Poems
A Bilingual Edition
Poems of Georg Heym translated from the German and with an introduction and notes by Antony Hasler
To the Silenced
Poems of Georg Trakl translated and introduced by Will Stone
It’s not surprising that Antony Hasler began his twenty-year project of translating Heym as a sixteen-year-old. As Hasler notes in his introduction, Heym has been the target of accusations of protracted adolescence from early on. The fixation on imagery of death and decay, so attractive to the adolescent mind, is most reminiscent of the poetry of Rimbaud, with whom he’s often compared. Heym, along with Georg Trakl, is labeled an Expressionist poet. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics notes: The styles of the major expressionist poets are linked solely by the tonality of apocalypse. And that tonality is almost monotonously expressed in Heym’s poems. Poem after poem contains “skull” or “corpse”. This, in itself, is not necessarily bad. But one gets the feeling that Heym is solely out to shock, still rebelling against the parents who forced him to pursue a legal career, by focusing on waste and decay. Adding to Heym’s mystique is his death at 24 by accidental drowning, seemingly foreshadowed by a dream, if not by a line or two from his own poems. Well, if you obsess about death, it’s not really prescient when you actually die.
So, in Heym we have a rebel poet who drowned. Makes for an interesting footnote in German literary history, but why should we care about the poems? For one thing, they show some technical expertise in meter and rhyme, but, then again, so does Hallmark. Subject matter? Decidedly not Hallmark. Even Shoebox Greetings doesn’t get into the kind of death and decay that Heym never seemed to tire of during his short career. Hasler maintains that it is a powerful distancing in Heym’s tone which prevents his poetry from being the “stammerings of a young man who does not seem to have achieved a full psychic victory over an awkward adolescence”, as one early newspaper review opined.
I looked forward to reading this book. I expected either dazzlingly surreal grotesques, or lyrically disturbing vignettes. For the most part, the distance that Hasler praises seems to me more like a matter-of-factness, a heavy-handedness. Still, there are some lines and images that particularly struck me, such as this description of a hanged man from his poem The Tree:
…like a bell’s tongue eaten by rust
swung against a sky of pewter.
But the next poem has a skull, the next poem after that has a corpse, the next poem another corpse… you see what I mean? I would have preferred less skulls and corpses and more rust-eaten tongues of bells swung against a pewter sky.
So let’s say that Heym has the potential of being an acquired taste. How well, then, has Hasler done in bringing him into English? From what I can tell, he’s done an excellent job of trying to preserve the feel of Heym’s rhyme and rhythm. As Michael Hoffman points out in his review in The Guardian, I question some of the word-order choices, but this is a fairly trivial nit to pick. Also, the capitalization of the first word of each line is not retained, which is perhaps no bigger deal than not retaining the capitalizations of all nouns, which is the German way. Hasler nicely renders charmingly lyrical passages, like this one from the poem “Why Do You Come To Me, White Moths, So Often?”
Why do you come to me, white moths, so often?
You dead souls, why do you often flutter
on my hand so, leaving time upon time
a little clinging ash from your wings?
Here I see Hasler departing markedly from the German word order, which is ok, because the original German word order would sound excruciating to the English reader. Also the use of “time upon time” as a replacement for the German “oft” (often) helps pad out the English to more closely approximate the German rhythm than would a more word-for-word translation. And if we want to talk about the prescience of Heym, I would point to this strophe as a foreshadowing of those souls turned to ash in the concentration camps.
Georg Trakl was another doomed German Expressionist poet. Unlike Heym, he lived to see The Great War, though he did not live to see the end of it. He had an incestuously intense relationship with his sister which may or may not have been consummated. In 1914 he was chosen to receive a subsidy from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, but failed to receive it. It is most likely he was schizophrenic. After being conscripted as a medical orderly in the Austrian army, Trakl eventually committed suicide through an overdose of cocaine. His sister shot herself to death three years later.
Will Stone has done for Trakl what has been done before, earlier by Robert Bly and James Wright, and, most recently, in the Fall 2005 issue of The Loch Raven Review, by Jim Doss and Werner Schmitt. I’d like to start by comparing translations of what may be Trakl’s most famous line (from the poem De Profundis):
Auf meine Stirne tritt kaltes Metall.
Which Bly/Wright render as
Cold metal walks on my forehead.
Doss/Schmitt render as
Cold metal walks upon my brow.
And Stone renders as
Onto my brow cold metal steps.
And which a word-for-word translation might be
On my brow steps cold metal.
I leave it to the reader to decide which is preferred. Certainly, Stone has distinguished himself by having the only version which ends on the verb.
I first became aware of Georg Trakl through an article on Weird Poets by Jack Anders in no. 19 of Mipoesias. I quickly found the Bly/Wright translations, and at about the same time I discovered the Doss/Schmitt versions. Now, several months later, I finally have a book which contains the original German. That alone makes this book worth its cost to me.
In looking at De Profundis we again see a sneaking of a verb at the end of a line. Where most translators render “Leib” as “body”, Stone renders it as “remains.” Ok, yes, he means “remains” as a noun, but still, it is a more verby noun than “body". Perhaps Stone is looking to chime “remains” with the word at the end of a line four lines back, “grain”, in much the same way the original German chimes “Leib” with the end-word four lines back, “ein.” Such is the web of decisions to constantly make in the act of translation. Stone addresses this web in his Translator’s Preface, where he points at Hasler’s Heym as a readable and comfortable translation which finds itself wandering in the no-man’s land between freedom and fidelity.
Along with the German and English versions of the poems, there is a fine introduction, as well as some extended biographical info at the back of the book. Included are some photos, including the manuscripts of Trakl’s two last poems.
As for Trakl’s poetry, I find it much more lyrically tender than Heym. Except for perhaps the latest poems, Trakl seems more wistful than the harrowing Heym. For an example is his short poem My Heart Towards Evening:
At evening you hear the shriek of bats,
Two black horses leap in the meadow,
Rustling of the red maple.
To the wayfarer on the road the modest inn appears.
Heavenly to taste the nuts and new wine,
Heavenly: to lurch drunkenly through the dusking wood.
From black branches grief stricken bells are sounding,
Dew drips on your face.