Beauty. A Very Short Introduction by Roger Scruton is a real revelation. Sir Roger V. Scruton convincingly shows that beauty is not something we can do without. Beauty has a deeper meaning than just being playful bells and whistles. Beauty, he shows, can be encountered in nature and created in art. Beauty is, so to speak, the reverberant sound of the divine creation and an essential endowment of. If it were absent from the world, we wouldn’t feel at home.

Scruton also hints at a disquieting development in art, music, and poetry: the flight from beauty, i.e. the deconstruction of beauty. And he gives appalling examples thereof.

One can only hope that all those involved in the business of art, music and poetry, such as stage directors, conductors, writers, editors, publishers, patrons and alike, read „Beauty,“ because it may enlighten them and prevent them from casting out beauty from the realm of art. The hope is also that all those involved in politics, economics, and so on, read „Beauty,“ in order to sharpen their eyes for nature’s beauty and prevent them from destroying it.

In fact, everyone ought to read the book. It is beautifully written! (Amadé Esperer)

Translating poems or rendering them or smuggling verses?

Lyrical poetry is undoubtedly considered one of the most challenging genres in the field of translation. Some even go as far as to hold that poems actually cannot be translated into another language without a considerable loss. There seem to be two extreme positions, one held by poets, such as Robert Frost, who deemed the major characteristic, the very essence, of lyrical poetry to be exactly what is being lost in translation. In sharp contrast, the other position, taken by poets such as Yehuda Amichai[1], holds that a poem should be as robust as the Bible to lends itself to translation in possibly all existing languages.

Between these rather theoretical poles, the real business of poetry translation is taking place on an everyday basis as can be judged by taking a look at the catalogues of the big publishing houses. Interestingly, one of the largest markets in this regard is the German book market whose yearly output of poetry translations can be inspected at the annual bookfair in Frankfurt. In 2016, for example, 12 % of all published books were translations, among which some 5700 publications were literary translations[2].

However, you may also find enough poor poetry translations there, especially if we talk about lyrical poetry. Thus, translating poetry well, or, shall we say, adequately, does not seem to be that easy after all. In fact, this was already clear to authors of former epochs. Thus, the Romantic poets, who increasingly enriched the German-speaking world with translations from other languages, were well aware of the problems associated with translation. That literary translation also always smuggles something of the culture of the language to be translated had already been stated by Friedrich Schleiermacher on the occasion of his Plato translations.

Obviously, to know how to speak a language well enough, though being a prerequisite for any acceptable poetry translation, does not suffice to render a good translation. You also need to know the peculiar idioms of the source language and your own language to hope for an adequate translation. The idioms are the frozen memory of a culture and, thus, the soul, so to speak, that inspires life into a language’s vocabulary and syntax, the latter making up its body. However, even, if you are an expert in idioms, this is no guarantee that you master a poem’s translation well.

As a poet, who is also a poetry translator, I actually tend to believe, translation of poems is an art of its own right and most poems can be translated only well enough, if you take into account their specific sound and rhythm, where „sound“ includes alliterations, associations, rhymes and word play. Although, none of these characteristics usually can be translated from one language into another in a 1:1 relationship, it is nevertheless possible to emulate these features in the „translation product“. Therefore, one could argue, that it does not only take a translator, but a poet to adequately translate another poet’s poetry. A poet-translator is not only familiar with the various poetic devices, but he thinks as a poet, which enables him to better understand the other poet’s intentions. So, what about having two poets, two native speakers of different tongues, sit together to work on their poems‘ translation in a common effort? Wouldn’t that be an unsurpassable ideal? Unsurpassable, really?

There may be even something better: Having two poets sit together with a bilingual translator, who may act as a mediator in cases of doubt.

In fact, several such triples recently sat together to translate their poems from German to English and vice versa. The products of their common endeavor has now appeared as a bilingual book with the Wunderhorn Verlag Heidelberg. The book’s title “VERSschmuggel} {reVERSuble” alludes to the editor’s philosophy: “Smuggling verses does not happen along regulated linguistic paths, but is a complex process that requires linguistic resourcefulness and acts past the structural differences of the other language …”. To accomplish this verse smuggling the poets recounted each other the stories behind their poems and then, with the assistance of the translator, „reinvented them in morphological, syntactical and phonetical evasive maneuvers“.

Well, what did these poet-poet-translator triplets really achieve?

Reading through the book one is really amazed and positively surprised, how well the groups performed in creating far more than just simple transmissions of the original poems. They really succeeded in the majority of cases in rendering, through their translations, the sound, the form, and the content of the original poems so well, that the resulting (translated) poem can be seen as an adequate equivalent of the original. Sometimes the translation, i.e. the novel poem, grasping the spirit of the original version even seems a bit funnier and wittier than its original:

..,die Sorge

Des Rauchmelders füllte die Küche zu zwei Dritteln aus

die Relation vom Rad zum Vogel Pfau, vom Glanz zur Angst

 

kein Wohnungsbrand fände hier Platz, also Vorsicht; wenn

ich, was dich nicht betrifft, irgendwann ausfalle

oder ein kraftvolles Glühwürmchen sich in der Nacht

finster auf einen Lichtschalter setzt

um auf den Finger zu warten, das Licht

…

 

The song of the smoke alarm fills two-thirds of the kitchen,

the exact ratio of wheel to peacock, of sparkle to fear,

 

but no easy fire finds room here, so watch out! Though

I am of no concern to you, I could malfunction

like a firefly landing

on a light switch in the night

waiting for the finger to end it, for light

…

In summary, the German-English poetry collection VERSschmuggel / reVERSEIBL is not only a highly interesting document of a renowned poetry workshop, but also a great aesthetic pleasure. Among the eight poets, who took part in this workshop and significantly contributed to its success, were: Brenda Shaugnessy, Sandra Meek, Jericho Brown, Linda Gregerson, Mario Chard, Ily Kaminsky, Anja Kampmann, Yevgeniy Breyger, Georg Less, Ulrich Koch, Ronya Othmann and Dagmara Krauss. Contributing to this achievement, however, were also the translators involved in this project, whose biographies unfortunately do not appear in the volume. This is regrettable as it runs opposite to the current trend of making the traditionally invisible translators more visible.

Nevertheless, the editors Karolina Golimowska, Alexander Glumz and Thomas Wohlfahrt, as well as the publishers, Manfred Metzner and Angelika Andruchowicz, are much to be lauded for publishing such a high-quality product.

[1] Esperer HDA. In: Jehuda Amichai. Gedichte, Königshausen & Neumann 2018

[2] https://www.dw.com/de/die-weltliteratur-wird-von-%C3%BCbersetzern-gemacht-internationaler-%C3%BCbersetzertag-2017/a-40754685

The human element. A piece of fundamental poetry.

For contemporary poets Adorno’s dictum „To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric[1]” is barbaric. Therefore, none of them holds to it, since:

 

„So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee[2].

 

Poetry, like any good literature, is not a luxury, but together with food, drink and sex a fundamental human need. Indeed, writing and understanding poetry distinguishes us as a cultural being from animals. Therefore, as Shakespeare so beautifully put it in his famous sonnet, lyric poetry will exist as long as there are human beings who can read and write.

Lyric poetry as a highly reflexive art can unearth and tame the unspeakable and, thus, has always advantageously participated in the literary process of dealing and coping with great human traumas and catastrophes. In this sense, lyrical testimonies of atrocities and genocides can be found in all cultures from all centuries as written testimonies prove. Some of the best-known poetic descriptions of these events are found in the Tanach resp. the Old Testament[3].

At the time when Adorno’s apodictic statement was uttered, it was already rendered obsolete by lyrical practice. Thus, already in 1945, the later Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz had written the poem Poor Christ sees the Ghetto and many other famous poets from the German-speaking world were to follow like Paul Celan whose Todesfuge, written between 1944 and 1945, was published in 1947, and Nelly Sachs, whose collection In den Wohnungen des Todes appeared in 1949[4].

Adorno reaffirmed his statement and only much later tried to soften it: „The perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the martyred person has to roar; therefore, it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz no poem could be written. But the less cultural question of whether it was still possible to live after Auschwitz is not wrong, whether those who escaped by chance and rightfully should have been murdered (sic!) should be allowed to live.”  It may be well possible that Adorno, like others, saw the dangers of aesthetic stylization in the lyrical and artistic treatment of human suffering: „with this alone, injustice is done to the victims, while no art would stand up to justice”. Others see the problem of post-Auschwitz art for the generations to come differently in that art, including poetry, has a potentially conciliatory effect: „Of all the problems that writers and artists face after the Holocaust, none seems more serious and paralyzing than the dilemma that any depiction of the Holocaust is potentially conciliatory. “[5]

Yet, we who are now aware of and shaped by many genocides ask today: Is it not precisely literature and art that restores dignity to the victims of genocide, war and expulsion, whether they are Armenians, Jews, Sinti and Roma, Palestinians, Tutsis or Kosovars, precisely through an empathic aestheticization that affects the individual?

And is it not the case that literature, even poetry, can help and have a reconciling effect on both the victims and perpetrators?

However, as Confucius put it, a poet must always bear in mind that, “if the terms are not right, the words are not right, and if the words are not right, the works do not come into being, morality and art do not flourish”[6]. It is precisely for this reason that the poet must be careful to use the right terms so that suffering is described in words that restore dignity to the victims and enable the survivors to remember with empathy.

To some extent Ellen Hinsey has impressively succeeded in achieving this goal in her bilingual collection Des Menschen Element / The Human Element recently published with Matthes & Seitz.

The work begins with lapidary statements, each in short strophic blocks consisting of two or three lines, imitating elegiac distichs and recalling archaic inscriptions:

…

In that moment, on that edge from that realm which

Lifts potential into being – so that actual

 

Approaches, nears embodiment; so that, at that exact

Impress of light everything ignites: the bare

 

Awkwardness of birch, the sour sturdiness of pine,

Grasses still heaped up, hills pinned in frost –

…

 

In this way, the poet continues page after page with these metrically completely free verses, and eventually the main focus of thought becomes clearer:

 

1.

Condition

About the Hand, nothing has changed. When its moment

Comes, it is deferential and compliant.

 

Nature

Yet, despite its mindlessness, it is always convinced of its

Righteous authority.

 

3.

Genesis

It lifts each time out of the primordial wood – enveloped in

The scent of barbarous necessity.

 

4.

Understanding

It is swiftly assuaged of gulit. The raised Hand is a catalogue

Of justifications.

…

 

Hinsey does not use aesthetically complicated procedures, but uses a succinct language that states, comments, observes and abstains from any romanticizing embellishments. She usually summarizes her verses in two or three lines to small blocks (elements) that are lined up like epitaphs, albeit a several times these short lumps are interrupted by longer text passages.

If the verses were not of such intense poetic power, one would be overwhelmed by the statements Hinsey offers. She tries hard to make these statements, which are very intense and reflect the genocidal horrors, to look like the objective result of a thorough investigation of reality. Hinsey, who attended several hearings of the International Court of Justice, tries to stick to the facts and nevertheless is capable of rendering them poetical. This seems perfectly in order so long as she thereby reconstitutes the victim’s dignity. And she does. Overall, Hinsey impressively renders the most horrible aspects of human life a gracious narrative. And she enables the reader to realize that it is not only the other, who is capable of committing atrocious acts, but that simply every human, even the reader, is capable of committing the most terrible crimes against humanity. In any case, after reading the book, one is left behind thoughtful and contemplative. And yet there is something productive about this contemplativeness, for one finally realizes that Hinsey draws a realistic world.

The only, albeit minor, defect one is inclined to deplore is that the author could have considerably improved her impressive work if she had not, as she sometimes did, given oversimplified explanations of the causes of homicidal human behavior. In particular, the (hyper)ethical attitude she sometimes adopts was by no means necessary. As a poet, she should have known that poetry can ultimately only exist, even when it deals with the cruelest aspects of life, if it is not captivated by ethics, but is allowed to float freely in the realm of ambiguity. For the true grammar of life is truth with all its aspects, some of which can only be found in ambiguity.

Overall, Hinsey’s truly unique book deserves as many readers as possible. Not least, because it had had a congenial translator in Uta Gosmann, who allows the style and tone of the English original to be well heard in German.

 

[1]Kiedaisch P. (Hrsg.) Lyrik nach Auschwitz. Adorno und die Dichter. Reclam, Philipp, jun. GmbH, Verlag, Stuttgart 1995

[2] These lines represent the final heroic couplet of Shakespeare’s 18^th sonnets

[3] Naimark N.M. Genocide- A world history, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2018, 8-10

[4] Celan P. Mohn und Gedächtnis, DVA, München 1952

[5] Adorno TW, Negative Dialektik. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1966 (Erstausgabe)

[6]  Hinderer W. Politische Lyrik Eine heikle Angelegenheit. Literaturkritik, 5, 2012