But whose past? Rilke was one of those poets who, in his reading, was constantly reminding himself of his own biography: his miserable childhood, his domineering father who forced him into military school, his snobbish mother who regretted not having a daughter and dressed him in girl’s clothes, his inability to maintain amorous relationships, torn as he was between the seductions of chic society and the life of a hermit. He began reading Labé three years before the outbreak of the First World War, at a loss in his own work in which he seemed to recognize the desolation and horror to come.
For when I gaze until I disappear
In my own gaze, I seem to carry death.8
In a letter he wrote, “I don’t think of work, only of gradually regaining my health through reading, rereading, reflecting.”9 It was a multitudinous activity.
Recasting Labé’s sonnets into German, Rilke was engaged in many readings at once. He was recapturing — as Labé had suggested — the past, though not Labé’s, of which he knew nothing, but his own. In “the same human words, the same concepts, the same experience and intuitions”, he was able to read what Labé had never evoked.
He was reading for the sense, deciphering a text in a language which was not his but in which he had become sufficiently fluent to write his own poetry. Sense is often dictated by the language being used. Something is said, not necessarily because the author chooses to say it in a particular way, but because in that specific language a certain sequence of words is required to constellate a sense, a certain music is deemed agreeable, certain constructions are eschewed as cacophonous or carry a double sense or appear to have fallen out of use. All the fashionable trappings of language conspire to favour one set of words over another.
He was reading for the meaning. Translating is the ultimate act of comprehending. For Rilke, the reader who reads in order to translate engages on a “purest procedure” of questions and answers by which that most elusive of notions, the literary meaning, is gleaned. Gleaned but never made explicit, because in the particular alchemy of this kind of reading the meaning is immediately transformed into another, equivalent text. And the poet’s meaning progresses from words to words, metamorphosed from one language into another.
He was reading the long ancestry of the book he was reading, since the books we read are also the books others have read. I don’t mean that vicarious pleasure of holding in our hands a volume that once belonged to another reader, conjured up like a ghost through the whisper of a few scribbled words on the margin, a signature on the flyleaf, a dried leaf left as a marker, a tell-tale wine-stain. I mean that every book has been engendered by long successions of other books whose covers you may never see and whose authors you may never know but which echo in the one you now hold in your hand. What were the books that stood so preciously in Labé’s proud library? We don’t know exactly but we can guess. Spanish editions of Garcilaso de la Vega, for instance, the poet who introduced the Italian sonnet to the rest of Europe, were no doubt known to her, since his work was being translated in Lyons. And her publisher, Jean de Tournes, had brought out French editions of Hesiod and Aesop, and had published editions of Dante and Petrarch in Italian, as well as the works of several other Lyonnais poets,10 and it is likely that she had received from him copies of several of these. In Labé’s sonnets, Rilke was also reading her readings of Petrarch, of Garcilaso, of Labé’s contemporary the great Ronsard, whom Rilke was to discuss with the Odéon bookseller on a winter afternoon in Paris.
Like every reader, Rilke was also reading through his own experience. Beyond the literal sense and the literary meaning, the text we read acquires the projection of our own experience, the shadow, as it were, of who we are. Louise Labé’s soldier, who may have inspired her ardent verses is, like Labé herself, a fictional character for Rilke, reading her in his room four centuries later. Of her passion he could know nothing: her restless nights, the fruitless waiting by the door pretending to be happy, the overheard mention of the soldier’s name that made her catch her breath, the shock of seeing him ride past her window and almost immediately realizing that it was not he but someone who resembled his matchless figure — all these were absent from the book Rilke kept by his bedside table. All he could bring to the printed words that Labé had penned years afterwards — when she was happily married to the middle-aged ropemaker Ennemond Perrin, and her soldier had become little more than a somewhat embarrassing memory — was his own desolation. It sufficed, of course, because we readers, like Narcissus, like to believe that the text into which we gaze holds our reflection. Even before contemplating possession of the text through translation, Rilke must have read Labé’s poems as if her first-person singular were also his.
Reviewing Rilke’s translations of Labé, George Steiner reproved him because of their excellence, allying himself with Dr. Johnson. “A translator is to be like his author,” wrote Johnson; “it is not his business to excel him.” And Steiner added, “Where he does so, the original is subtly injured. And the reader is robbed of a just view.”11 The clue to Steiner’s criticism lies in the epithet “just”. Reading Louise Labé today — reading her in the original French outside Labé’s own time and place — necessarily lends the text the reader’s optic. Etymology, sociology, studies of fashion and the history of art — all these enrich a reader’s understanding of a text, but ultimately much of this is mere archeology. Louise Labé’s twelfth sonnet, which begins Luth, compagnon de ma calamité, (“Lute, companion of my misfortune”), addresses the lute, in the second quatrain, in these terms:
Et tant le pleur piteux t’a molesté
Que, commençant quelque son délectable,
Tu le rendais tout soudain lamentable,
Feignant le ton que plein avais chanté.
A literal word-by-word translation might read:
And the pitiable weeping so upset you
That, as I began (to play) some pleasant sound,
All of a sudden you turned it pitiful,
Pretending (to play as minor) the key which I had sung as major.
Here Labé makes use of an arcane musical language which she, as a lute player, must have known well, but which is incomprehensible to us without a historical dictionary of musical terms. Plein ton meant, in the sixteenth century, the major key, as opposed to the ton feint — the minor key. Feint literally means “false, pretended”. The line suggests that the lute plays in a minor key that which the poet has sung in a “full” (i.e., major) key. To understand this, the contemporary reader must acquire a knowledge that was common to Labé, must become (in equivalent terms) far more instructed than Labé merely to keep up with her in her time. The exercise is, of course, futile if the purpose is to assume the position of Labé’s audience: we cannot become the reader for whom her poem was intended. Rilke, however, reads:
[…] Ich riß
dich so hinein in diesen Gang der Klagen,
drin ich befangen bin, daß, wo ich je
seligen Ton versuchend angeschlagen,
da unterschlugst du ihn und tontest weg.
[…] I led
You so deep along the path of sorrow
In which I’m trapped, that anywhere
I try to strike a blissful tone,
There you conceal and mute it until it dies away.
No knowledge of specialized German is required here, and yet every musical metaphor in Louise Labé’s sonnet is faithfully preserved. But German allows further explorations, and Rilke charges the quatrain with a more complex reading than Labé, writing in French, could have perceived. The homophonies between anschlagen (“to strike”) and unterschlagen (“to embezzle, to pocket, to stash away”) serve him to compare the two amorous attitudes: that of Labé, the distressed lover, attempting to “strike a blissful tone”, and that of her lute, her faithful companion, the witness of her true feelings, who will not allow her to sound a “dishonest”, “false” tone and who, paradoxically, will “embezzle it”, “conceal it”, in order to allow her to become, at last,
silent. Rilke (and here is where the reader’s experience bears down on the text) reads into Labé’s sonnets images of travel, cloistered sorrow, silence preferable to the false expression of feelings, the unyielding supremacy of the poetic instrument over any social niceties such as pretence of happiness, which are the features of his own life. Labé’s setting is chambered, like that of her distant sisters in Heian Japan; she is a woman alone, mourning her love; in Rilke’s time, the image, commonplace in the Renaissance, is no longer resonant and requires an explanation of how she came to be “trapped” in this place of sorrow. Something of Louise Labé’s simplicity (dare one say banality?) is lost, but much is gained in depth, in tragic feeling. It is not that Rilke’s reading distorts Labé’s poem more than any other reading beyond her century; it is a better reading than most of us are capable of, one that makes our reading possible, since any other reading of Labé must remain, for us on this side of time, at the level of our impoverished individual intellectual skills.
Asking why, of the work of all the twentieth-century poets, Rilke’s difficult poetry acquired such popularity in the West, the critic Paul de Man suggested that it might be because “many have read him as if he addressed the most secluded parts of their selves, revealing depths they hardly suspected or allowing them to share in ordeals he helped them to understand and to overcome.”12 Rilke’s reading of Labé “solves” nothing, in the sense of rendering Labé’s simplicity even more explicit; instead, his task seems to have been the deepening of her poetic thought, carrying it further than the original was prepared to go, seeing, as it were, more in Labé’s words than Labé herself saw.
As early as Labé’s time, the respect accorded to the authority of a text had long been in abeyance. In the twelfth century, Abelard had denounced the habit of attributing one’s opinions to others, to Aristotle or to the Arabs, in order to avoid being directly criticized;13 this — “the argument of authority”, which Abelard compared to the chain by which beasts are attached and led on blindly — was possible because in the mind of the reader the classical text and its acknowledged author were deemed infallible. And if the accepted reading was infallible, what room was there for interpretations?
Even the text judged most infallible of all — God’s Word itself, the Bible — underwent a long series of transformations in the hands of its successive readers. From the Old Testament canon established in the second century AD by Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph to John Wycliffe’s English translation in the fourteenth century, the book called the Bible was at times the Greek Septuagint of the third century BC (and the basis for subsequent Latin translations), the so-called Vulgate (Saint Jerome’s Latin version of the late fourth century) and all the later Bibles of the Middle Ages: Gothic, Slavic, Armenian, Old English, West Saxon, Anglo-Norman, French, Frisian, German, Irish, Netherlandish, Central Italian, Provençal, Spanish, Catalan, Polish, Welsh, Czech, Hungarian. Each one of these was, for its readers, the Bible, yet each allowed for a different reading. In this multiplicity of Bibles, some saw the humanists’ dream being accomplished. Erasmus had written, “I wish that even the weakest woman should read the Gospel — should read the Epistles of Paul. And I wish that these were translated into all the languages so that they might be read and understood, not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Saracens.… I long that the husbandman should sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them to the tune of his shuttle.”14 Now was their chance.
In the face of this explosion of multiple possible readings, the authorities sought a way to retain control over the text — a single authoritative book in which the word of God could be read as He intended. On January 15, 1604, at Hampton Court, in the presence of King James I, the Puritan Dr. John Rainolds “moved His Majesty that there be a new translation of the Bible because those which were allowed in the reign of Henry VIII and Edward VI were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original” — to which the Bishop of London answered that “if every man’s humour should be followed, there would be no end to the translating.”15
In spite of the bishop’s sage warning, the king agreed and ordered that the Dean of Westminster and the regius professors of Hebrew at Cambridge and Oxford put forward a list of scholars able to undertake such a stupendous task. James was unhappy with the first list presented, since several of the men on it had “either no ecclesiastical preferment at all, or else very small”, and asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to seek further suggestions from his fellow bishops. One name appeared on no one’s list: that of Hugh Broughton, a great Hebrew scholar who had already completed a new translation of the Bible but whose irascible temper had made him few friends. Broughton, however, required no invitation, and sent the king himself a list of recommendations for the enterprise.
For Broughton, textual fidelity could be sought through a vocabulary that specified and updated the terms used by those who set down God’s Word in a past of desert shepherds. Broughton suggested that to render exactly the technical fabric of the text, artisans should be brought in to help with specific terms, “as embroiderers for Aaron’s ephod, geometricians, carpenters, masons about the Temple of Solomon and Ezekiel; and gardeners for all the boughs and branches of Ezekiel’s tree.”16 (A century and a half later, Diderot and d’Alembert would proceed in exactly this manner to get the technical details right for their extraordinary Encyclopédie.)
Broughton (who had, as mentioned, already translated the Bible on his own) argued that a multiplicity of minds were needed to solve the endless problems of sense and meaning, preserving, at the same time, an overall coherence. To achieve this, he proposed that the king “have many to translate a part, and when they have brought a good English style and true sense, others should make an uniformity that diverse words might not be used when the original word was the same.”17 Here perhaps begins the Anglo-Saxon tradition of editing, the habit of a super-reader revising the text before publication.
One of the bishops on the scholarly committee, Bishop Bancroft, drew up a list of fifteen rules for the translators. They would follow, as closely as possible, the earlier Bishops’ Bible of 1568 (a revised edition of the so-called Great Bible, which was in turn a revision of the Matthew’s Bible, itself a composite of the incomplete Bible of William Tyndale and the first printed edition of a complete English Bible, produced by Miles Coverdale).
The translators, working with the Bishops’ Bible in front of them, referring intermittently to the other English translations and to a wealth of Bibles in other languages, incorporated all those previous readings into their own.
Tyndale’s Bible, cannibalized in successive editions, gave them much material which they now took for granted. William Tyndale, scholar and printer, had been condemned by Henry VIII as a heretic (he had earlier offended the king by criticizing his divorce from Catherine of Aragon) and in 1536 had been first strangled and then burnt at the stake for his translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek. Before undertaking his translation, Tyndale had written, “Because I had perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the lay-people in any truth, except the scriptures were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the process, order, and meaning of the text.” In order to achieve this, he had rendered the ancient words into a language both simple and artfully crafted. He introduced into the English language the words “passover”, “peacemaker”, “long-suffering” and (this I find inexplicably moving) the adjective “beautiful”. He was the first to use the name Jehovah in an English Bible.
Miles Coverdale had complemented and completed Tyndale’s work, publishing the first complete English Bible in 1535. A Cambridge scholar and Augustinian friar who, some say, assisted Tyndale in parts of his translation, Coverdale undertook an English version sponsored by Thomas Cromwell, Lord Chancellor of England, and drawn not from the original Hebrew and Greek but from other translations. His Bible is sometimes known as the “Treacle Bible” because it gives J
eremiah 8: 22 as “Is there treacle in Gilead” instead of “balm”, or the “Bugs Bible” because the fifth verse of Psalm 91 became “Thou shalt not need be afraid of any bugs by night” for “the terror by night”. It is to Coverdale that the new translators owed the phrase “the valley of the shadow of death” (Twenty-third Psalm).
But the King James translators did much more than copy out old readings. Bishop Bancroft had indicated that the vulgar forms of names and ecclesiastical words were to be kept; even if the original suggested a more accurate translation, traditional usage would prevail over exactness. In other words, Bancroft acknowledged that an established reading overrode that of the author. He wisely understood that to restore an original name would be to introduce a startling novelty that was absent in the original. For the same reason, he precluded marginal notes, recommending instead that they be “briefly and fitly” included in the text itself.
The King James translators worked in six groups: two in Westminster, two in Cambridge and two in Oxford. These forty-nine men achieved, in their private interpretations and communal blendings, an extraordinary balance of accuracy, a respect for traditional phrasing and an overall style that read not like a new work but like something long-existing. So accomplished was their result that several centuries later, when the King James Bible was established as one of the masterpieces of English prose, Rudyard Kipling imagined a story in which Shakespeare and Ben Jonson collaborated on the translation of a few verses of Isaiah for the great project.18 Certainly the King James Bible has a poetic depth that enlarges the text beyond any mere rendering of sense. The difference between a correct but dry reading, and a precise and resonant one, can be judged by comparing, for instance, the famous Twenty-third Psalm in the Bishops’ Bible to its version in the King James. The Bishops’ Bible reads:
A History of Reading Page 28