Reading Rilke (10 page)

Translators are on a par with poets when it comes to being mean-spirited. Walter Arndt, in his arrogant collection called
The Best of Rilke
(there are no
Elegies
), complains bitterly about the efforts of others, and one can enjoy his diatribes, if not the poems themselves. Considering line 4 of the “Panther” poem, Arndt says of one esteemed translator,

the drugged languor of the stanza is spoiled, from mere ineptitude, by the indecent hop-and-skip of an anapaest.
Its rhymes, moreover, are replaced by assonances. Close assonances may be unavoidable second-bests occasionally, but to this pains-faking paraphrast they are neither close nor occasional but part of a cheery what-the-hellitude that Rilke, of all delicate spirits, has not deserved.
²

Arndt is scornful of those who try to translate from a language to which they are not native, and there is no doubt that such a practice frequently leads to errors, some of which he properly points out, though we could use a little less gloat and glee, since he deals with every mistake as if he has caught a criminal. In my opinion, it is more important that the translator have native-like possession of the language into which he is trying to put his chosen poem. Arndt is also, I think, idolatrous about genre and meter and rhyme, and insists on twisting normal English orders inside out simply to satisfy a scheme.

I’ve already complained of how political it all is anyway. The poet, while composing, struggles to rule a nation of greedy self-serving malcontents; every idea, however tangential to the main theme it may have been initially, wants to submerge the central subject beneath its fructifying self as though each drizzle were scheming a forty-days rain; every jig and trot desires to be the whole dance; every la-di-da and line length, image, order, rhyme, variation, and refrain, every well-mouthed vowel, dental click, silent design, represents a corporation, cartel, union, well-heeled lobby, a Pentagon or NRA, eager to turn the law toward its interests; every word wants to enjoy a potency so supreme it will emasculate the others (I have known the little letter “a” to act just that outrageously); and then there is the poet too, who is supposed to be in charge, a fraud like Oz’s Wizard, teetering on a paper throne and trying to keep a dozen personal insecurities from finding out about each other; trying to overcome the temptation to give in to one poetic demand at the expense of another—the Useful
instead of the Alluring, the Alluring rather than what’s Essential—trying to avoid habits which prefer first thoughts, indulge weak ones, encourage the facile, and ruin the work.

Thus the completed poem is a series of delicate adjudications, a peace created from contention, and there are occasionally those beautiful moments when every element runs together freely toward the same end and every citizen cries out, “Aye!” Must the translator mimic this mess, and take the measure of such miracles? He must. The translator, remaining in command of his best self while working in another unaccommodating language, must somehow register these decisions and adjustments, the many permissions and denials issued by the poet in the first place. The result, of course, is the record of a reading, and almost never a poem—not the economical setting down of a critical interpretation, although the interpretation must take place, but one step beyond that toward the compound, multi-spliced and engineered, performance which emerges from a recording studio. Still, to sing Rilke in English, even when machines have gloriously falsified your voice:
Ein Gott vermags
.

A god can do it. But tell me,

how can a man follow him through the lyre’s strings?

His soul is split. And at the intersection

of two heart-riven roads, there is no temple to Apollo.

Song, as you have taught, is not mere longing,

the wooing of whatever lovely can be attained;

singing is being. Easy for a god.

But when are we? And when does he fill us

with earth and stars?

Young man, this isn’t it, your yearning,

even if your voice bursts out of your mouth.

Learn to forget such impulsive song. It won’t last.

Real singing takes another breath.

A breath made of nothing. Inhalation in a god. A wind.
³

So find an English song for these words, these phrases, from “Die Spanische Trilogie,” for instance: … 
der den Schein zerrissner Himmels-Lichtung fängt
 …, … 
das grosse dunkle Nichtmehrsein der Welt ausatmend hinnimmt
 …, … 
aus schlaftrunknen Kindern an so fremder Brust
 …, or, my favorite,… 
wie ein Meteor in seiner Schwere nur die Summe Flugs zusammennimmt.…
You don’t have to know German. Just look at it:
zusammennimmt
. A god can’t do it.

Nor are poems approached in innocence, and with the absence of lubricating forethought. Have we not had to suffer those who direct
The Tempest
as if it took place in Central Park? Many of our translators have programs—organized preconceptions—which drive and direct their labors. Hölderlin must sound as if written now. Why? The cry of the current is continuous like a noisy creek; let’s have a Hegel for our time, a Kant for the country club. Shall we throw Racine into a hearty street vernacular, update Dido and Aeneas? Or if nostalgia overtakes us, we can run as well in reverse. Does not MacIntyre translate
Weltraum
as “welkin,” down-dating Rilke in the direction of Chaucer?

Welcome to the pole vault. The second section of this “First Elegy” puts the bar at twenty feet.
Und so verhalt ich mich denn und verschlucke den Lockruf dunkelen Schluchzen
s. Several words from the opening line find re-employment. A harsh and overwhelming music surrounds these bird-sung meanings, and a deforming pattern, like a bound foot, unreasonably demands to be danced.

If we try to stay close to the immediate English sense of the German words, a nearly vomitous calamity results (consider Leishman’s unfortunate initial effort, for instance), and we must avoid these luring calls, these dark sobs, at all costs. The controlling image, which “The Third Elegy” confirms, is that of the frightened child calling for Mother to remove the darkness with its terror, which, like the absent light, is so alive in it. Thus the cry is an appealing one on two counts, and one which issues from the poet’s deepest nature. The cry is held back because the fear itself is a fear we worship out of frightened gratitude; because the cry comes from the child in us; and because it is anyhow pointless, as the famous lines which follow
mournfully but selfishly reiterate: alas, who is there we can make use of?

However, what does Rilke say the “call” is like? Although Young’s casual prosiness is again inexplicable (“And since that’s the case …”), he is the only translator to put Rilke’s bird on its perch. The idea that the cry is effective the way a child’s sobbing might be, and the notion that the cry is alluring as the mating calls of the bird are meant to be, collide like two trains. I see only smoke and steam. But Rilke likes to pass through all the ranks: not God, not Angels, not men, not birds either. Perhaps a tree or a walk or a habit, as we’ll see, reading on, but our friends are few.

“So I master myself to stifle” is awkward; “… instinctive as a mating song” is an interpretation, but at the moment I want to keep it because I think the bird has to be there. Birds coo sometimes, or moan, but they never sob.

Not another “heart,” I can hear my inner critic saying, and too many m&m’s. The pattern of alliteration could be shifted:

But “cut short” is a bit too colloquial, and too temporal to boot. We’re not talking about a vacation. “So I control myself to muffle an appealing outcry—”

As we advance into the elegy as into some movie Africa, the weaknesses of our company become increasingly manifest: the heat is getting to them, the rotten gin, the drums, the flies. Who but fish swallow lures? Garmey/Wilson suggest that the poet withholds himself, and Boney that the poet actually employs his somber sobs to suppress his luring call. It is hard to imagine a version much worse than my first try. Shall we permit readers to believe that this great poem contains lines of such pretentious silliness? Poulin’s translation is cleaner than the others, as is customary with him, and that is not a minor merit when among the unwashed; yet for any poem, song is essential to its being, and all we hear here are the squeaks of unoiled doors.
Für den Gott ein Leichtes
. There is that wonderful moment, for instance, when the poem asks lovers (who characteristically believe their arms encircle an exciting and excited body) to add the actual emptiness they are grasping to the totality of space (
Wirf aus den Armen die Leere zu den Räumen hinzu, die wir atmen; vielleicht dass die Vögel die erweiterte Luft fühlen mit innigerm Flug
), and Leishman gives us a triumphant rendering:

Alongside this, Poulin’s attempt is awkward and prosy, except that (like Garmey/Wilson) he emphasizes the interior meanings that apply to
innigerm
, always appropriate with Rilke.

Poulin has no knack for the right word here. If we are hurling away from us what we’ve once hugged, isn’t “fling” the only correct name for the gesture which empties our arms?

Mitchell is significantly better.

Gass, a jackal who comes along after the kill to nose over the uneaten hunks, keeps everything he likes:

I am obliged to point out that Flemming, whose translation I came upon rather late in the day, also uses “fervent” to qualify “flight,” but I wonder at his word order:

As we pursue these comparisons tediously from line to line and verse to verse, it becomes evident that Leishman, Poulin, and Mitchell have given us the only tolerable versions, and that they are quite different in spirit as well as in the details of their execution. The awkwardness of Leishman’s frequent Germanic constructions, his sometimes overly noisy line, the mumbo jumbo that gets into them, the oh-so-literary faces he makes, the occasional inaccuracy, the thickets of confusion we need to be rabbits to run through: we are certainly as familiar with these qualities now as with the faults of a friend, for J. B. Leishman, more than anyone else, has given us our poet, Rilke, in English (as Herter Norton has rendered the prose), and his lines have been impressed on our sensibilities like creases of bedclothing on sleeping bodies; it is impossible to remove them, especially when they dent so handsomely, and “immemorial sap mounts in our arms when we love.” Yet he will do his derivative dances, like this Hopkins jig from “The Second Elegy”: