Eletelefonie
Es war einmal ein Elefant,
wollt nutzen einen Telefant –
Nein, nein! Ich mein ein Elefon,
wollt nutzen wohl ein Telefon –
(Herrje! Hoffentlich, mit Müh und Not,
bring ich die Sache jetzt ins Lot!)

Wie dem auch sei, ihm geriet der Rüssel
letztendlich in die Telefüssel;
Je mehr er zu befrein sich müht,
desto lauter schrillt das Teletüt –
(Mit dem Lied lassen wir es dabei bewenden,
mit Telefiet und Elefenten!)

1.

1As a child, I once saw a drawing which for some reason has stuck in my mind to this day: an elephant, walking on a tightrope. His ludicrously inflated belly made him look reminiscent of a balloon, giving him an air of weightlessness while he seemed to be hovering over the barely visible tightrope. The scene evoked a feeling of suspicious effortlessness from which emanated a sense of imminent disaster. I could not help but think of this remote childhood memory while translating Laura Richards’s poem “Eletelephony.”

2.

2“Once there was an elephant, / Who tried to use the telephant”—Much of the drama unfolds around the speaker’s failure at uttering the two words “elephant” and “telephone” in one and the same sentence, leading to increasingly bizarre distortions: “telephunk,” “telephee,” “elephop,” and “telephong.” What all of these have in common is the sequence—“ele-”; the latter can be regarded as the nucleus around which the poetic structure coagulates. The shared etymological source of the German equivalents of these words—“Elefant” and “Telefon” can hardly be overlooked. One might therefore think that the poetic engine of the original text could easily be reconstructed in its German translation. On closer scrutiny, however, it turns out that a subtle difference shifts the focus of the translated text in a meaningful way. While the English [ˈɛləfənt] (elephant) and [ˈtɛləˌfoʊn] (telephone) are both stressed on the first syllable, the German equivalents display a different stress pattern, namely word-final stress in [eləˈfant] (Elefant) and either word-final or word-initial stress in Telefon ([ˌteːləˈfoːn] and [ˈteːləˌfoːn]); the latter is nowadays more common, especially in colloquial speech, the former rather dated. The English “elephant” and “telephone” and their various malformations have in common the word stress on what has been labeled the poetic nucleus—the sequence—“ele-”. In German, however, there is no centripetal force at work like in the English variants “elephant” and “telephone.” Stress is placed on the two opposite sides of the word. It is already clear that the German reader of the poem will be treading on a shakier ground than the English one.

3.

3On the graphemic level, I should point at two slight, yet important differences between the English “elephant” and “telephone” and their German counterparts. Unlike English, German nouns are always spelled with capital first letter, resulting in “Elefant” and “Telefon.” The English words “elephant” and “telephone” and all their pseudo-derivations in the poem therefore represent the poetic nucleus graphemically consistent as “ele”, whereas the orthographic convention in German requires an alternation of “Ele” (“Elefant,” “Elefenten”) and “ele” (“Telefon,” “Telefant,” “Telefüssel,” “Teletüt,” “Telefiet”), which obscures the common element -ele- in these two groups of words.

4The second obvious distinctive feature are the different graphemic representations of [f] in the two languages as “ph” in English and “f” in German. What makes the English digraph “ph” look particularly elegant is the combination of curved elements (the semicircle in “p” and the semi-arc in “h”) and the two parallel vertical lines that not only echo the one found in the “l” of the “ele” sequence, but also made me think of the balancing pole used by some tightrope walkers or of their arms extended to the sides as a way of keeping their balance. The “f” in the German “Elefant” and “Telefon,” however, looks more heavy-headed and fails to inspire the sensation of balance that is so striking in the digraph “ph” and resonates so much with the idea of funambulism. German orthographic convention produces, again, a minute shift towards greater imbalance and precariousness.

4.

5Readers of the German translation are likely to find the title “Eletelefonie” somehow compelling in a way slightly different from the English readers’ experience. The reason is probably the repetition of the syllable [lə] (which shows up several times in significant, i.e. verse-final position, within only one word—“Eletelefonie”—and the way it is linked to the German lexicon. In the first place we should mention one German verb that perfectly describes the staggering, tottering speech evoked by the title: lallen [ˈlalən]. But this is not the only link to the German lexicon that makes the title so effective: Lulle (colloquial for cigarette), Luller and Lulli (colloquial for pacifier, dummy), Lolli (like English lolly, lollipop)—all of these words follow a common pattern (lvl(l)v) and are metonymically related to the mouth. We could trace this connection back to other more ancient tongues as well; the Greek verb λαλέω [laˈle.o] (to talk, to chat) would be a striking example. I am not trying to put on an air of objectivity in this comment on my translation, which is why I take the license to point at another highly idiosyncratic lexical association based only on phonetic similarities: the Hebrew noun לוליין [lulyan] translates as acrobat, in certain contexts also as tightrope walker, and clearly resonates with the pattern lvl(l)v. As someone interested in multilingual modes of writing, I conceive of the different languages in a writer’s (and translator’s) head as interconnected and inseparable, associations freely flow regardless of claims made by historical linguistics on the proximity and relatedness of different languages. My reading and subsequent translation of the poem with its particular focus on (im)balance and the implicit imagery of funambulism have thus been informed by this link to the Hebrew language as well.

5.

6Up to which point should I, as a translator, slacken the reins and give way to the centrifugal forces that became manifest in the process of translation? Where do I have to intervene and try to maintain balance? While I allowed for some inaccuracies in rhyme and colloquialisms in grammar (e.g. “einen Telefant” and not the more accurate “einen Telefanten” for the accusative case), I opted for balance in syntax. The translation of subordinate clauses from English into German is notoriously difficult because the verb in unmarked German subordinate clauses must come at the end. A raw translation of the first four lines could look as follows: “Es war einmal ein Elefant, / der einen Telefanten nutzen wollte— / Nein, nein! Ich mein ein Elefon, / der (das) ein Telefon nutzen wollte.”

7As noted above, the verse-final position of the distorted forms of “elephant” and “telephone” is at the very heart of the poem’s poetic language. The raw translation does not succeed at preserving this feature since it puts the modal verb “wollte” (wanted) at the end of both relative clauses. In addition to that, German relative pronouns inflect for gender. “Elefant” and “Telefon” differ in gender (masculine vs. neuter). So, which one could we assign to the made-up word “Elefon”? Der “Elefon” (masculine gender) leans towards (der) “Elefant,” whereas das “Elefon” suggests that it is closer to (das) “Telefon.” Fortunately, there are ways to circumvent this inclination to specify things that should better remain ambiguous. One way is a marked construction where the finite verb (“wollt(e)”) is placed at the beginning of the subordinate clause, so that the relative pronoun can be omitted (“wollt nutzen einen Telefant” and “wollt nutzen wohl ein Telefon”).

6.

8A couple of weeks ago, I came across a children’s (!) program that was supposed to explain how weight and gravitational force are interrelated. What I found disturbing was the example they used: if you toss an elephant and a mouse from a skyscraper, the difference in weight will leave their carcasses in very different degrees of dismemberment. Elephantine funambulism seems to come with a high risk to end in very bloody disaster.