Herewith, the second installment in our newest monthly column by past Asymptote contributor
“Peru.” Honesty begins at home. I balance my vehement defense earlier about preserving rhyme with a set of true confessions now, acting as my own devil’s advocate by pointing out choices that could be seen as fudging, padding, patching, cheating—all of which might argue against translating rhyme.
“Peru” in a bit, after working to it from another clarifying example. In one of his novella-length stories, Doderer has a character attend a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio, and he includes a few lines from Leonore’s great solo in Act 1.
So leuchtet mir ein Farbenbogen,
Der hell auf dunklen Wolken ruht.
Der blickt so still, so friedlich nieder,
Der spiegelt alte Zeiten wieder,
Und neu besänftigt wallt mein Blut.In me there gleams a shining rainbow,
Rests on gray clouds above the flood.
It looks down placidly, serenely,
Mirrors the old times’ image keenly;
With new-found calm now flows my blood.
Ludwig Wittgenstein or Karl Kraus would have my head for tautologies alone: clouds are of course above the flood—where else?; there’s nothing about a flood in the original anyway (but something had to rhyme with “blood”); can an image be “keenly” mirrored, instead of “sharply”?; doesn’t the displacement of the subject in the last line make the word order cheesily “poetic”?
The examples from last month are wobbly as well. In the poem about the Strudlhof Steps, I added a word (“dying”) that’s nowhere in the original—it fits the spirit but strains the letter; the choice of “footfall” corresponds to “Tritte” in the German, and each word duly ends with an unaccented syllable, but the real need was to find a rhyme for “wall.” As for the Latin quatrain about the wine, I may have perpetrated an impossibility of usage. An adjective as generic noun is common in the plural (“The meek shall inherit the earth”; “The rich get richer”), but can that construction even exist in the possessive? Am I cheating with “the bad’s dismay” for “bös dem Schuft” = “pravis prave”? As a final example, consider my metrical change in a couplet from another novella: “Gewalt-Tat gegen Unbekannte / Löscht Feuer ehe es noch brannte” becomes “Violent deeds against men you don’t know / Extinguish a fire before its first glow.” The German four-beat line has an additional beat in English, and feminine end-rhymes become masculine. (As for that, what about the sexism of “men you don’t know”?) If I demand retention of rhyme, why am I allowed to change the meter? (NYRB, don’t fire me, please!)
The only truthful answer is practicality. Each of my solutions has met with ego-gratifying praise; colleagues at conferences brush off my self-objections. Reactions like that are much preferable to sneers or snubs, but while I stand by my translations, I view them more askance than others appear to.
Samuel Johnson has been one of my idols for a long time, but his poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes” doesn’t come out of his top drawer. It begins: “Let Observation with extensive View, / Survey Mankind from China to Peru.” Even as a high-school kid I could see tail wagging dog; “Peru” is the rhyming word for the sole and simple reason that it fits so pat with “view.” Dryden or Pope would never have perpetrated anything so clumsy. Or were they just more sneaky, sophisticated, and sly in their tactics? Maybe it’s all “Peru” on some level and it takes trying to practice the craft up close to find that out. If I could talk with Hopkins or Mallarmé or Celan, with Dickinson or Droste-Hülshoff or Bachmann, they might divulge that padding and fudging and forcing are the essence of the whole endeavor, with some able to hide it better than others. That’s art!
“Panegyrics of Praise.” “Your landscapes live, breathe, reach beyond themselves; they’re not ‘descriptions.’ They glow with warmth and life” (Paul Ellbogen, letter to Doderer, 1951). Ellbogen was hardly a bosom friend (long story), but even those who hated Doderer and his work were in awe of his mastery here. His powers of evocation are always assessed as having produced some of the greatest writing in German.
Two features of his exceptionally lyrical prose are easily spoiled. The language is replete to saturation with rhapsodic, sensuous images that could become overly lush or even maudlin; sensitive word choice is paramount. In addition, Doderer purposely emptied such passages of narrative motion; he had an ideal, derived from Flaubert, of the roman muet or “silent novel” in which atmosphere and lyricism could replace plot or story. They don’t do any such thing, to be sure, since they are themselves elements of the story, but instead of developing by episode and incident, they follow musical processes of recapitulation, variation, and echo effects.
Hundreds of pages could serve, but the opening of Part Four is most illustrative. It stops the “story” and recapitulates the opening of Part One some 550 pages earlier (as the opening of John’s Gospel pointedly echoes the opening of Genesis) while weaving in references from the rest of the novel—the air-balloon gondola has figured earlier.
Über der Stadt und ihren weit ausgestreuten Bezirken stand auf goldenen Glocken der Spätsommer, noch nicht Nachsommer, noch trat der Herbst nicht sichtbar ins Spiel.
Die Windstille war eine so vollkommene, dass eine leichte schwebende Luftgondel, die man sich im schwindelnden Blau etwa genau über die Strudlhofstiege hätte denken können, durch Stunden wäre am gleichen Punkt dort oben verblieben, ohne abgetrieben zu werden, etwa über den Strom und den langen Mugel des Bisambergs, dessen Gescheck von Wiesen, Feldern und Wald noch keine Veränderung der Farben zeigte.
In den Wohnungen ist es sehr still; und diejenigen, welche augenblicklich gerade leer und versperrt sind, stehen doch wie geöffnet. Jedes glänzende Ding, allein gelassen, strebt da in die Ferne; und besonders dort, wo sich eine bedeutendere Aussicht von den Fenstern bietet in die vielsagende Stadtlandschaften, scheint etwa der spiegelnde Glanz auf einem einsamen Notenständer oder einem verlassenen Klavier innig verschmolzen mit jenem, der fern and fliehend auf unbekannten Dächern liegt.
Golden domes of late summer vaulted over the city and its wide-reaching districts; not yet Indian summer, autumn had still given no sign of itself.
The air was so utterly calm that if someone had pictured the gently hovering gondola of an air balloon more or less directly above the Strudlhof Steps, it would have remained aloft at the same spot for hours without drifting away across the river and the long slopes of the Bisamberg, its checkerboard of meadows, fields, and forest not yet showing any change of color.
Dwelling places were very quiet, those deserted and locked at the moment now looking open. Every shimmering object left alone dreams of distances, and especially where the windows present a more intriguing view out into the substantial cityscape the sheen reflected off a solitary music stand or an abandoned piano seems intimately molten and fused with the gleam lying far-flung and fleeting on unknown roofs.
Reader response as I’ve experienced it almost always borders on amazement at the intense, authentic poetry of these “mute” scenes, so much so that I think I don’t need to add much. Alliteration, so vital to Doderer’s effects, must be replicated, but the deeper living energy of his lyrical prose is the rhythm, perhaps even more essential than in verse by guaranteeing continuity and forward motion when sequential events are in abeyance. If the rhythm falters, the passage turns into quicksand.
When I was translating Gert Jonke and used to meet him in the Café Sperl, he would never look at my work but would always ask me to read out loud quietly. He told me right from the beginning that he didn’t know English very well but that he was listening for rhythmic patterns and correspondences. When he heard the pulse, the heartbeat, he was happy. Rhythm is the heartbeat of Doderer’s prose as well, and I am grateful to readers who tell me they hear it.
*****
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