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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Translator’s Preface
from GRAUZONE MORGENS (1988)
Mornings in the Grayzone
Eine einzige silberne Büchse
A Single Tin
Trilce, César
Trilce, César
No. 3
No. 3
No. 8
No. 8
Dieser Tag gehört dir
All About You
Nullbock
No Fun
›Nimm es an!‹
“Accept It!”
Grund, vorübergehend in New York zu sein
Reason to Be Temporarily in New York
Badewannen
Bathtubs
Ohne Titel
Untitled
Fast ein Gesang
Almost a Song
Belebter Bach
Bubbling Stream
Olé
Olé
MonoLogisches Gedicht No. 1
MonoLogical Poem #1
MonoLogisches Gedicht No. 2
MonoLogical Poem #2
MonoLogisches Gedicht No. 4
MonoLogical Poem #4
MonoLogisches Gedicht No. 5
MonoLogical Poem #5
MonoLogisches Gedicht No. 13
MonoLogical Poem #13
Perpetuum mobile
Perpetuum Mobile
from SCHÄDELBASISLEKTION (1991)
Skull Base Lesson
Portrait des Künstlers als junger Grenzhund
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog (not Collie)
from FALTEN UND FALLEN (1994)
Folds and Traps
Variationen auf kein Thema
Variations on No Theme
Einem Schimpansen im Londoner Zoo
To a Chimpanzee in the London Zoo
Einem Okapi im Münchner Zoo
To an Okapi in the Munich Zoo
Einem Pinguin im New Yorker Aquarium
To a Penguin in the New York Aquarium
from NACH DEN SATIREN (1999)
After the Satires
In der Provinz
In the Provinces
Klage eines Legionärs aus dem Feldzug des Germanicus an die Elbe
Lament of a Legionnaire on Germanicus’s Campaign to the Elbe River
Der Misanthrop auf Capri
The Misanthrope on Capri
Club of Rome
Club of Rome
Tizians neue Zimmer
Titian’s New Pad
Einer Gepardin im Moskauer Zoo
To a Cheetah in the Moscow Zoo
Memorandum
Memorandum
Asche zum Frühstück: Dreizehn Fantasiestücke
Ashes for Breakfast: Thirteen Fantasies
Kosmopolit
Cosmopolite
Berliner Runde
Berlin Rounds
Grüße aus der Hauptstadt des Vergessens
Greetings from Oblivion City
Vor einem alten Röntgenbild
In Front of an Old X-Ray
Vita brevis
Vita Brevis
Mantegna vielleicht
Mantegna, Perhaps
Europa nach dem letzten Regen
Europe After the Last Rains
from ERKLÄRTE NACHT (2002)
Configured Night
Berlin posthum
Berlin Posthumous
Arkadien für alle
Arcadia for All
Notes
About the Authors
Copyright
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
For upwards of twenty-five years, you have written English poems, and translated not poetry, but German prose. You felt no particular disquiet at this separation of powers. But finally, you don’t want to spend your entire life in avoidance of something, in fear or disdain, however well grounded. There are translations of foreign poets to which you feel deep gratitude: Cavafy, Akhmatova, Zagajewski, Montale. You love your Waley and your Pound. In fact, the first poet you ever read, at the age of eight, was in translation: Zbigniew Herbert. (The poem was “From Antiquity,” the one about the barbarians and the little salt god, and you’ve never forgotten it.) Above all, you feel an attachment to the idea that you have some German poet twin—the one who, unlike you, stayed at home—whom it is your duty and your sacred pleasure to translate into English.
I would never claim Durs Grünbein as my twin—he’s a much better poet, and he’s five years younger—but I did experience this feeling of kinship when I first met him and heard him read, ten or twelve years ago in Rotterdam, and many times since. For various practical, urgent occasions, I have supplied English cribs for his poems: another time in Rotterdam, once in London, at a talk in Hamburg. We share a derisive melancholia, an interest in amplitude (much more developed, in his case), a love of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, a fascination and a belief in the classics (again, much more developed in his case). At the same time, I am painfully aware of many things that divide us; medicine, neuroscience, animals, ancient history, contemporary art, responsible metaphysics are all avocations of Grünbein’s of which I am, as they say in German, unbeleckt. Innocent. There is a formidableness, a dauntingness about Grünbein that I don’t have, perhaps can’t do, and find it difficult even to respond to.
You see, the different countries and different languages have evolved different types of poets—although, thrillingly, probably for the first time in history, one’s formation as a poet is almost bound to be cosmopolitan nowadays and polyglot, and if it isn’t, it damned well should be. I’m saying that I grew up as an English poet: small-scale, occasional, personal, wincingly witty, articulate about dirt. Grünbein is much more like another English poet, whom Brodsky also revered, but who was so much a one-off in or from the English tradition, that he described himself as “a minor Atlantic Goethe”: W. H. Auden. Grünbein is squarely in the line of German poets: a poeta doctus and an intellectual. Further, there is a frontality and an abundance in him—massive poems, great sequences of numbered parts—that I can only wonder at. He has solved the problem of inspiration that Rilke worked at in his Neue Gedichte of 1907 and 1908. Grünbein has such facility and industry, it is as though there had been a Rodin in his life once as well.
What you translate has to come out of you; you have to be able to encompass it, in other words. You can’t quite say things you couldn’t have said, even if you have been given them to say. (In an odd way, this is more of a problem for poet-translators, who tend to suffer from self-consciousness and squeamishness, and a firmer sense of their own edges, than others, who are perhaps better able to slip into costume and lose their inhibitions.) You have to work on your own plausibility, your range, your idiom, your connections, and you try of course to extend them. Perhaps you’re like a parrot, saying back things the way you’ve heard them said. (But always it has to come from you.) Temerity takes you further. And for me that’s a real motivation: I should like to learn temerity. But there are many poems and places where Grünbein is too skillful, too euphoric, and too rhetorical for me to follow him. Sonnet sequences, poems praising Italy, his more neutral and classical—unPoundian—vein of classicism (what I think of in him as “marble”), anywhere, in fact, where rhyme—to Rilke the vector of praise—presents itself as an issue.
Accordingly, inevitably, I have to diminish him. Sometimes this wil
l express itself in the range of poems that I feel able to tackle at all, sometimes in my inability to match, even to gesture at, his forms. (Though Brecht said: “When poems are translated into another language, most of the damage tends to be due to people trying to translate too much. Maybe they should confine themselves to translating the poet’s ideas and attitudes.”) Translation is most often described—perhaps can only be described—in metaphors, many of them drawn from the world of performance. (We’ve already had the actor, and the parrot.) Here, I’m tempted to say that translation is like tracing. Going over an original on onionskin paper. Well, in the case of those designs of Grünbein that most resemble architectural drawings—and there are many poems of his like that—I can’t cope with the finickiness and the perfection. But what I suppose I do have—and Grünbein has declared himself willing to accept this, in fact, in his generosity, not even to see it as a pisaller, a second-best—is my own “line.” My own idiosyncrasy and distinctiveness. I have the ability, I think, to go over lines, and make it seem like freehand. (I have learned to do this, both from my own writing and from making so many prose translations. The worst thing in a translation, it seems to me, is the appearance of being remote-controlled, ferngesteuert.) You have to look comfortable, voluntary. The Grünbein translations will look like—I hope to God they do look like—not the product of steel rulers and midnight oil, but like poems that want to be poems. I may not be able to limn them from the outside, but I hope I can animate them from within.
I am aware of course of the likelihood of there being something specious and sentimental about this argument. (I would say that, wouldn’t I? Well, of course!) Actually, I’m not at all convinced that this is the better way, or that the specter of the point-for-point and formal translator—Lowell called him the “taxidermist”—has been put to flight. Auden, by way of a germane instance, used to say he first looked at the “contraption” of a poem, and only then at whatever it might express. I fear my versions of Grünbein won’t be all that interesting as “contraptions.” The exemptions I can see (once again, like Montale to Lowell) are those poems of his with bulk and quiddity, those poems of his that are interesting as prose.
I have perhaps one last thing to cheer me up and lead me on. As I’ve said, one of the things that Grünbein and I share is a love of the poet Joseph Brodsky. Really from the moment I first heard Brodsky, in 1981 as a recent ex-undergraduate in Cambridge, I had the sense of his poems existing in a weirdly trefoil or trinitarian fashion: there were the trim, carved stanza shapes, the vast oceanic surge and melody of them (especially of the Russian), and the wry modern first-person concreteness of them. And while I liked very much Anthony Hecht’s “Lullaby of Cape Cod,” and the poet’s own astonishing English versions of “A Part of Speech,” my favorite translations are a couple that were done by a Slavist, Barry Rubin, which are unrhymed and unscanned. Here is the beginning of “San Pietro”:
Three weeks now and the fog still clings to the white
bell tower of this dull brown quarter
stuck in a deaf-and-dumb corner
of the northern Adriatic. Electric
lights go on burning in the tavern at noon.
Deep-fried yellow tints the pavement
flagstone. Cars at a standstill
fade out of view without starting their engines.
And the end of a sign’s not quite legible. Now
it isn’t dampness that seeps through the ocher and terra-cotta
but terra-cotta and ocher that seep through the dampness.
What commends this to me is that it has so much of the “feel” of Brodsky, what I thought of as the third member of his personal trinity. The tired, almost baffled sentences, worn down to nerve and frazzled bone. Interest, personality, plight, speed of thought: are these not enough—more than enough—to furnish forth a poem, even if the original does have rhymes and bells and whistles? So, I thought, if I could get Grünbein to sound comparably dense and inhabited in English, I would be doing all right by him. Tickling his nostrils with the smoke of a satisfactory olfactory sacrifice.
As I say, Grünbein works in big poems and sequences, but it was not always thus. There are little Polaroids from his young years in Dresden, under the old management. The poet himself may be a little uneasy about these now, but his translator admires some of them very much for their unhindered voice, sprayed out across a page: big vocabulary, correct syntax, and still a sense of something being blurted. The mood of nauseated contempt in, say “All About You,” is admirable, and bound to appeal to the author, himself, once, of a volume, called Acrimony. A few phrases: “einer immerfort gestrigen Politik,” “an insistently ancestral politics”; “zwischen Kinderwagen und Scharen räudiger Tauben, die einen Wirbel machen beim Futtern,” “between the baby carriages and the flock of mangy pigeons that fly up in a sort of haute volée gobbling”; “das übliche Kino des Status Quo Minus,” “the usual BBBBBB films”; “schlenderst du einfach ein wenig weiter zur nächsten Kreuzung, sehr langsam,” “but instead you just gander on very slowly to the next crossing.” There are differences—inevitably, there are differences—but I like to think what I offer is harmonious and possible, with its bird words and assonances. As I say, what I’m anxious not to do is offer something exotic, wooden, pointless, and dead.
That poem came out of the mid-eighties, “from the Eastern part of my life,” as Grünbein inscribed my copy. Then, there is a thirty-nine-part sequence called “Variations on No Theme” (the title is pure Brodsky, the switch of geography likewise!) from the early nineties. “Variationen auf kein Thema” is Grünbein’s “A Part of Speech,” thirteen-line sections, attractively set in and out, little essays, memories, a lexicon of modern life, autobiography in a solvent of metaphysics, Betrachtungen. I’ve had a go at the whole thing, all thirty-nine steps, but I couldn’t pretend to you that they’re all equally good or equally finished. In fact, the question of “finish” in poetry translation is what macht mir zu schaffen—does my head in, I would say in English. In fiction it’s easy. I put the original away, and fiddle with the English to the point where I start to undo my corrections and put back things I had before. Then it’s done. But what to do with a poem? If I “take it away,” and work at it in the same way, until every line has just enough material and just enough music and just enough interest, then surely it would become one of my own poems. And it might be a long way from the original. Is the secret, then, merely to reduce its exposure to me, “undercooking” it, as it were? Possibly—but that’s precisely my objection to a lot of poetry translations, that they are undercooked. They might be glimmerings and beginnings of poems, but full of clumsinesses and dullnesses; no English poet would dream of offering something so “half-baked,” so halbgar, so intermittent. But it has to be in some more verifiable relation to the original. It doesn’t merely face the reader; Janus-faced, it has to be looking back over its shoulder at the German, too. It’s a real problem, and I don’t know what the answer is. Lowell, whom my editor encouraged me to imitate, wrote in his introduction to Imitations: “I have tried to write live English and to do what my authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America,” and: “I have been almost as free as the authors themselves in finding ways to make them ring right for me.” But then the poets Lowell translated were, with one or two exceptions, not his living contemporaries, and he was not offering the first or principal way into their work for an English readership. There may be a little security to be had from printing the facing German texts, but that always cuts both ways, I feel, as a reader. You can’t settle to anything; the original faces down the translation. Also, German comes a long way below French, Spanish, Italian, on the list of feasible foreign languages: only just above Russian, I think, in my more pessimistic moments. Anyway, on to a couple of sections of “Variations on No Theme.” First an early memory, the infant Grünbein:
What a bloody little leprechaun you once were,
A wrinkled imp with knotted
Arms and legs. Bluish skin,
As though kicking for your life,
Early concerned with your impending death.
And it all began so unconsolably,
With a piercing yell, when the world
Moved into your lungs with a rattle.
With a shock (“so much light!”), a slicing
Of deft scissors and knives
Into the only flesh that wasn’t you.
The umbilicus was like the thread,
The Fates’ love of sundering from the get-go.
I’m uneasy about my repeating “with” in a slightly different sense in lines 7 and 9, and I’m very pleased with the sudden shift of idiom, “love of sundering from the get-go,” but other than that I have nothing much to confess to, here.
The situation is very different with the other “Variation”:
Back in front of the telephone, under the cheese cloche,
The cosh, the Alexander Graham Bell jar,
No sooner was the door shut, you froze, a cynosure,
A dead ringer for passersby on the sidewalk,
Staring at the dial-pad, digits
Like the stellar magic forest
In the night sky … decimal mandala
Tempting you by its availability
Sudden nearness, whispers, betrayal,
Egad, love, even—all of it seemingly
Hardwired, a sort of “I’ll call you” life.
The numbers no sooner punched
Than a voice explodes in your brain.
If the previous “Variation” was dutiful, this one is wildly interesting! It begins with the very first words, “Back in front,” and carries on through little rappish rhymes and raffish portmanteaux (“cosh” and “cloche”; “the Alexander Graham Bell jar”), through extravagant diction (“cynosure”) and puns (“a dead ringer”), the bizarre ejaculation “egad,” and a further pun in “punched” at the end (although the very best thing, for my money, is the phrase about the “‘I’ll call you’ life”). It is in an interesting relation to the German. I don’t know why this happened like that to this poem. Perhaps it was the single-sentence rush of the thing; perhaps it began with the cheese cloche, and turned, as is in the nature of cheese, into a nightmare.
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