in a strange language...

Hilde Domin

Exile


The mouth dying
The mouth twisted
The mouth trying
to say the word right
in a strange language.


~


Else Lasker-Schüler

My Blue Piano


At home I have a blue piano.
But I can’t play a note.

It’s been in the shadow of the cellar door
Ever since the world went rotten.

Four starry hands play harmonies.
The Woman in the Moon sang in her boat.
Now only rats dance to the clanks.

The keyboard is in bits.
I weep for what is blue. Is dead.

Sweet angels, I have eaten
Such bitter bread. Push open
The door of heaven. For me, for now—

Although I am still alive—
Although it is not allowed.


         (Trans. Eavan Boland)

                – from After Every War, E. Boland ,ed.

*

Two devastating poems about the ravaged scale of war – and what remains. These works carry the reader into that haunting and silent place where words are not possible.

hovers...

Paul Celan

Fadensonnen

[Celan reads his work.]





Fadensonnen
über der grauschwarzen Ödnis.
Ein baum-
hoher Gedanke
greift sich den Lichtton: es sind
noch Lieder zu singen jenseits
der Menschen.


~


Thread suns
above the grey-black wilderness.
A tree-
high thought
tunes in to light’s pitch: there are
still songs to be sung on the other side
of mankind.

            (Trans. Michael Hamburger)


Threadsuns
over the gray-black wasteness
A tree-
high thought
strikes the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
humankind.

            (Trans. John Felstiner)

*

I post both translations because of the variation, at least for me, in tone between the sets of closing lines.

Sometimes, what we want or what we hope for cannot – will not – break away from where we are – from what we are – in all this living. I’m fairly certain that the poem eludes both translations.

waiting...

The point is that translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different—not merely another—reading. The same poem cannot be read twice.

                              – Eliot Weinberger, from 19 Ways of Looking
                                       at Wang Wei (Asphodel, 1987)
*

This little book, with commentary by Weingberger and Octavio Paz, focuses on various translations of one four-line poem by Wang Wei. But – this is not merely a book of translations or about the translating process. Its true force is about reading, about our approach to language. The different versions of the poem illustrate just how cluttered our reading lives are. We don’t read as much as we scan. And as for writing, most never move past the surface of what is there – waiting.

If you want to be a better writer – or reader, for that matter – spend time with this book.