Leisure

The Germans say it's from Goethe:

Entschuldigen Sie, dass ich Ihnen einen langen Brief schreibe, für einen kurzen habe ich keine Zeit.

 The Americans say it's from Mark Twain:

 I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

The French say it's from Voltaire, but it's from Blaise Pascal:

Je n’ai fait celle-ci [cette lettre] plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

I love that it's "loisir": leisure. And that it's Pascal, whose famous formulation about the troubles of humanity also implicitly touches on "loisir", here as "repos":

Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.

If only we had the time to sit quietly and write shorter letters.

Snowdrops and Summer Snowflakes, Drooping

Another moment in Reginald Shepherd's Fata Morgana that caught my attention was this, from the poem "Snowdrops and Summer Snowflakes, Drooping":

The river is silted with sentiments, Ophelia
sings flowers in hell to all the goodnight
ladies martyred to plots ...

That makes this poem a much better version of one I wrote long ago, "Gretchen and Ophelia," which toyed around with the similarities between Gretchen in Goethe's Faust and Ophelia, the way that they die over and over again on stages all over the world.

Where is Hamlet being played tonight? Who is playing Hamlet? Who Ophelia? Where is Faust being played? And who is playing Gretchen? Questions like the claim that somewhere a radio station is playing a Beatles tune as you read this. Which station? What tune? "Things We Said Today" would be my choice.

Shepherd continues with all the things he would give Ophelia, all the flowers, and concludes with this:

... What I wouldn't give
to hear her shut up that infernal singing,
walk out of sullen water open-eyed.

To Richard Boyle

When I was reading Alexander Pope a few weeks ago (see my previous posts here and here), I was struck by a point made twice in his poem "To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington" (Boyle was an architect):

You show us, Rome was glorious, not profuse,
And pompous buildings once were things of use.

Or, as Pope puts it later:

'Tis use alone that sanctifies expense,
And splendor borrows all her rays from sense.

I was reminded of Goethe's remarks in Spoleto, at the end of the same century, with the same emphasis on the utility of Roman architecture, in contrast to the alleged uselessness of the architecture of Pope and Goethe's respective contemporaries.

Goethe's birthday

Thanks to Greg Rappleye for the reminder!

Terni, October 27 [1786], evening
I climbed Spoleto, and was on the aqueduct, which is also a bridge from one mountain to another. Through all their centuries, the ten brick arches which reach across the valley have stood there so quietly, and the water still flows in every corner of Spoleto. I have now seen three works by the ancients; they all have the same great meaning, a second nature serving civic ends. That is how they built, and there they are: the amphitheater, the temple, and the aqueduct. Only now do I feel how justified my hatred of all willful things was, the winter barracks on the Weissenstein, for example, a nothing around nothing, a monstrous layer of icing. It is the same with a thousand other things. They are now all as if stillborn, for whatever does not have a true inner existence has no life, and cannot be great, and cannot become great.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, tr. Andrew Shields)

Note:
On the plaque by the aqueduct in Spoleto, there is an ellipsis in this quotation. The passage about "den Winterkasten auf dem Weissenstein" and the "thousand other things" has been omitted, presumably because nobody in Italy knows what the "Winterkasten" is. In my edition of Goethe's Italienische Reise, however, there is a note which identifies the "Winterkasten" as the Octogon in the Wilhelmshöhe Park in Kassel (my wife's hometown). The baroque buildings in Wilhelmshöhe, especially the grandiose Octogon topped by a towering statue of Hercules, would presumably seem "willful" to Goethe because they do not "serve civic ends."

Ashes for Breakfast

The taximeter skips ahead twenty cents at a time—money it takes
Forever to earn if what you do for a living is turn hexameters.

Durs Grünbein, "Berlin Posthumous," tr. Michael Hofmann, from Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, 2006

I do not often read German poetry in translation in English, because I tend to want to read the original instead. But I knew I wanted to read this book someday, as I am a great fan of Durs Grünbein's poetry; I wanted to know how his work comes across for those who read English but not German.

If I was ambivalent about reading the book, though, the explanation is clear: I spent five years in the late nineties translating a lot of Grünbein myself. In a sense, I learned how to translate by translating Grünbein. When the moment came for a collection to be published, the initial proposal was for Michael Hofmann and me to co-translate the book. When Michael and I talked about the idea, we decided it did not make sense: our approaches to translating Grünbein were just too different. (One symbol of these differences is that I translate Grünbein's rhymed works as rhymed poems and Michael does not.) When given the choice between Shields and Hofmann, FSG and Faber and Faber went for Hofmann.

So I approached Ashes for Breakfast with some trepidation: what if I hated the book? Would that just be a sign of resentment?

Well, I don't hate the book; I love it. It is a great pleasure to read Hofmann's translations and to imagine friends of mine with no German finally being able to get a sense of what makes Grünbein such a remarkable poet. I especially recommend the sequence "Variations on No Theme." And here's something I like from "Memorandum," to go with the quotation from "Berlin Posthumous" above:

Poets, so they tell us, are awkward customers
Not up to much. Even laughter has a keener, full-throated edge
When they're not around. They're not very amusing.

Poets may or may not be amusing (many blogging poets are very amusing), but Grünbein's often bitter humor is.

A line from the title poem made me wonder about how newspapers are printed these days (while also reminding me of Anthony Hopkins and his ironing of the newspaper in The Remains of the Day):

I have breakfasted on ashes, the black
Dust that comes off newspapers, from the freshly printed columns.

I don't think newspapers have that problem anymore, do they? My two newspapers, Die Basler Zeitung and The International Herald Tribune, do not seem to leave marks on my fingers anymore!

I do realize that many translators feel that they should not try to translate rhyme and meter, as the attempt to do so might distort the sense of the poem, but I do miss the rhyme and meter of the original. Some of Grünbein's poems heighten their dark comedy with the rhyme, and the line I began with about hexameters seems odd if the poem is not in hexameters. (It also contains a lovely echo of Goethe's image, in the Roman Elegies, of tapping out hexameters on the back of the woman he is sleeping with.)

Yet one poem in Hofmann's selection did make me wonder further about the translations in this book in general:

BUBBLING STREAM

with old auto tires, broken glass,
household junk, and the bones
of a small fort

of polystyrene and crap,
where, on a lagoon of oil,
with cotorni of bubbles

a yellow plastic duck
bobs round on its axis,
caught by low-lying branches.

Come,
waves of crystal waters, come.

I like this poem. It happens to be one I know very well in the original version, because I once planned (and even began writing) an essay on Grünbein that was to begin with it (and I did write a poem called "Waves of Clear Waters" about how I first discovered Grünbein). And of course I translated the poem myself:

BUSY BROOK

with old car tires, glass,
garbage, and an imitation
of a small weir

of cellophane and junk
in which amidst the foam
exposed on a film of oil

a green plastic fish
sways between the twigs,
spins lightly on its axis.

Come
waves of clear water, come.

Leaving aside all the other differences between the two translations (and perhaps can see why an edition with Michael and me as co-translators was not a good idea), many of which I did not notice until I went back to my version, I immediately noticed that Grünbein's "green plastic fish" had become Hofmann's "yellow plastic duck." In part, I noticed this because a comic version of the thesis of my unwritten essay was that Grünbein is a (green) fish, and my thesis does not make sense if the English poem turns the fish into a (yellow) duck. (The serious issue the essay would have addressed is the near-absence of the first-person singular in Grünbein's first three books and its partial appearance in his fourth.)

But more seriously, the shift from fish to duck raises two concerns for me: first, I do not understand the motivation for the altering of the image, and it seems to change the metaphorical implications of the poem quite considerably. The toy may be plastic, but a fish floating on the water is dead, while a duck floating on the water is not.

Secondly, and more generally, it makes me wonder whether Hofmann has altered Grünbein's imagery elsewhere in the book as well. Is this move from fish to fowl an isolated case? Or is it a symbol of Hofmann's translation procedure in general? If so, then those who discover Grünbein through this book might wonder whether the scaly Grünbein of the original German has become feathery instead. Or to put it another way, Hofmann has produced a wonderful collection of poems that are a great pleasure to read, but they might be more "yellow" than "green" (as in Grünbein).