{"id":307,"date":"2010-10-11T06:25:59","date_gmt":"2010-10-11T06:25:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nabourke.com\/?p=307"},"modified":"2010-10-11T06:25:59","modified_gmt":"2010-10-11T06:25:59","slug":"translating-rilke-the-first-duino-elegy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/?p=307","title":{"rendered":"Translating Rilke: The (First) Duino Elegy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lots of people speak about the difficulty of translating the first line of Rilke’s Duino Elegies<\/em>, perhaps because it’s so well known (Wer, wenn ich schriee, h\u00f6rte mich denn aus der Engel\/Ordnungen?<\/em>). It’s a little like the opening line of Don Quixote<\/em>, which can be used as a litmus test for any new translation of the work as a whole.<\/p>\n

For me, however, one of Rilke’s most intriguing lines in the first elegy is the deceptively simple: Und das Totsein ist m\u00fchsam<\/em>,<\/em> which literally means ‘and [the] death is hard\/hard work\/laborious’ or perhaps, if you’re willing to transform the noun Totsein<\/em> into an adverb: ‘and [being] dead is hard\/hard work\/laborious’. <\/p>\n

I had a bit of a wrangle with the word Totsein<\/em>, and chatted with Inga about it. Totsein<\/em> is one of those German words that’s comprised of two other words joined together. The first part is the noun (der) Tot<\/em> – death – and the second the verb sein<\/em> – the future tense of the verb ‘to be’. One of the examples for the verb sein<\/em> in Inga’s dictionary is a translation of Hamlet’s famous line ‘To be or not to be’, translated into German as: sein oder Nichtsein<\/em>. Nichtsein<\/em> has a simlilar compound structure to Totsein<\/em>: a noun formed of the verb sein<\/em>, and another word (the adverb nicht<\/em>: no or not). So, Totsein<\/em> is a compound or hybrid noun, indicating the state of being dead. Or, perhaps, Being-dead.<\/p>\n

I’ve been thinking about the gender of the noun ‘death’ in German (its masculine in German, but feminine in the Romance languages, like French and Spanish) – because I’ve been thinking, and writing, about the grammar of death in my work in progress. I’ve been thinking about whether you should translate Totsein<\/em> in this line from Rilke as verb or noun, and whether doing so changes the reader’s understanding of the phrase. The capitalisation indicates the noun form, but plenty of translators have opted for the verbal phrase ‘being dead’. It seems to me that you have to make a choice, but choosing results in such different phrases, with enormously different resonances! Here’s how some have translated this line: Lieshman and Spender go for a very rhythmic interpretation, and opt for the verb that suggests death is a state of being:<\/p>\n

And it’s hard, being dead,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(J B Leishman and the poet Stephen Spender collaborated on a translation, published in 1939, which was for a long time the benchmark translation of this particular work. Leishman polished up both the First Elegy and the Ninth when he republished the Elegies as part of his Rilke: Selected Poems<\/em> in 1960.) While Snow is more literal-minded and prosaic, even Protestant, in his interpretation of m\u00fchsam<\/em>, and opts for the noun form that suggest death is an entity whom the dead are, perhaps, answerable to:<\/p>\n

And death demands labor,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Elsewhere, such as in the next phrase of the poem, Snow is oddly colloquial: using the phrase ‘tying up loose ends’ to translate Rilke’s und voller Nachholn<\/em>. Norris and Keele opt for the more verbal orientation:<\/p>\n

And being dead is so arduous,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

which somehow, to my ear, sounds like a complaint rather than the cool statement of fact I get from Rilke’s line. Stephen Cohn plumps for:<\/p>\n

And death is demanding,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Echoing the prosaic Snow, but choosing the noun form. The team of Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebman translate the line as:<\/p>\n

And being dead is toilsome,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is Rilke evoking death as an almost anthropomorphised being – a demanding creature as Cohn or Snow perhaps imply – or as a state into which we enter, like being lost or being happy, or being in pain? My sense is that its the second – the notion of being dead – that is closer to the original poem, but there is so much to contemplate here, not just in the shift from the noun to the verb – from death as an entity to death as a process or state of being – but also in the interpretation of m\u00fchsam<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The German-English dictionaries I consulted give the meaning of m\u00fchsam<\/em> as: arduous, laborious, painstaking, or difficult, and suggest it can be either an adverb or adjective. Creative use of the thesaurus might lead you to toilsome, but it seems a forced translation to me. I respect Snow’s workmanlike, almost denuded translation – perhaps the most literal – but I prefer the Lieshman and Spender, myself, perhaps because I’m partial to its more poetic diction. And to the creative, more courageous inversion of Rilke’s syntax, which seems simple but hums in the ear. The rest of this passage is:<\/p>\n

Und das Totsein ist m\u00fchsam
\nund voller Nachholn, da\u00df man allm\u00e4hlich ein wenig
\nEwigkeit sp\u00fcrt. – Aber Lebendige machen
\nalle den Fehler, da\u00df sie zu stark unterscheiden.
\nEngel (sagt man) w\u00fc\u00dften oft nicht, ob sie unter
\nLebenden gehn oder Toten. Die ewige Str\u00f6mung
\nrei\u00dft durch beide Bereiche alle Alter
\nimmer mit sich und \u00fcbert\u00f6nt sie in beiden.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which Leishman and Spender translate as:<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s hard, being dead,
\nand full of retrieving before one begins to perceive
\na little eternity. – All of the living, though,
\nmake the mistake of drawing too sharp distinctions.
\nAngels (it\u2019s said) would be often unable to tell
\nwhether they moved among living or dead. The eternal
\ntorrent whirls all the ages through either realm
\nfor ever, and sounds above their voices in both.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"An<\/a>Such a gorgeous, and strange passage from – yes, I know – one of Rilke’s less-loved works. And yet, I can’t help but adore Rilke’s image of the angels who are uncertain whether they are moving among the dead or the living. And I like Leishman’s translation of Nachholn<\/em> as ‘retrieving’, though there’s also something fitting about Cohn’s translation of it as ‘to atone for’ (he translates the phrase as: we have much to atone for<\/em>). [The dictionaries I have access to suggest that the transitive verb nachholen<\/em> can mean ‘to catch up on’ or ‘to make up for’, comprised of nach: ‘to\/after’, and holen: ‘to fetch or get’ in the transitive, or ‘catch’ in the reflexive.]<\/p>\n

Perhaps, as Rilke himself states near the beginning of this same work:<\/p>\n

Engel nicht, Menschen nicht,
\nund die findigen Tiere merken es schon,
\nda\u00df wir nicht sehr verl\u00e4\u00dflich zu Haus sind
\nin der gedeuteten Welt.<\/span><\/p>\n

(<\/span>Not angels, not men;
\nand even the noticing beasts are aware
\nthat we don’t feel very securely at home
\nin this interpreted world.)<\/p>\n

[J B Leishman translation]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which do you prefer?<\/p>\n

Today, I was writing about a different section from the same poet:<\/p>\n

Yesterday, my mother asked me to read to her from an old, bilingual copy of Rilke\u2019s Duino Elegies<\/em>. The German facing off against Snow\u2019s English translation. My mother was not a reader of German \u2013 it was French she had loved, and Latin \u2013 but she enjoyed bilingual editions and collected them when she could:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2026But listen to the wind\u2019s breathing,<\/em>
\nThat uninterrupted news that forms of silence.<\/em>
\nIt\u2019s rustling toward you now from all the youthful dead.<\/em><\/td>\n		\u2026aber das Wehende h\u00f6re,<\/em>
\nDie ununterbrochene Nachricht, die aus Stille sich bildet.<\/em>
\nEs raucht jetzt von jenen jungen Toten zu dir.<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Sitting in the quiet room, with the windows closed and the air conditioning humming, and my mother lying on the lounge, her eyes closed, I had noticed again how powerful\u00a0 the gendered grammar was in his work, and how much of the poetry was lost when they were brought over into English. The old conundrums come into play: how to communicate in an ungendered tongue the subtle ways in which gender shapes your sense of a noun’s meaning, whether it is worth trying. Rilke’s neuter wind, feminine silence, masculine death become in English just wind and silence and death. But you cannot write that she<\/em> is rustling toward you: to do so would suggest an emphasis, a metaphoric gendering, that is more insistent than that of the original. How strange, too, to bring Rilke over into one of the Romance languages. In my mother\u2019s beloved French, the genders of the words would shift: the wind would become masculine, the silence masculine, the death feminine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lots of people speak about the difficulty of translating the first line of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, perhaps because it’s so well known (Wer, wenn ich schriee, h\u00f6rte mich denn aus der Engel\/Ordnungen?). It’s a little like the opening line of Don Quixote, which can be used as a litmus test for any new translation of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[175,179,167,182],"tags":[261,262],"class_list":["post-307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dying-in-the-first-person","category-on-translation","category-on-writing","category-work-in-progress","tag-duino-elegies","tag-rainer-maria-rilke"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4LH1G-4X","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}