Heine today

The indefatigable marlene has opend the discussion on another German poet who is of great interest to me, too. I will chime in after trying to get hold of the essay Die Wunde Heine by T. W. Adorno, who should have much to say about this. (Not that I take Adorno as final authority on many subjects, but I find him really illuminating when it comes to literary criticism because of his penchant for debunking established wisdom)

BTW Die Wunde Heine is hard to translate. It means literally "The Wound Heine", which isn't really English. One has a choice between "Heine as [Open] Wound", "Heine's Wound", "Heine, the [Open] Wound" and perhaps other possibilities. I probably like the first one best.

Addendum: After starting this thread, I have translated two Heine poems I like. They may offer a good way to get into this topic.

For people who love cats

This blog may need some comic relief. So, here is a poem by me that started out as a parody of Emily Dickinson. But I could not really get the edginess with which she often goes against the meter she has set up. And so, I ended up with a poem "in the style of Dickinson":

There is a corner in my room where Cat prefers to pee - and then he yawns and walks away - leaving the mess to me. And as a wipe I contemplate the nature of this act - was this a form of vengeance or simply a lack of tact? But then I look into his eyes and in his whiskered face - I gather up my soap and cloth - and sigh - and rest my case.

Word of the month: Schlimmbesserung

Word of the Month: Index

This word is different from the ones I talked about before: I had never heard it used until someone mentioned it on another blog. My first reaction was: This must be a neologism that occurred after I left Germany. But then, thanks to the wonders of the web, I found a source that is over 200 years old: Someone complaining--at the beginning of the 19th century--about the editors of a play by Kleist, Der Prinz von Homburg, who, in the attempt to improve upon Kleist’s language, actually made it worse. And that’s exactly what the term means: An intended improvement that has the opposite effect (the adjective schlimm can mean anything from "bad" to "malicious"; the noun Besserung means "improvement"--literally "betterment")--a useful word indeed, given how often we have seen so-called "reforms" that make a situation worse.

Details in my first comment.

German comfort food

Yesterday in an xword blog, some very disparaging things were said about lima beans. This saddens me because Dicke Bohnen mit Speck (lima beans with bacon) is a classic regional dish in the Rhineland, where I grew up--it was one of the comfort foods of my youth. To kick this thread off, I'll start with the recipe in my first comment.

And speaking about lima beans: my wife makes a very good lima bean dip with cumin, a little cream. and butter.

On Rilke

Marlene started a post on Rilke, and I am delighted to take her up on this. I am no specialist, though--which should encourage other non-specialists to contribute!

The awful German language

In a thriller I recently read, the author describes people waiting at an airport and speaking in "ugly German". This was an aside, of no consequence to anything in the plot: It's simply understood that German is ugly. I have encountered this attitude many times while living in the US, and it has motivated me to launch this post.

It's true that German can be ugly. We have our share of poetic hacks who butcher their syntax to make their sentences fit some strict meter or rhyme scheme. German academic prose has a bad reputation that is not entirely undeserved: There are indeed professors (and others) who consider unreadabilty a sign of profundity—I've seen sentences that do not yield their meaning even after a third parsing. But then there are the masters, and it is they who show us how expressive and musical German can be. One would not try to assess the beauty of (American) football by watching one's neighbor quarterbacking a pick-up team—one would watch Joe Montana or Danny Marino. Similarly, one should go to Goethe, and Hölderlin, and Rilke to find out what German can do. And this tradition is neither restricted to poetry nor dead. Among modern prose authors, for example, I find that Christoph Ransmeyer’s language has a beauty that is positively seductive.

Let me, then, kick off this discussion by summoning the great Jose Luis Borges as witness. I'm grateful that Laraine Flemming pointed me to his poem To the German Language. It reads so well in English that I thought at first it was written by Borges like this. But then I found the Spanish original and realized that the English version was a translation by the poet and translator Christopher Mulrooney. I think either version will serve nicely to start a discussion.

Addendum (March 2017): The link to the Mulrooney translation doesn't work anymore in my browsers. If you have the same problem, try copying and pasting the url directly into your browser:
http://www.christophermulrooney.net/borges/id29.html

Translating Der Erlkönig and such

Motivated by today's NYT crossword puzzle, I present here, for further discussion, my thoughts on the chances and pitfalls of translating German texts into English--and vice-versa.

Here's the comment I put on the puzzle blog: Der Erlkönig (The Erlking): A Lied (art song) by the greatest composer of such songs in German, Schubert, using as lyrics the perhaps best known ballad by the greatest German poet of all time, Goethe... The ballad/song has not lost its appeal to the present day. Nabokov quotes the first two lines in my favorite Nabokov book, Pale Fire; Hilary Hahn has a wonderful version of it for solo violin; and Kraut Rock is also not immune to its allure.

Among the versions I found on youtube, I liked this audio-only version by the great basso A. Kipnis because of the clarity of his diction. If you do not know the lyrics, here is the German text together with a (workable, if flat-footed) prose translation.

This brings me to the present thread. For starters, please read some of my general thoughts on translation and take a look at my own prose line-by-line translation of this gem by Goethe.