Fido the Yak

Nathanael at Rhine River posted some thoughts on poet Heinrich Heine. In following up some links, the poem "Still ist die Nacht" from Die Heimkehr caught my attention. (Schubert fans may know this as Der Doppelgänger.) I don't like any of the several translations I've seen, so I thought I'd offer one of my own.

Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen,

In diesem Hause wohnte mein Schatz;

Sie hat schon längst die Stadt verlassen,

Doch steht noch das Haus auf demselben Platz.

Da steht auch ein Mensch und starrt in die Höhe,

Und ringt die Hände, vor Schmerzensgewalt;

Mir graust es, wenn ich sein Antlitz sehe —

Der Mond zeigt mir meine eigne Gestalt.

Du Doppelgänger! du bleicher Geselle!

Was äffst du nach mein Liebesleid,

das mich gequält auf dieser Stelle,

So manche Nacht, in alter Zeit?

The night is still, the avenues are quiet,

This is the house where my dear heart lived.

She left the city long ago,

but the house still stands in the same place.

There's also a person standing there, staring aloft,

Wringing his hands in violent agony;

I'm horrified when I see his face—

The moon is showing me my own figure.

You Doppelgänger! You ghastly fellow!

Why are you aping the pangs of love

That tormented me on this spot

So many a night, in a time gone by.

I'm not fully satisfied with my translation. I sacrificed meter and rhyme, and perhaps my word choice is too pedestrian. The syntagmatic structure of the poem largely survives, but I made some flips and grammatical changes to render it more like ordinary American English. My sense of the poem is that Heine is taking up romantic themes, with echoes of courtly poetry, in rather plain language. I read it as having a bourgeois sensibility, by which I mean the setting, tone, and what I'll call the construction of desire speak to a kind of middle class urban existence. There's also an embeddedness in a literary world that may be described as bourgeois, but I won't be going there.

Some particulars

• "Avenues" for "Gassen." "Alleys" is too surreptitious, "streets" too broad.


• "Dear heart" for "Schatz." There's no literal "heart," but a figurative sweetheart, and a suggestion of something that should be safeguarded or cared for ("Schutz"). For the poem "sweetheart" is too saccharine, "beloved" too sober or stilted perhaps. "Dear Heart" may be more prevalent in some regions of the US than others. It sounds okay to my ear, but not perfect.


• "Aloft" for "in die Höhe." Some translators have used "into space," which is tempting, but deflects from the reading that the person has his gazed fixed upon something in particular. "Upwards" would be a natural choice, but I do think there's a sense of staring off into space as well as directing the gaze up towards the (phantasmal, remembered) beloved, so I went with "aloft" as a compromise. The off-rhyme with Sehe suggests Ehe ("marriage", the "pair" is missing) and, to my ear, eher ("ere").


• "Violent agony"/"figure" for "Schmerzensgewalt"/"Gestalt"--my own poetic sensibility, in lieu of rhyme. "Anguish" might be a good choice as well.


• "Face" for "Antlitz." I might have said "aspect" or perhaps "visage" to mark the difference between Antlitz and the more common Gesicht, but "face" works fine. I just can't bring myself to accept "countenance," but I suppose readers in the Nineteenth Century wouldn't have thought it was so strange.


• Platz/Stelle. Platz is a place like a location, a piece of real estate, not really the perspective of an inhabitant. Stelle is place like a position, a standing or a setting. Idiomatically, either could be a "spot." "Auf der Stelle" means "on the spot," i.e., immediately. To render "auf dieser Stelle" as "in this position" seemed wrong, but it's an aspect I think of what Heine is saying. It is place embodied, lived, felt.


• "Doppelgänger". If I had to avoid the German altogether, I might say "spitting image." Thankfully I don't have to. The idea of a walking double is a key element of the idea here, in my view. And the reference to other works, a folk belief and a cultural tradition.


• "Ghastly" for "bleich." I really think Heine means "ghastly" in the sense that "pale" doesn't signify strongly enough. This is a ghost.


• "Geselle." Speakers of some common varieties of English may choose "mate" instead of "fellow," in which case I might say "You ghastly mate!"


• "Äffen." We don't use "ape" as verb much anymore, but I think it's preferable to "mock" because of the sense of there being a figure, like a person, but not exactly. By reading "Gestalt" as "figure" instead of "shape" or "form," I'm privileging my own reading.


• "Liebesleid." One thinks of "Liebeslied," "love song." Now, if you can switch a diphthong in one place, you can switch it in another--"Leibeslied" ("song of the body") and "Leibesleid"" ("suffering of the body"). "Pangs of love" is hardly ideal. It may be a sentiment like "Why are you mocking my broken heart?," i.e. a bit ironic. But I'm not quite sure.


• "Gone by" for "alter." I wanted to say "another time" which would have been deceptive on my part. The meaning is "in old time," or "in time past." The phrase should parallel "pangs of love," so I'll take "time gone by" for the consonance and the assonance.

In many ways reading and writing seem to be aspects of the same activity. If there is an essential difference, can we understand it in a way that doesn't do violence to the integral connectedness of the two? And what does translation reveal about the connectedness/disjuncture? I'm not adept enough at translation to speak authoratitively on the matter, but from my vantage point, it seems impossible to translate poetry in all of its fullness and resonance without substantially rewriting it. If the tranlatability of langauge is a given--and I don't believe that's an unreasonable premise--then it must be understood as grounded in the power of speech (parole), not language, but not divorced from language, announcing language.

If translation is a kind of address, skopic, enunciatory, a report on the current state of intelligibilities, what then is poetry?

As with all things l'écriture Yak, cum grano salis, yada yada yada.

posted by Fido the Yak at 5:41 AM.