townhall" or that the little squirrels of the wood were all silent. Do they exist as "good" poems, then? Insofar as all three hue closely to Goethe's fairly simple and stark language, it isn't a stretch to say that each also retains some of the power of his imagery. While obviously of the three Hass' is the most accomplished stylistically, each manages to escape the long traverse of language with some imagistic integrity intact. 

As much as any poem can derive weight and virtue from what it's "about" then it must be fair to say that each of these translations is roughly (very roughly) as good as Goethe's. But that, of course, is absurd, if you just end it there. Poetry exists as sound as well as text (well, yeah) and in that sense all three translations are clumsy, piecemeal attempts to catch up to something organic and liberated. Even if you don't know any German, try reading Goethe's original out loud. The cadence flows and halts, starts at a sharp sound and resumes motion with trepidation-- it capitulates the movement of a traveler moving through an unsettlingly silent wilderness at night even without the benefit of the reader knowing what each word means. 

I can't speak for prose-- we've all heard, I guess, how much Dostoyevsky for example benefits from translation-- but in poetry, a translation can be effective, it can be smart, it can even be beautiful, but it is ultimately and necessarily a losing game.