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Friedrich Hölderlin:
Hyperions Schicksalslied
Ihr wandelt droben im Licht
Auf weichem Boden, selige Genien!
Glänzende Götterlüfte
Rühren euch leicht,
Wie die Finger der Künstlerin
Heilige Saiten.
Schicksallos, wie der schlafende
Säugling, atmen die Himmlischen;
Keusch bewahrt
In bescheidener Knospe,
Blühet ewig
Ihnen der Geist,
Und die seligen Augen
Blicken in stiller
Ewiger Klarheit.
Doch uns ist gegeben,
Auf keiner Stätte zu ruhn,
Es schwinden, es fallen
Die leidenden Menschen
Blindlings von einer
Stunde zur andern,
Wie Wasser von Klippe
Zu Klippe geworfen,
Jahr lang ins Ungewisse hinab.
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Friedrich Hölderlin:
Hyperion's Song of Fate
Up there you walk through the light
on delicate grounds, Elysian Spirits!
Shimmering breezes of Gods
touch you as softly
as the hand of the harpist touches her
sacrosanct strings.
Unencumbered by fate, like a slumbering
newborn, are breathing the heavenly dwellers;
chastely protected
by a bud unassuming
flowers for them
eternal the spirit
and their hallowéd eyes
shine in serene
clearness forever.
But to us it is given
never and nowhere to rest:
we suffering humans —
vanishing, falling
blindly from one
hour to the next —
are thrown like the water
cliff down to cliff,
yearlong down to an unknown abyss.
That was easy to translate, you say, consisting as it does of freely flowing verses devoid of rhymes? Well, let me tell you: For me, "free-verse" is far more difficult to translate than schematically rhymed and strictly metered material — hence it consumes far more of my time until assuming a form acceptable for upload. How come, you ask?
Here's my best guess: There's a pheromone emanating from defined rhymes and meters. It strongly appeals to the human (whether "modern" poetry accepts that or not). It significantly lowers the reader's acceptance threshold and lets the translator in by the back door. Such are the mating habits of Erato.
Whence does this pheromone emanate? From a welcomed order, from an agreement with resonating expectations, from the still reverberating drums of the tribe? I do not know — and neither does anyone else. But the effect is clearly demonstrable in the human.
So, for a "bloody amateur" translator like me (a bona fide traitor to both languages out of necessity and passion, I suppose), strict rhymes and meters are the trellice on which I can easiest arrange and best display these tender fruits of paradise. The reader readily accepts that, because everything seems to be in its proper place and the world keeps on revolving smoothly around Him. Or, oftener, around Her.
But then free verse sneaked into this idyllic setting. The clever serpent offered us something new: the tree of knowledge, the apple of choice. No longer bound to rhyme — and no longer assured of divine acceptance, either — the question arose how to emigrate to that Wasteland East of Eden that none of us knew too well. And the Garden of Eden itself was suddenly guarded by a prosody-enforcing angel with flaming sword, one on whose shield was written: No modern poets in paradise!
It was the process of choice that had allowed humans to sin; it was the process of choice that had allowed humans to become human when they were not supposed to. And the apple of knowledge, as the Great Gardener had sadly foreseen, turned into the apple of the human eye.
So humans tasted this bittersweet fruit of being able, nay, of being forced to know and hence to choose. The results are apparent in both Hölderlin and Trakl (and countless other artists): Hölderlin died in (supposed) insanity, Trakl in suicide. Here both poets speak poignantly - free in their verses though disparate in their tongues - to the human fate of forced knowledge and choice.
As it happens, I again took liberties with the text.
For translations closer to literal meaning, join me in admiring the valiant efforts of
Brian Cole,
Emily Ezust, and
Jay Macpherson.
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Georg Trakl:
Untergang
["Fünfte und letzte Fassung:
An Karl Borromaeas Heinrich"]
(Rechtsseitige Übersetzung für Martin Wisser, in Dankbarkeit)
Über den weißen Weiher
Sind die wilden Vögel fortgezogen.
Am Abend weht von unseren Sternen ein eisiger Wind.
Über unsere Gräber
Beugt sich die zerbrochene Stirne der Nacht.
Unter Eichen schaukeln wir auf einem silbernen Kahn.
Immer klingen die weißen Mauern der Stadt.
Unter Dornenbogen
O mein Bruder klimmen wir blinde Zeiger gen Mitternacht.
Warum ich soviel auf der rechten Seite schrieb und (bis jetzt) nichts auf der linken? Nun ja, wenn Sie Linksleser sind, wissen Sie sicher mehr über Hölderlin und Trakl als der typische Rechtsleser. Abgesehen davon, daß Sie als Linksleser Englisch bestimmt besser verstehen als der Rechtsleser Deutsch — mit regelbestätigenden Ausnahmen, versteht sich, bei denen ich mich mit Kompliment umgehend entschuldige.
Und jetzt, bei Trakl, haben Sie nicht vielleicht doch hinübergeblinzelt, ob die Übersetzung helfe, ihn nicht nur zu fühlen sondern auch, horribile dictu, zu verstehen? Oder zumindestens herauszufinden, ob ich ihn wohl auch "korrekt" übersetzt hätte? Ihre Zweifel verstehe ich schon — doch gibt es jemand, der sie bestätigen könnte?
Naja, ich werde Hilfestellung leisten: Wissen Sie, wer mich dazugebracht hat, Hand an dieses Trakl Gedicht zu legen? Herr Martin Wisser ist schuld daran! Er hat mir jüngst ein dickes Buch von Franz Fühmann: [Franz Fühmann: Vor Feuerschlünden — Erfahrungen mit Georg Trakls Gedicht, Hinstorff Verlag, Rostock, 2000 (Neuausgabe)] zum Geschenk gemacht. Und Trakls Untergang ist dessen immer wieder aufklingendes Leit- und Erlösungsmotiv.
Übrigens, Trakls Verfall (eines der schönsten Sonette, das ich je übersetzt habe) erfährt bei Fühmann auch ausführlichste Interpretation. Was wollen Sie mehr?
Ah, Sie kennen das Buch. Mein Kompliment! Und Sie meinen, daß da noch allerhand anderes drinnensteht, nicht nur von wegen weißen, sondern auch von wegen roten und von wegen schwarzen Mauern. Und von allen diesen "sprachlosen und kalten" Mauern, von früher wie von heute, von innen wie von außen, von großem grauen Beton wie von kleinen grauen Zellen. Über denen, um Hölderlin zu Ende zu zitieren, im Winde die (schwarz-weiß-roten?) Fahnen klirren.
Ja, das stimmt schon — und dafür meinen verbindlichsten Dank!
Und wie vornehm und vorsichtig Sie das ausgedrückt haben! Aber darüber, entschuldigen Sie schon, habe ich durch die Gnade meiner Wiener Geburt weder die Erfahrung, noch die Fähigkeit, noch das Recht - und schon gar nicht das Verlangen - ein Urteil zu sprechen. Wenn es sein muß, wenden Sie sich daher bitte an Herrn Wisser — der, wie Franz Fühmann einmal schrieb, wirklich ein "Wisser" ist. Und ja auch für den Anstoß dieser Gedanken verantwortlich war...
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Georg Trakl:
Demise
["Fifth and last version:
To Karl Borromaeas Heinrich"]
Translation dedicated to Martin Wisser, in gratitude
Across the snowy pond
the wild birds have moved away.
From our stars blows an icy wind in the evening.
Over our graves
bows the broken forehead of night.
Under oak trees we sway in an argentine pram.
Forever resound the city's niveous walls.
Under thorny bows,
blind pointers we, oh my brother, are climbing to midnight.
The meaning of this poem remains obscure to you? You find it perplexingly ambiguous, mysteriously enigmatic, or even esoterically opaque?
But, look, if you find it a poem, all that other stuff does not really matter. And just recently a very beautiful translation turned up on the Internet (thanks Bertram, thanks Emily!), from which you might glean more information or at least get a better look on what's going on.
But, you say, this poem does no longer display the shining clarity that you found in Hölderlin? Sure. But, then, about one century separates the two poets. And, in literary terms, that was a very long century indeed. The beginning of modernity, if you don't mind me spouting sloppy slogans.
Today, obscurity is a criterion of academic acceptance. So poor old Georg — actually, I should not say "old": he died very young, at 27, from an overdose right at the bloody beginning of World War I — can be considered a literary innovator after all, even though his poetry had other peaks to scale than those of the learned. And, to me at least, far more dominating ones.
So I wouldn't worry. The lower and better half of your brain may discern meaning where the upper one doesn't. Myth is literally more informative than logic, anyway.
I shouldn't spit barbed wire and rather tell you why Trakl's bow has "thorns", who got hurt by the black thorn, and, indeed, which of the many meanings of the English word "bow" are apt to apply here?
Come on, now. Do you really want me to destroy your very own experiencing of this poem, your looking around its harrowing horizons and sad symbols, your reading something into it that even I hadn't found?
Tell you what. We'll compromise. You read the
first,
the second
and the
third version
of Trakl's Untergang and I'll give you a rough translation of the fourth one. Just in case your German isn't up the snuff; or you can't figure out what the first version has to do with the fifth (bar the title and the oh-my-brother phrasing); or you wonder whether Trakl's idiosyncratic symbols occur in perhaps easier-to-interpret Doppelgängergestalt in the earlier version. So here it goes:
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Georg Trakl:
Untergang
["Vierte Fassung"]
Unter dem dunklen Bogen unserer Schwermut
Spielen am Abend die Schatten verstorbener Engel.
Über den weißen Weiher
Sind die wilden Vögel fortgezogen.
Träumend unter Silberweiden
Kosen unsere Wangen vergilbte Sterne,
Beugt sich die Stirne vergangener Nächte herein.
Immer starrt uns das Antlitz unserer weißen Gräber an.
Leise verfallen die Lüfte am einsamen Hügel,
Die kahlen Mauern des herbstlichen Hains.
Unter Dornenbogen
O mein Bruder steigen wir blinde Zeiger gen Mitternacht.
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Georg Trakl:
Demise
["Fourth version"]
Under the dark bow of our sadness
play in the evening the shadows of angels that died.
Across the white pond
the wild birds have flown away.
Dreaming under white willows,
our cheeks are caressed by fading stars,
and the head of bygone nights bears down on us.
Forever stares at us our white graves' countenance.
Softly decay the lonely winds on the hill,
the balding walls of autumnal forest.
Under thorny bows,
brother of mine, we blind hands are rising toward midnight.
Thanks, you say, but no thanks? Even if the fourth version is more elegiacally lyrical than the fifth? And you indeed suspect that I just inserted it because I liked it better? And you still insist on pointers about what "pointers" in version 5 and "hands" in version 4 mean?
Well, well. But I'll bow to your demand. Even if that is almost as difficult as to guesstimate what "bow" means. "Ihr Wunsch, mein Befehl", as the Teutons say ("Your wish is my command"). It shall be done, on a wing and a prayer. By the seat of my literary pants!
In German, "Zeiger" are, for instance, the "hands" of a clock. "Zeiger" may also mean the "needle" of a measuring device or, for that matter, the "indicator" of how things are progressing. Anton Wildgans, for instance, used the metaphor of "der großen Weltuhr Zeiger" (poorly translated: The hand of the world's gigantic clock) tolling in the great hours of history. Or perhaps it would help to think of Robert Frost's "one luminary clock against the sky". The word "Zeiger" - which happens to be both singular and plural - is derived from the verb "zeigen": to show, display, point at, point out, describe, demonstrate, etc. And yes, I do realize now that my translation failed to drive that point home.
But wait, there may be help for your problem, provided you know some German. Herr Martin Wisser was recently so kind as to send me a voluminous book by Franz Fühmann: [Franz Fühmann: Vor Feuerschlünden — Erfahrungen mit Georg Trakls Gedicht, Hinstorff Verlag, Rostock, 2000 (Neuausgabe)], which explores and interprets, in considerable, learned and eloquent detail, several of Trakl's poems. The book's subject? Well, Georg Trakl is one of it's subjects, obviously, but political psychology and the personal/governmental ideas of truth, guilt and what a human is (or, rather, is supposed to be) also play a role. The book focusses on East Germany before the Wall fell and, in a way, touches the very problems Hölderlin and Trakl touch on this page: the (never to be fulfilled) desire for personal and societal redemption.
But what is interesting here: the book also offers literary analyses of several of Trakl's poems and, in particular, his Untergang.
Indeed, this poem becomes the book's Leitmotiv, serving as an ever-recurring reminder and moral benchmark in the author's excruciating battle between his political faith and his human conscience. Finally, the poem may have also served as the catalyst for his personal redemption (and conflict with the regime of the times) — or so these convoluted confessions suggest.
Fühmann's book was the reason I translated Untergang, and Martin Wisser's gift of it is to credit or blame for that. By the way, Fühmann devotes also several pages to Trakl's Verfall, one of the most beautiful poems I ever translated. It is interesting to compare its stanzas — written in the closely defined and severely demanding poetry pattern of the (Petrarchan) sonnet — with the free-verse work discussed here, with which Trakl fought for five rounds like Jacob wrestling with the Angel.
Perhaps this will illustrate a point that I had made earlier on this page: Not only the translation but also the initial composition of a poem in highly defined prosody may be "faster" and "easier" to achieve than one to which such restrictions do not apply. Even poets - vide Fühmann -
are able to perform faster and smoother by following trellices and templates (not to mention government edicts).
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NOCH SPÄTER GESCHRIEBEN:
Die linke Hand soll auch wissen, was die rechte tut! Im Notfall sogar auf Deutsch! Über Zeit und Raum hinweg!
Sie beschweren sich schon wieder, daß ich die rechte Seite bevorzuge? Ja, würden Sie denn anders handeln?
Außerdem, bedenken Sie doch: Die Gedichte können sehr wohl ohne meine Übersetzungen und Kommentare auskommen. Umgekehrt aber...
Und doch, verehrter Leser, charmante Leserin: Ihretwegen lege ich mich sogar mit der Bibel an. Ich werde lästern und die linke Hand wissen lassen, was die rechte tat.
Zumindestens in groben Zügen und großen Gesten. Ich habe wieder einmal von Rechten wegen Spaß verzapft (geblödelt, wie man so in Österreich sagt), obwohl das Thema — die Unwiederholbarkeit menschlichen Erlebens, die Verformungsfähigkeit des menschlichen Gehirns, und die Gedanken des Ihnen aus der Schule ("Nicht für die Schule, sonder für das Leben lernen wir!") wohlbekannten Heraklit dazu — durchaus auch ein wenig Ernst vertrügen. Aber den hatte ich halt gerade nicht zur Hand.
Was heißen mag: Ich habe auf dieser virtualen Verbalbühne den englischen "Sommernachtstraum" vor den Kulissen der deutschen "Götterdämmerung" spielen lassen. Sozusagen. Und so sorry!
Aber Hilfe ist nah: Bei mir ist gerade im transatlantischen Ping-Pong Herrn Wissers wohlplazierter Smash gelandet — und der erzählt Ihnen, sogar auf Griechisch und verläßlicher als ich das je könnte, von Heraklits Spuren im Wasser.
Wie gesagt, das Thema ist nicht ganz unernst. Im SF Rotwelsch ausgedrückt, zweimal in den gleichen Fluß zu steigen würde ein Zeitbeben erfordern. Naja, Sie wissen schon, Kurt Vonneguts "Timequake", eine plötzliche Verschiebung im Zeitgefüge, nach dem Beispiel eines Erdbebens, bei dem das Erdgefüge sich gegeneinander verschiebt.
Sie meinen, das stimme sogar laut Albert Einstein, nach dem ja (mindestens) vier Dimensionen - eine Zeit- und drei Raumdimensionen - mathematisch gleichwertig sind? Stimmt, stimmt. Diese "Theorie" hat sich in Hunderten von verschiedensten Experimenten als richtig erwiesen. Und nicht umsonst ist sie als "Relativitätstheorie" in die Tagessprache eingegangen. Wenn man nur noch das Hirn da hineinzwängen könnte, d.h. sein sich selber bewußt sein (und für die Physiker die Quantentheorie, wenn's ein bisserl mehr Gral sein darf), dann wäre das Kind geschaukelt. Das wäre ein veritables "Childhood's End" (wie der wohl berühmteste Roman von Arthur C. Clarke, dem Erfinder der Synchronsatelliten, heißt)!
In der SF Welt gibt es genügend Zeit- und Raummaschinen. Zu den frühesten und bekanntesten Zeitmaschinen gehört wohl die von H.G. Wells, aber man findet sie, in verschiedensten Formen, bei den meisten berühmten Science Fiction Autoren. Übrigens findet man sie auch bei dem einen oder andern unserer berühmten theoretischen Physiker. Das ist weiter nicht verwunderlich: Beide, wie auch ihre Leser - oft ja ein und dieselben - arbeiten mit der gleichen Art von Hirn. Und unser Hirn ist immer noch die einzig wirklich funktionierende Zeit- und Raummaschine.
Zugänglich durch Selbstbetrachtung. Bis sich alles auflöst und eines wird. Womit wir wieder bei Heraklit wären — und ich getrost meinen lieben Leser sich selbst und mich meinem Gesundungsschläfchen überlassen kann...
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WRITTEN LATER:
Some highly irreverent und altogether irreconcilable night-thoughts on a constantly changing poetic oxymoron
You did have the feeling, did you not, that somewhere on this page you felt not only being swept down from cliff to cliff into a gaping unknown, or climbing blindly through bowing thorns to a snowy midnight, but also the unmistakable overtones of an apocalypse — or, in historical terms, a destructive future poetically foretold.
Trakl's poem was written in the looming shadow of World War I, a war whose bloody beginning proved his demise. On this website, two other poems to which one could ascribe apocalyptic overtones are
Heym's Der Krieg and
Yeats' The Second Coming. Click the links and read — if you dare. Then take a step back, right into this page of Hölderlin and Trakl. But know that you can never step twice into the same river!
And, if — all is one — and the same to you — try visiting again — Heraclitus of Ephesus — his small Wikiwebsite, well worthy of full exploration — just to realize that all has been with us for a long time — long dashes, mad dashes, dashes for naught and dashes in spite — and all that — much farther back than even the famous and fabled sixth century BC.
[Sorry for extendedly hyphenating like Pavlov's Dog, but yesterday my translatory hopes of sneaking up on some of Emily Dickinson's originals were dashed, and now I am suddenly confronted by my memory's stammering mimicry. Anyway, watch for the new Dickinson translations in November, el mes de los muertos, to which they should better fit — if all goes well, that is...]
But what I wanted to say before I got waylaid by my ambulating and advertising double-spiralled DNA: Great poems are like streams, forever new, forever changing in our times and minds. Or is it our minds themselves that change? No matter, one thing is for sure: You can never step twice into the same poem! "Change alone is unchanging!" says, well, you know who by now.
But what does all of this have to do with Trakl, you ask? Insane as World War # 1 was - not to mention # 2 - we are only a couple of genetic reiterations removed from it, and what has once been carved into our DNA helices, spiralling between below and above — from the unknown abyss of the world's darkest waters to the blinding destiny of a midnight frozen — is bound to occur and reoccur. So why feign being surprised by our time? Wake up and smell the rose-scented apocalypse; get up and watch the world on doomsday TV!
Why I didn't tell you that earlier? Because I felt different, because it didn't occur to me then, that's why. So why now, you ask? Because it happened that I, too, tried to step twice into that forbidden Heraclitian river: I, like you, also read the poems again. And, why, yes, of course they differed from before.
You protest? The poem's words stayed exactly the same? Yes, they did — but I didn't and you didn't either. Change, the 'becoming-different' from what was before, is by definition not an absolute but a relative. If a partner changes, the affair changes, n'est-ce pas? And, in my case, I am afraid Erato with her lyre and one or two of her infinite varieties has done me in again...
But if, as the much plagiarized Heraclitus (ca. 535 - 475 BC) says, "character is destiny" and I'd better "follow the Logos" [nowadays: the Tao], then I must admit, if only in hindsight, that "much [of my] learning does not teach understanding"; yet, in my defense, please do consider that "even sleepers are workers and collaborators on what goes on in the universe", or, as Milton said more than two millennia later, "they also serve who only stand and wait".
And, of necessity, do a bit of rhyming and snoozing in between. Which brings these night thoughts to a close — and me to my well-deserved beauty-sleep. I must gather strength for my next uploading stand-up routine. After all, there is nothing new going on under this sun anyway (change excepted). Or, as the French say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Rest well, dear Reader. If you got that far, you have surely deserved it...
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