Ein Wort
Ein Wort, ein Satz—: aus Chiffren steigen
erkanntes Leben, jäher Sinn,
die Sonne steht, die Sphären schweigen
und alles ballt sich zu ihm hin.
Ein Wort—ein Glanz, ein Flug, ein Feuer,
ein Flammenwurf, ein Sternenstrich—-
und wieder Dunkel, ungeheuer,
im leeren Raum um Welt und Ich.
Gottfried Benn
A Word
A word, a phrase -- from ciphers climb
Known life, sudden sense.
The sun stops, spheres no longer chime,
All thickens around, dark and dense.
A word, a gleam, a flight, a spark,
A thrust of flame, star-strike on the sky --
Then again the enormous dark
And empty space around world and I.
(my translation)
(apologia grammatica: i am aware that an englsh pronoun as the object of a preposition should be in the accusative case. i spent years trying to bully or threaten or bribe scores of 18-year-olds to write between you and me, rather than between you and I (which they think sounds smart because it is how the people on tv talk).
ReplyDeletesimilarly, germans would normally write um Welt und mich ("around world and me") in the last line. but, of course, gottfried benn knows precisely what he wants to do. there is no accident here :-) ... and the translation attempts to reflect this ...
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finding it difficult to be quiet, when i should just shut the hell up, i offer these two lines to place alongside the ending of benn's poem. i make no claim of a genetic relationship, only that they all speak from a similar field of thought
Deletearthur rimbaud's famous promouncement, je est un autre, "i is an other" (the first tremor of postmodernism??)
the protagonist's final words in peter handke's Kaspar: ich bin nur zufällig ich, "i am i only by chance"
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lol! are you scolding yourself for your comments? You are quiet even when you are loud :)
ReplyDeleteLiz: you might think i would win more often when i argue with myself ... but no -- it seems about fifty-fifty ...
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for me I refers much more concretely to self. this is necessary for the poem to have the heft called for. after all, a word, existence itself, is being birthed. for me to birth existence, creation of word, is fine. i think i could eat fries while doing it. but for the I to birth existence, creation of word, well holy hell, limbs would tremble and out of nothing everything would spill.
ReplyDeletethis is a very powerful poem.
(i laugh along with liz just a little because you are so damned sexy in your mind, knowing all the while that this is very serious.)
xo
erin
erin: the difference is symbolized in language by setting the I up at the head of the sentence as subject, as agent, while the me follows later as object, as acted-upon ... perhaps one of the attractions of translation is that it put the translator always in the position of the me, relieved of the awful responsibilities of an I....
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how spooky, I just commented on a Benn poem yesterday :) nice language choice (star-strike) and I'm always a fan of internal rhyming. I watched the film 'A Single Man' last night, which I really enjoyed in a depressing and thought-provoking kind of way :) but the 'I am only I by chance' came up in it too, and the 'I can only ever know you through my own (eye/ I) perception of you'. I think the 'I' is always changing and I think there is a large amount of self-determination involved. I've always been attracted to the Buddhist concept of the impermanent self.
ReplyDeleteMarion: i've heard good things about that film, and have meant to see it.
Deletei think the self changes continually, the content that we pack into the envelope of the word I is something different each day ... and yet there is also continuity -- when i was seven years old, i loved a puppy named mutton. i miss him. how is that possible, unless i am the same i????
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perhaps the pre-selfconscious self ie the childhood self is the the only true self? reminds me of this from a Ted Hughes letter to his son, Nicholas: "Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances." you can read the full letter here - http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/09/live-like-mighty-river.html. Mutton - love it :)
Deletei don't see any case for an apologia grammatica here (if not the loveliness of this expression and of making such a witty gesture :-)
ReplyDeletesince Benn is referring to the noun "Ich", exactly the "I", which stays the same in all cases, he is not referring to the pronoun which should be placed in accusative, as in "um Welt und mich" and he doesn't go against any grammar rules. so your translation is not only perfect, but, i think, the only option, unless one would want to replace "I" with something like the Self, i see no reason to do it.
Roxana: you are exactly right, of course :-))
Deletei was worried that the english might sound confusing, and i wanted to preempt any vexation that might distract from reading the poem ... but i was needlessly concerned, i think ...
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Though I don't read German, I am happy with your translations, which are poems in themselves, heartily and lyrically so. In fact I find this one with its "I" and your commentary to be a representation of that process: the reflected self that comes through the best translations—the route from emptiness to thing to feeling to word and back again to emptiness through word.
ReplyDeleteRuth: i like this description of translation very much: the route from emptiness to thing to feeling to word and back again to emptiness through word. i have been thinking and talking a lot with erin about translation recently, without being able to do much more than circle the mystery at its core, but i think you are close to what i want to say, the word and the word, bracketed on both sides by emptiness, the good emptiness....
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I don't speak German, but I loved your words. :)
ReplyDeleteHave a good weekend James!
Lucia: i don't speak german, either :-) i fumble and mutter and manage to fool americans ... which can be amusing enough :-)
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