(from "The Seventh Elegy")
No longer, voice. No longer let wooing send forth your cry:
you're past that. Even though your cry would be clear as a bird's
when first Spring bears him aloft, almost forgetting
that he's a cautious creature and not an unsheathed heart
being flung into brightness, in passionate skies.
Like him, with all his art, you'd also woo--: invisibly,
so that some silent mate might learn of you, and,
as she listened, a reply would slowly wake and grow warm--
the kindled complement of your own ardent feeling
3 comments:
Conrad:
It would help to know who the translator is.
I tend not to respond well to thorny translations of dense verse.
Certain kinds of awkwardness seem inevitable, so I'm left pondering what the original grace was, which the translation can't really duplicate.
Rilke may be one of those poets whose work resists translation.
Curtis,
you've got me wondering about translation, too. I'll have a go myself at the first few lines of "The Seventh Elegy" (relying on a very elementary knowledge of German and my old Langenscheidt dictionary). First the German text, then my translation,one striving for a literalism consonant with poetic sense. I'll end with a few brief comments:
Werbung nicht mehr, nicht Werbung, entwachsene Stimme,
sei deines Schreies Natur; zwar schrieest du rein wie der Vogel,
wenn ihn die Jahreszeit aufhebt, die steigende, beinah vergessend,
daß er ein kümmerndes Tier und nicht nur ein einzelnes Herz sei,
das sie ins Heitere wirft, in die innigen Himmel.
____________
Don't let wooing (never again wooing!)be the form of your cry, nor ever its originating voice; indeed, you'd cry pure as the bird when the season carries him up, up, almost forgetting that he's a grieving creature and not a solitary heart, cast into very serenity, into heaven's depths.
______________________
Firstly, the translator of the original text (Edward Snow)has fractured a complete opening statement (expressed as a wish), leaving the reader with a succession of competing grammatical constructions where Rilke intended only one: as a result the integrity of "Werbung" (grief), indicated by position and emphasis through repetition, has been broken. The reader is now distracted by 'bird flight' when it's "Werbung" (speaker's anguished wooing) Rilke gives primacy to;
secondly, tampering too loosely with Rilke's own syntax--which Snow has done a second time (at "Even though your cry...") by substituting a 'fragment' for what is a complete thought in the original-- results in a perhaps too 'romanticized' view of the lyricist's anguished voice desperately trying for release from the bonds of his earthly misery. Precisely that troubling sense of arrested flight needs to be kept and can't be in translation that doesn't respect the form of the original. The bird of poetry simply rises too freely, too untroubled by the causes of the anguished voice; and
thirdly, Snow's translation has left us (for the reasons above-stated) with a Rilke the Romantic rather than the more properly Modernist figure that he really is. Heidegger (in "What Are Poets For?")has aptly called Rilke the poet who's given us poetic song that "lingers over their destitute land." And that sense is precisely missing in Snow's translation.
Here's a better looking translation (mine);
Don't let wooing (never again wooing! be the form of your cry, nor ever its originating voice;
indeed, you'd cry pure as the bird
when the season carries him up, up, almost forgetting
that he's a grieving creature and not a solitary heart,
cast into very serenity, into heaven's depths.
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