Wanderer's Night Song
Across the hilltops,
Restfulness;
Over the treetops
Stillness hangs in the air.
The birds have silenced their song.
Wait: before long
You too will rest there.
Hopefully some of you reading this will recognize it as an Anglicization of the most famous lyric poem in German literature: Goethe's "Wanderers Nachtlied (II)". Having composed it yesterday afternoon lying on my bed I make no particular claims on its behalf. Instead the idea for the following arose when I decided to test my version against those I could find on the internet. The results were interesting; some, in fact, could only be described as alarming. First of all, here is the original:
Über allen Gipfeln
ist Ruh.
Über allen Wipfeln
spürest du
kaum einen Hauch.
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
ruhest du auch.
Milan Kundera finds a beautiful way to introduce the poem into his novel Immortality (1988). Read by an expatriate German to his daughter, it becomes first a lullaby, a bond between their childhoods in different countries, different languages; then, at the very end of his life "she realized that the poem speaks of death... She whispered with him 'Warte nur, bald ruhest du auch', soon you too will rest. And she recognized the voice of Father's approaching death: it was the calm of birds in the treetops". Here is the literal prose translation in the English text of Kundera's novel:
On all hilltops
There is peace,
In all treetops
You will hear
Hardly a breath.
Birds in the wood are silent.
Just wait, soon
You too will rest.
As Kundera himself admits, "in a literal translation the poem loses everything". Well, perhaps not quite everything. But on a technical level this little lyric is cut like a jewel: "every line has a different number of syllables, there is an alternation of trochees, iambs, dactyls, the sixth line is oddly longer than the others, and even though the poem consists of two couplets, the first grammatical sentence ends asymmetrically in the fifth line, which creates a melody that had never existed before, in any poem, as magnificent as it is ordinary".
One might, then, think that a translator's task would be to try and match that technical achievement, creating an equivalent of equal structural brilliance. And expectations were raised when I found the following translator's gloss, which seemed to be fully aware of the versifying subtleties that would be required:
"So naïve-sounding a rhythm, diction, and feeling can only be the product of the most sophisticated craftsmanship... Translators have either betrayed Goethe’s simplicity by cleverness or cloyed it by banality. To substitute for the resonance of feminine rhyme in German (uninflected English having more masculine rhymes), I’ve increased the number of rhymes with the key word 'rest'. And to prevent this increase from becoming monotonous, I’ve used one rhyme with accent not on 'rest' but on the penultimate syllable: 'forest' in line four. To enhance the hushed mood by echo, Goethe on line six alliterates the 'w' of 'schweigen' with the 'w' of 'Wald'. Analogously in line six of the English, 'hushed' and 'heath' alliterate. This is achieved at the cost of using an eye rhyme (heath, breath) instead of a 'perfect' ear rhyme. In denotation, 'heath' is not a proper translation of 'Wald'. The former has mere thickets; the latter is arboreal. But the emotional connotations are partly similar: rustic, unpruned, unmapped, a wilderness for wanderers at night. I don’t want to repeat the earlier used concept of forest and woods. The reader’s ear needs the couplet ending in 'eath' to escape for just a moment the restless 'rest' rhymes."
The analysis sounds sensitive, convincing: the author is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and according to one of his colleagues “no one has ever translated Goethe as well into English”. One's expectations rise still higher. Here is the poem that resulted:
To every hill crest
Comes rest.
In every tree crest
the forest
scarcely draws breath.
Each bird-nest is hushed on the heath.
Wait a bit; soon you
will find rest too.
And...nascetur ridiculus mus! Since the perpetrator can easily be discovered by clicking the above links, there is no point in preserving his anonymity any longer. In fact there is an added incentive. His surname sums up the defining quality of his translation: Peter Viereck (Peter Square). Everything else that he apparently wanted to avoid - "cleverness", "banality", "monotonousness" - is nonetheless, unfortunately, present. The last two lines are more catastrophically clunking than a fatal accident in a lumber yard.
So translation is evidently an art, and not a science. One cannot create a good poetic rendition by analysis, though one can certainly use analysis in demonstrating why a rendition is good or bad. To make a start with Herr Square's version: "comes rest" in line 2 introduces a disruptive movement of arrival that does not appear in the original, and is entirely out of place; Goethe's forest does not "draw breath", and still less does it do so "in its tree crests" ( - though Goethe had a high opinion of his own scientific work, this poem is not known for contributing to the discovery of photosynthesis); and "Warte nur" is not successfully rendered by "Wait a bit", any more than it would be by "Hang on", "Hold up", or "Can we stop for a breather, I've got a stitch". All these are faults of Viereck's poem as a poem, as well as qua translation: they all disrupt the Stimmung, the mood that the poem tries (and already has precious little space) to create.
And that ultimately subjective, non-technical factor, "mood", leads me onto a defence of the other part of my title - translation as Romantic art. For one thing that the Romantics believed in firmly was that the "holistic" aspect of the arts, the ability to imbue creative expression with the unity and self-evidence of a simple, intuited truth, was imaginative and emotional, not rational. As August Wilhelm Schlegel put it, "concepts outline each thing for itself, whereas in reality, nothing ever exists for itself; only feeling perceives the all-in-all". In Romantic poetry, as in music, there is always a subjective essence - be it an emotion, an Idea, or a vision - which casts its light across the poem's accidents of sound and sense. And if sceptics would identify those accidents literally and not philosophically, I can only respond that I find considerably fewer of them in the following nineteenth-century rendition of "Wanderers Nachtlied" by the much-despised Longfellow than in the twentieth-century version by Viereck:
Over all the hilltops
Is quiet now
In all the treetops
Hearest thou
Hardly a breath.
The birds are asleep in the trees:
Wait; soon like these
Thou too shall rest.
In a context like this one sees how the Romantic habit of simple rhyming (now/thou, trees/these) can be unobtrusive and well-judged: it does not have to be "trite", as it is so often accused of - even in a translation by a second-rate poet. (A better target for charges of "triteness" would be bad twentieth-century rhymes, which plumb unsounded depths of banality - viz. "you/too"). But to see what a great Romantic poet can really do with rhyme and rhythm, just look at a passage from Shelley's incomplete (sadly, scarcely begun) 1822 translation of Goethe's Faust. The second stanza of the "Prologue in Heaven" is spoken by Gabriel:
Und schnell und unbegreiflich schnelle
Dreht sich umher der Erde Pracht;
Es wechselt Paradieseshelle
Mit tiefer, schauervoller Nacht;
Es schäumt das Meer in breiten Flüssen
Am tiefen Grund der Felsen auf,
Und Fels und Meer wird fortgerissen
In ewig schnellem Sphärenlauf.
Here is John R. Williams' translation (available in Wordworth Classics):
The earth in majesty rotating
Spins on itself as swift as light,
Celestial radiance alternating
With dread impenetrable night.
In rocky depths the foaming ocean
Surges with elemental force,
Swept on by the eternal motion
That speeds the worlds upon their course.
The metre, rhyme-scheme and meaning are all preserved: deviations are extremely minor, and indeed quite felicitous ("unimaginably fast" in the original is pictured "as swift as light", and the sea's "broad streams" become elemental surges). All things considered, philologically, this is a model translation. But now read Shelley's version:
And swift and swift, with rapid lightness,
The adornèd Earth spins silently,
Alternating Elysian brightness
With deep and dreadful night; the sea
Foams in broad billows from the deep
Up to the rocks, and rocks and Ocean,
Onward, with spheres which never sleep,
Are hurried in eternal motion.
The sheer force of movement here is unmatched in Goethe's original. Goethe could have had it, of course - there is no suggesting he was not a master of verse effects. The reason why he did not is that the variety of verse-forms in Faust is motivated by the speaker and the tone and context of the scene as much as by the poetic imagery. Theatrically speaking, there should be a certain stiffness and ceremony to these lines, so that when Mephistopheles enters he can the more effectively puncture the mood - "apologies, I'm not capable of such high-flown phrases!".
Shelley, obviously, is more interested in the poetry for itself, commenting in awed tones in his translator's note, "it is impossible to represent in another language the melody of the versification; even the volatile strength and delicacy of the ideas escape in the crucible of translation". For all that he succeeeds extraordinarily well. It is the energy which most convinces, felt in the enjambment of the fourth line, and even more in the repetitions, which Goethe separates (schnell and Fels) but Shelley thrusts together: "And swift and swift", "Up to the rocks, and rocks and Ocean..."
For another example, one which I hope will better illustrate the specific importance of "mood" or "tone", let us make a linguistic passage in the other direction. (Apologies to those who do not read German: I will try and back-translate where it seems worth it). Here is the first half of the soliloquy from Hamlet as our starting-point:
To be, or not to be - that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep -
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
German readers will already have the well-known translation of this echoing in their heads - it is probably one of the most successful Shakespeare translations ever made. But before we come to it, let us look at two rather less well-known (and less successful) renderings. Both are by famous German poets of the eighteenth century. Here is Wieland's prose version from the 1760s, before German literature had entirely rejected the French code of bon goût:
Sein oder nicht sein - - das ist die Frage - - Ob es einem edlen Geist anständiger ist, sich den Beleidigungen des Glücks geduldig zu unterwerfen oder seinen Anfällen geduldig entgegenzustehen und durch einen herzhaften Streich sie auf einmal zu erledigen? Was ist Sterben? Schlafen – das ist alles - - und durch einen guten Schlaf sich auf immer vom Kopfweh und allen andern Plagen, wovon unser Fleisch Erbe ist, zu entledigen, ist ja eine Glückseligkeit, die man einem andächtiglich zubeten sollte – Sterben, schlafen - - Doch vielleicht ist es was mehr - - - wie, wenn es träumen wäre?
- - Da steckt der Haken - - was nach dem irdischen Getümmel in diesem langen Schlaf des Todes für Träume folgen können, das ist es, was uns stutzen machen muss. Wenn das nicht wäre, wer würde die Miβhandlungen und Staupenschläge der Zeit, die Gewalttätigkeiten des Unterdrückers, die verächtlichen Kränkungen der Stolzen, die Qual verschmähter Liebe, die Schikanen der Justiz, den Übermut der Groβen ertragen, oder welcher Mann von Verdienst würde sich von einem Elenden, dessen Geburt oder Glück seinen ganzen Wert ausmacht, mit Füβen stoβen lassen, wenn ihm freistünde, mit einem armen, kleinen Federmesser sich Ruhe zu verschaffen?
The contrast with Shakespeare's own style could hardly be greater! Wieland's urge to tone the violent impulses down and introduce a more elegant turn of phrase must have once been an anticipation of his audience's social sensibilities; today it reads like a strange exercise in moralistic featherbedding, delivered with all the rhetorical force of a professorial retirement lecture. The slings and arrows are thrown out and replaced by "fortune's insults", which, however they are to be treated, must always be met "patiently", and the "heartache" and "thousand natural shocks" become an inconvenient "headache" and a lot of other "vexations" which can be "got rid of by a good sleep"(!)
Going almost (but not quite) as far in the other direction, here are Herder's verses, full of Sturm und Drang excitability:
Sein oder nicht sein? – das ist nun die Frage!
Ob’s edler, im Gemüte fortzudulden
Des Schicksals Tückepfeil und Hohngeschoβ?
wie oder aufzustehn den Trübsalsstürmen
und widerstehnd sie enden! – Sterben! – Schlafen!
Nicht mehr? Und schlafend sagen können: aus ist
das Herzach, aus die tausend Erdenstöβe,
die Fleisch wir erbeten! – So ist’s Vollendung,
andächtig recht zu wünschen – Sterben! – schlafen! –
Nur schlafen? – wohl auch träumen! Ah! da liegt’s!
Denn in dem Schlaf des Todes was für Träume
da kommen, wenn nun aus ist Lebenslärm,
das macht uns Halt! – Und die, die Rücksicht ist’s,
die Jammer macht so langen, langen Lebens.
Denn wer ertrüg’s, die Hieb’ und Streich’ des Unfalls,
Gewalt des Drückers! stolzer Narren Schmach,
den Stich verschmähter Liebe! der Gesetze
Betrugverzögerung – Staatsmanns Hoffart! Spott
den’s leidende Verdienst vom Bub empfängt –
kann man sich selbst je los und ledig machen
mit bloβem Dolchstich –
Where Herder succeeds is in using the peculiarly German resource of compound nouns to express the metaphor-packed pithiness of the original. "Tückepfeil" und "Hohngeschoβ" are fine strokes, quite legitimately transferring the force of fortune's "outrageousness" (explicated as "cunning spite" and "mockery") to the "arrows" and "missiles". Where he goes too far is in reducing other parts of the text to a barely filled-out procession of exclamation-marks. While one must grant that the German Ausrufezeichen is more common, and does not by itself convey such an excitable atmosphere as it does in English, moderation would surely have been urged had Herder noticed that Shakespeare's text uses not a single exclamation-mark. Any vor sich hin, soliloquizing tone is abandoned: Herder's text berates heaven and earth.
Finally, here is August Wilhelm Schlegel's canonized version:
Sein oder Nichtsein; das ist hier die Frage:
Ob's edler im Gemüt, die Pfeil' und Schleudern
Des wütenden Geschicks erdulden, oder,
Sich waffnend gegen eine See von Plagen,
Durch Widerstand sie enden? Sterben – schlafen –
Nichts weiter! Und zu wissen, daß ein Schlaf
Das Herzweh und die tausend Stöße endet,
Die unsers Fleisches Erbteil, ’s ist ein Ziel,
Aufs innigste zu wünschen. Sterben – schlafen –
Schlafen! Vielleicht auch träumen! Ja, da liegts:
Was in dem Schlaf für Träume kommen mögen,
Wenn wir die irdische Verstrickung lösten,
Das zwingt uns stillzustehn. Das ist die Rücksicht,
Die Elend läßt zu hohen Jahren kommen.
Denn wer ertrüg der Zeiten Spott und Geißel,
Des Mächtigen Druck, des Stolzen Mißhandlungen,
Verschmähter Liebe Pein, des Rechtes Aufschub,
Den Übermut der Ämter und die Schmach,
Die Unwert schweigendem Verdienst erweist,
Wenn er sich selbst in Ruhstand setzen könnte
Mit einer Nadel bloß?
The precision is striking enough, especially when one considers that Schlegel, unlike Herder, produced 17 plays' worth of this perfectly-turned blank verse. As the great Swiss Germanist Emil Staiger remarks, in the introduction to Schlegel's critical writings from which I have taken the above extracts, "Schlegel preserved the original wording to a quite remarkable extent...and yet there is a faint Romantic tinge to his Shakespeare". And there is nothing wrong with that; indeed for Staiger it may have guaranteed that "Shakespeare...worked his way into the German soul". It takes, perhaps, a great cultural movement in the present to do justice to one of the past.
If that last sentence has any truth to it, it will be worth our while expanding the frame of cultural reference. For on this model, it is not so much the fine threads of intellectual and cultural history linking the German Romantics and the English Renaissance that matter (many of them, such as the self-evident command of classical rhetoric, or the adherence to what E. M. W. Tillyard called the "Elizabethan world picture", had indeed been irremediably broken). Rather, it is the imaginative connection, the fact that the Romantics felt that Shakespeare was a "Romantic" poet, and were determined to use all the resources they could find to emulate and extend his achievement. And that imaginative connection to Shakespeare was felt well beyond Europe. The Bengali cult of Shakespeare began only slightly later than the German, in the nineteenth century. As a teenager, Rabindranath Tagore was already trying his hand at rendering Shakespeare into Bengali. He did all the witches' dialogues from Macbeth (quite a linguistic challenge when one thinks about it!); here is the opening of the play -
( ডাকিনী । ম্যাক্বেথ্ )
দৃশ্য : বিজন প্রান্তর । বজ্র বিদ্যু ৎ । তিনজন ডাকিনী ।
১ম ডা — ঝড় বাদলে আবার কখন
মিল্ব মোরা তিনটি জনে ।
২য় ডা — ঝগড়া ঝাঁটি থামবে যখন ,
হার জিত সব মিট্বে রণে ।
৩য় ডা — সাঁঝের আগেই হবে সে ত ;
১ম ডা — মিল্ব কোথায় বোলে দে ত ।
২য় ডা — কাঁটা খোঁচা মাঠের মাঝ ।
৩য় ডা — যাক্কেথ সেথা আস্চে আজ ।
১ম ডা — কটা বেড়াল ! যাচ্ছি ওরে !
২য় ডা — ঐ বুঝি ব্যাং ডাক্চে মোরে !
৩য় ডা — চল্ তবে চল্ ত্বরা কোরে !
সকলে — মোদের কাছে ভালই মন্দ ,
মন্দ যাহা ভাল যে তাই ,
অন্ধকারে কোয়াশাতে
ঘুরে ঘুরে ঘুরে বেড়াই !
Without bothering with stage directions, parts etc., but just to give you an idea of the harsh music of Tagore's rendering, here is a rough transliteration:
Jhor badole abar kokhon
Milbo mora tinti jone?
Jhogra jhanti thambe jokhon
Har[o] jit sab mitbe rone.
Sanjer age hobe shey to -
Milbo kothay bole dey to.
Kantha koncha mather majh.
Macbeth shetha asche aaj.
Kota beral! Jacchi o re!
Ei bujhi byang dakche more!
Moder kache bhalo-i mondo
Mondo jaha bhalo je tai,
Ondhokare kuyashate,
Ghure ghure ghure berai!
The last four lines correspond to the chorus couplet, "Fair is foul and foul is fair/ Hover through the fog and filthy air", giving Rabindranath twice as many syllables to play with. And he knows how to use them: "ghure ghure ghure berai" is a poundingly energetic line to close the scene on (a typically Bengali compound verb, with berano meaning "to travel" and ghora feeling very much like a cognate of the Italian [fare un] giro, to "go around" in both the loose and the literal senses; the witches don't hover, they whirl off into the stormy air!). The other famous chorus is treated in the same way: "Double, double toil and trouble/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble" becomes -
দ্বিগুণ দ্বিগুণ দ্বিগুণ খেটে
কাজ সাধি আয় সবাই জুটে ।
দ্বিগুণ দ্বিগুণ জ্বলরে আগুন
ওঠ্রে কড়া দ্বিগুণ ফুটে ।
Digun digun digun khete
Kaj sadhi aay sobai jute.
Digun digun jwalre aagun
Othre kora digun phute.
- with six "doubles", and an added instruction to work harder at collecting their ingredients! The interesting points are those where Rabindranath has to decide how to translate the untranslatable: he leaves the "harpier" (in the third line of Act IV/i) as a "harpy", which presumably would mean little to a Bengali; however, the witches themselves become dakinis. In Hindu mythology these are female spirits. But far from being generally imagined as potion-stirring hags, they are more usually young and beautiful, using their charms to seduce and trick men who cross their path. Quite how this might have affected (or might still affect) a Bengali reading of the witches' (or dakinis') encounters with Macbeth, I will not try to guess: it would certainly have made the text's reference to the witches' "beards" (Act I/iii, line 46) doubly puzzling!
Tagore's other translations include poems by Byron, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and some short lyrics from Heine. In his reminiscences he reports learning to read German from a missionary, so the Heine translations were direct and not via English. Here is one:
নীল বায়লেট নয়ন দুটি করিতেছে ঢলঢল
রাঙা গোলাপ গাল দুখানি , সুধায় মাখা সুকোমল ।
শুভ্র বিমল করকমল ফুটে আছে চিরদিন!
হৃদয়টুকু শুষ্ক শুধু পাষাণস্ম সুকঠিন!
Ranga golap gal dukhani, sudhay makha sukomol.
Shubhro bimol korokomol phute aache chirodin!
Hridoytuku susko shudhu pashanoso sukothin!
Die blauen Veilchen der Äugelein,
Die roten Rosen der Wängelein,
Die weißen Lilien der Händchen klein,
Die blühen und blühen noch immerfort,
Und nur das Herzchen ist verdorrt.
I can't find an acceptable English version, but the point of the poem is Heine's comparison of the various parts of the beloved's body with flowers - eyes blue violets, cheeks red roses, hands white lilies; these are forever in bloom, he says, but the part that matters most, the heart, is withered. Tagore's version again virtually doubles the poem's length, with eight-foot lines instead of the quadrameter of the original, and he adds in extra imagery. In this context one naturally tends to assume the additions are part of the same general, rather cliched Romantic vocabulary: the "liquid clearness" of her eyes in line 1, her "nectar-filled" cheeks in line 2 - but in line 3 we suddenly hit something unmistakeably Indian: korokomol literally means "hand-lotus"! And suddenly Heine's chance colour association (lily-white skin) is linked up to a whole Sanskritic system of lotus-based symbology, in which "lotus hands", "lotus feet" and gods seated on lotuses (think the Indian equivalent of Botticelli's Venus in her shell) are all already culturally established as familiar poetic and artistic icons of formal perfection.
This is, finally, to raise (hopefully from a somewhat shifted perspective) the familiar questions - how "cultural" should a translation be? How "faithful"? If we translate Tagore, should we be as radical as he was in approaching Heine? Should his lotuses become our lilies? That is certainly not the current solution; most Western readers of an author such as Tagore want an "Indian flavour", and there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. Many of his poems and songs are so bound to the landscape that inspired them that a re-imagining in Western terms would be impossible anyway ( - as impossible as trying to imagine the frozen landscape of Schubert's Winterreise while lying sweat-soaked under a mosquito net). All I want to raise here is the point that "faithfulness" takes many forms, and we need to be much more aware than we perhaps are (given the existence of Viereck-style travesties) of the complex relationships between letter and spirit.
The twentieth century wanted to simplify those relationships, and in literature just as in music, visions of getting closer to the Urtext, the authentic, original, stripped-down version came to dominate. As Andre Aciman observes in relation to the Scott Moncrieff (1922) and Lydia Davis (2004) translations of Proust, even for that most digressive, shadowy, and ramifyingly suggestive of all literary texts, a certain Puritanism has taken hold. Aciman objects to this, and on principle at least, I think rightly so. To capture the beauty of some passages, he suggests, "you may need to do something no translator will admit needs doing: you may have to depart from the text in order to capture not just its meaning, but its cadence, its luster, its magic. In other words—and I should bite my tongue—you may need to pad, to adorn, to interpolate" (all the things of which Scott Moncrieff stands accused). Of course one may not have to make such a departure: Schlegel's Hamlet does not, nor Longfellow's Goethe. But what they and Tagore have in common is that the judgement of poetic necessity and licence remains poetic. It never becomes Puritan or professorial.
