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Merwin Recollected: Echo-Futures With or Without Us
Essays

Translating Merwin: Navigating Nature, Place, and the Apo Koinou

Helmbrecht Breinig

Résumés

Partant du concept de traduction propre à Merwin, cet article établit un lien entre son travail de poète et de traducteur et les théories anciennes et récentes du langage et de la traduction. En prenant son poème « Leviathan » comme premier exemple, il montre comment la façon innovante dont Merwin utilise les modèles médiévaux peut être transférée en allemand. L’article souligne la nécessité de conserver l’ouverture sémantique et philosophique de la poésie de Merwin, mais il insiste aussi sur l’importance de suivre les différents axes thématiques et les caractéristiques formelles de ses œuvres ultérieures, notamment The Shadow of Sirius. Ce recueil, avec ses poèmes sur la mémoire et sa déploration de la perte des anciens modes de vie en Occitanie ainsi que de la destruction de la nature, sert de matériau principal pour esquisser les possibilités et les obstacles de la restitution de ces aspects en allemand. Nos versions de ces textes sont, selon les arguments de Walter Benjamin, des échos des originaux, réducteurs et enrichissants ; ils spécifient et explorent tout à la fois.

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1In one of the wonderful short prose pieces in W.S. Merwin’s The Miner’s Pale Children, “Unchopping a Tree,” the writer imagines the process of reassembling a tree that has been chopped down. He describes the (impossible) task of undoing the damage humans have done to the work of nature: “Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nests that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places” (1994 85). But the text is also an attempt to reveal what it means to translate nature, the organic system created by nature, into the language, the mode of thinking and constructing used by humans. Merwin is often called a nature poet, but in this text he makes us aware of the fact that such translation, from the system of nature to human language, is as impossible as, indeed, “unchopping a tree.”

2When I translated this piece into German, I couldn’t help comparing the translator’s job with the task described by Merwin: innumerable details have to be considered, and the result will never be adequate to the original. For instance, my version of the title, “Einen Baum entfällen,” uses the verb customary in German for cutting a tree: fällen, which is close to the English to fell. But so doing, I lost the activity of the axe that can be heard in Merwin’s title, because I chose comprehensibility for the sake of my readers.

  • 1 “Entweder der Uebersezer läßt den Schriftsteller möglichst in Ruhe, und bewegt den Leser ihm entgeg (...)

3Translation theorists have pointed out the necessity to decide either in favor of the original, both semantically and linguistically, or for whatever facilitates the reader’s comprehension, that is, the words or phrases customary in the target language. This dilemma was already described in 1813 by Friedrich Schleiermacher: “Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader!”1 But as Schleiermacher knew and as later theories of translation from semiotics to hermeneutics, from speech act theory to psycholinguistics, from interculturality studies to postcolonial theory have elaborated upon, this binary model is far too reductive to describe the processes going on between languages and cultures, notably in complex, literary texts. Can Merwin, the translator, be a model for dealing with these decisions and complexities?

4Those familiar with Merwin’s career will remember that he, as a very young man, visited Ezra Pound at St. Elisabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. in order to gain his advice for becoming a poet. He recalls the meeting in The Mays of Ventadorn:

[Pound] told me he imagined I was serious, and that if I was I should learn languages, “so as not to be at the mercy of translators.” And then I should translate, myself. “If you’re going to be a poet,” he said, “you have to work at it every day. You should write about seventy-five lines a day. But at your age you don’t have anything to write about. […]. So get to work translating. The Provençal is the real source. The poets are closest to music. They hear it. They write to it. Try to learn the Provençal, at least some of it, if you can. Meanwhile, the others. Spanish is all right. The Romancero is what you want there. Get as close to the original as you can. It will make you use your English and find out what you can do with it.” (2002 8)

5This, one can see, is a theory of translation in a nutshell: translation is unreliable but is necessary for anybody who is not in command of the language of the original. It teaches the range of the target (usually one’s own) language, including its “music.” It has to be as close to the original as necessary and yet as creatively free as possible.

6In The Mays of Ventadorn, Merwin describes his encounter with the southern French region Occitanie, with its history, language and the Occitan troubadours. Notably, he tells us how he found and acquired the old farmhouse in the Lot where he was to spend major portions of his life. He tells us what is known about the career of Bernart de Ventadorn and the history of the castle of Ventadour, where the medieval poet resided. He also provides examples of his own translations from the Provençal.

7In his fine paper on how these early translations from the Provençal and other Romance languages informed Merwin’s development as a poet, Michael Alm argues:

These translations are essential when approaching Merwin’s output as a poet. Indeed, early in his career, Merwin kept true to Pound’s advice, interpreting the process of translation as a way of transforming the English language and creating “something new.” Merwin sees translation as a way of “stretching” the English language and a creation unto itself, something apart from the source text, recalling the Poundian penchant for translation as a form of creative multicultural exchange. (5)

8Referring to Rainer Schulte’s “Transferral of Poetic Frontiers,” Alm continues:

Merwin’s translations thus take on a different meaning as “the dialogue” between himself and the source of his translation progresses. They are not translations in the conventional sense, but rather multi-layered dynamic processes of investigation into the very nature of poetry. Like Pound before him [...], Merwin uses his translations into English to create “something new,” a work apart, rather than faithfully translating the source text. It would perhaps be better to use the term poet-translators when talking about Merwin and Pound, because poetic re-creation takes precedence over translation. (6)

9All of this goes to show that Merwin heeded Pound’s advice while discovering his own way to render texts written in other languages into English, a modern English that by no means follows the original meticulously. Merwin, indeed, became a great translator. Does translating the translator’s own poetry mean that his free, flowing, musical English versions of Romance and other texts form a model that should be emulated? I found that this was advisable only to a certain degree. The compromise, here, is that his method of a poetic dialogue with his source texts has to be reduced to a humbler approach trying to stay as close as possible to the original, that is, Merwin’s poems and their contexts, while considering their readability. What can be learned from his early endeavors is that translating his texts implies getting involved in his themes, his political, social and environmentalist views, his love of nature, plants and animals, his attachment to certain places like Lacam in southwestern France or Maui, Hawaii. If the translations are to be echoes of the original it also means that one has to come to terms with his formal techniques like his dropping of punctuation and his use of dangling sentence constructions like the apo koinou. And, as we – my wife Susanne Opfermann and myself – have found out, one needs to know about the precise contexts of his poems if one wants to find equivalents: for instance, it is necessary to know Lacam and the Dordogne valley to follow his imagery in The Shadow of Sirius. It is necessary to find out about which bird species he is referring to when talking about song or appearance. It is necessary to know about Merwin’s world.

10The first Merwin poem I translated was “Leviathan” from his early collection Green with Beasts (1956). The first part of that volume bears the title “Physiologus: Chapters for a Bestiary,” and, indeed, here Merwin follows the ancient and medieval tradition of writing a series of texts about certain species of animals, listing their properties according to the state of zoological knowledge at that time, and usually adding a part called “significatio,” containing religious and moral lessons deduced from the alleged character and behavior of the beast, thus turning it into an allegory. Probably, the biblical monster Leviathan referred to a whale, but in many texts its species is somewhat ambiguous (fig. 1). Thus, the Old English Physiologus contains a poem about a whale but bears the title “Asp-Turtle”—some traditions have it, that the big monster of the deep is a gigantic turtle with trees growing on its back. It begins:

Nū ic fitte gēn ymb fisca cynn
wille wōðcræfte wordum cȳþan
þurh mōdgemynd, bi þām miclan hwale.

  • 2 “This time I will with poetic art rehearse, by means of words and wit, a poem about a kind of fish, (...)

Sē bið unwillum oft gemēted,
5frēcne and fer[h]ðgrim, fareðlācendum,
niþþa gehwylcum; þām is noma cenned,
fyr[ge]nstrēama geflotan, Fastitocalon. (The Old English Physiologus 8)2

Fig. 1. An Aspidochelone from a French manuscript, c. 1270. J. Paul Getty Museum

Fig. 1. An Aspidochelone from a French manuscript, c. 1270. J. Paul Getty Museum

11One notices the consistent use of alliteration, stave rhyme, and the two-part structure of the line. The Early Middle English Bestiary, on the other hand, uses these formal elements only intermittently and often replaces them by the more modern four-beat rhymed line:

Cethegrande [the whale] is a fis
ðe moste ðat in water is. (Hall 188)

12It would have been easy to imitate this model, but Merwin chose the hard, Old English way. His long poem’s opening is:

This is the black sea-brute bulling through wave-wrack,
Ancient as ocean’s shifting hills, who in sea-toils
Traveling, who furrowing the salt acres
Heavily, his wake hoary behind him,
Shoulders spouting, the fist of his forehead
Over wastes gray-green crashing, among horses unbroken
From bellowing fields, past bone-wreck of vessels,
Tide-ruin, wash of lost bodies bobbing
No longer sought for, and islands of ice gleaming
Who ravening the rank flood, wave-marshaling,
Overmastering the dark sea-marches, finds home
And harvest. (2013a 99)

13Alliterations are used throughout; sometimes, as in line one, following the Old English model with double alliteration in the first half-line, single in the second. Also, following this tradition, most half-lines have two heavy stresses (staves), while the number of unstressed or half-stressed syllables varies. The impressive sound pattern is further enriched by numerous assonances.

14Curiously, in a review of Merwin’s Selected Translations, Adam Plunkett criticized the poet for levelling the differences between the various languages he translated from:

The world of Merwin’s translations is flat. In his English, the Spanish sounds just like the Eskimo [...]. You cannot distinguish poems of different languages from the originals—there are none—nor by notes that explain regional symbols and literary traditions—there are hardly any notes at all. What is odd and distinctive about Merwin is that I doubt that he’d take these observations as criticisms.

The central theme of Merwin’s poetry has always been the distance between experience and expression, between the felt joy of the sounds of words and the inadequacy of words to capture it. So, it’s no surprise that he enjoys the foreignness of foreign languages, in which he can appreciate their sound without being distracted by sense. For Merwin, it is when “all the languages were foreign” that “the first / year rose,” a Kingdom of heavenly sounds. (1)

15Obviously, Plunkett’s first observation does not hold true for “Leviathan.” To be sure, it is not a translation, but rather an imitation as well as a “dialogue,” and as such it is distinctly original. But it reveals Merwin’s aim of finding equivalences for the medieval model while developing new areas of sense. Even if in this poem he does not follow the divided line and continuous alliteration/assonance pattern of Old English poetry over-obediently, he uses it often enough to evoke the Germanic tradition. In particular, he makes heavy use of kenningar. A kenning, as defined in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, is “a stock phrase of the kind used in Old Norse and Old English verse as a poetic circumlocution in place of a more familiar word” (Baldick 117). Thus, “waves” become “shifting hills” or “horses unbroken,” the sea becomes “salt acres.” Poetic images abound: “the fist of his forehead,” “tide-ruin,” “wave-marshalling” and so forth. In other words: Merwin does indeed imitate the central formal and tonal features of Old English verse but extends the range of his own English by inventing new images and sound patterns.

16Thus, to translate this poem into German is demanding and yet also easy, because German is a Germanic language, and Old High German has texts that follow the same alliterative model. I have tried to emphasize these elements by taking the liberty of not sticking too closely to the original but rather to invent new kenningar, use neologisms just like Merwin does, and select words that lend themselves to this kind of formal play:

Das ist das schwarze Meer-Monster, malmend durch Brecher-Brocken,
Uralt wie des Ozeans bewegte Berge, das durch Schwall-Schwere
Fahrt nimmt, das, durch Salz-Felder furchend,
Schwerfällig, sein Kielwasser weißlich zurücklässt,
Aus Schultern spritzend, der Hammer seines Helms
Über Öden graugrün krachend, zwischen Rössern, unzugeritten,
Aus brüllenden Brachen, vorbei am Knochenwrack von Koggen,
Tiden-Trümmern, verloren treibenden Leichen,
Nicht länger gesucht, und Inseln aus Glänz-Eis,
Das, die ranzige Flut räubernd, Wellen befehligend,
Meister der finsteren See-Marken, Heimstatt findet
Und Ernte. (Breinig and Donat 225)

17For instance, I echoed the alliterations of the first line, “sea-brute bulling,” by “Meer-Monster, malmend” or replaced the “fist of his forehead” by the “der Hammer seines Helms” (i.e. “the hammer of his helmet”). In other words, I took Merwin’s emphasis on the sound of language(s) and his exploration of new possibilities of English seriously by being similarly inventive in my German version.

  • 3 For the biblical references, see Felstiner.
  • 4 Hebrew for man, male person.

18However, this poem isn’t simply an imitation. It connects the whale with the biblical image of liwjatan by referring to its strength, but also to the fact that “First created he was of all creatures” (Merwin, 2013a 99).3 Leviathan thus does not belong to the list of creatures whom Adam/Isch4 was allowed to name and hence subject to his power. The poem contains an eschatological message just like its Old English model, though not a Christian, religious one, but one that turns the whale into an image of the ambiguity of existence, of nature, and of creation. Leviathan is “Like an angel, although a lost angel,” (99); the view from his eyes encompasses totality from sunrise to nightfall. This is the ending: “The sea curling, / Star-climbed, wind-combed, cumbered with itself still / As at first it was, is the hand not yet contented / Of the Creator. And he waits for the world to begin” (99-100). Here we already find the syntactic openness that we see in Merwin’s later poetry, after he abandoned punctuation. How is “The sea curling” connected with “is the hand not yet contented”? What or who is “the hand”? Who or what is the Creator? God? Nature? Evolution? Who is the “he” of the last line—the Creator or Leviathan? Or are they one and the same? (Breinig 12-15). The poem has been associated with Hobbes’s political model of the Leviathan; the extended metaphor of the whale has been read as symbolizing the destructiveness of humanity or else the dangers it is exposed to, and of course, the tradition evoked by the poem makes for an allegorical reading. However, the very unambiguity of the medieval “significationes” is what Merwin tried to avoid all his life. Therefore, the translation here has to be as precise and literal but also as open as possible: “Das Wasser wirbelnd, Sternerklettert, windgekämmt, beladen mit sich selbst noch, / Wie es war am Anfang, ist der Hand des Schöpfers / Noch nicht genug. Und er wartet auf der Welt Beginn” (Breinig and Donat 225).

19As close as this comes to the original, I was not always capable of transferring the modern philosophical openness conveyed by Merwin’s dangling, convoluted constructions in their very multi-directionality. Just one example: I translated “And he waits for the world to begin” by “Und er wartet auf der Welt Beginn” because I needed the sound-equivalent of “to begin,” without making the line too long, like “er wartet darauf, dass die Welt beginnt.” Thus, I lost the ambiguity in the English version: will the world begin by itself or is it made to begin, as the German version suggests?

  • 5 “Ich spreche nicht die Sprache, sondern werde von der Sprache gesprochen“ (114; my translation).
  • 6 Cf. Merwin’s complaint in The Mays of Ventadorn: “Standing in the ruins of what is now known as Ven (...)

20What is behind the openness to be aimed at? In a paper on the theory of translation, Olaf Kühl strongly argues for retaining the ambiguities of an original because it conveys more than the author’s intended meanings. Kühl quotes Umberto Eco paraphrasing Martin Heidegger: “I don’t speak the language, but I am spoken by the language.”5 Language is the way Being articulates itself through me. What this means for translation is that we are never in command but are in a sense driven by the text which in turn was only partially controlled by the mind of the author, itself controlled by the factual world, by Foucauldian discourses, the subconscious, dissemination... So, here we have the Greek and Latin tradition of the Physiologus, the Anglo-Saxon world, the question of how to deal with myth and nature from a modern point of view, and how to have these different world views and their linguistic and formal transferral find an adequate echo in contemporary German. The difficulties, ambiguities, and formal features combine to support Merwin’s own view that to translate poetry is, in the final analysis, an impossible task. However, it is a task to be undertaken nonetheless.6

21Language is not only a field into which we are placed but also an area of exploration. Kühl refers to the great philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander’s brother. In his lecture “On the Comparative Study of Language Seen in Relation to the Several Periods of Language Development,” Humboldt argues:

  • 7 Durch die gegenseitige Abhängigkeit des Gedankens und des Wortes von einander leuchtet es klar ein, (...)

The mutual dependency of thought and word makes it clear that languages are not simply means of representing the world as it is already known but much rather of discovering the hitherto unknown. Their difference is not one of sounds and signs, but a difference of the very worldviews. Here is the foundation and ultimate purpose of all language studies. The sum of what can be known, as the field to be tilled by the human intellect, is situated between all languages, and independent of them, in the center; humans can approach this purely objective territory by no other means than their own way of knowing and feeling, that is, subjectively. (Humboldt 256, my translation)7

22That is, there is a greater reality which we can approach and explore only partially, individually, by the ways in which we think and speak, and these are defined by our individual minds and the different cultures we belong to.

23Merwin shared this view, but put a special emphasis on the role of language as a universal, particularly human, means of expressing our experience of an “unsoundable” deep structure of reality. Commodification has all but obliterated this original faculty of dealing with the world. In his “Notes for a Preface” he writes:

[…] the original seems more and more frequently to be, not a particular mode of poetry, but the great language itself, the vernacular of the imagination, that at one time was common to men. It is a tongue that is loosed in the service of immediate recognitions, and that in itself would make it foreign in our period. For it conveys something of the unsoundable quality of experience and the hearing of it is a private matter, in an age in which the person and his senses are being lost in the consumer, who does not know what he sees, hears, wants, or is afraid of, until the voice of the institution has told him. (1966 269-270)

24This passage seems to have been written with a poem like “Leviathan” in mind. Merwin’s reference to an original language as a means of expressing the imaginative approach to a world that does not place humans at its center but as one of many species may take us to another of his whale poems, which also illustrates the problem of openness. Translating can make phrases more unambiguous than they should be or might be. It can also make certain points stronger, as in Merwin’s iconic poem “For a Coming Extinction” from The Lice (1967). This poem was one of the best-known eco-literary texts of the early environmental movement and, in its poster version, decorated innumerable Berkeley student apartments, my own included. Here, Merwin’s “world” is far more easily accessible than in “Leviathan” and can easily be linked with his ideas in “Notes for a Preface”:

Going along with the life of [the artist's] time in an earnest fashion may or may not benefit the attempt to give utterance to the unutterable experience of being alive, and consciously mortal, and human, in any time. It does not necessarily entail going along with all possible activities of an emergent and epidemic species which scorns all life except its own withering existence, and is busily relegating the senses its predecessors were given to apprehend their world, and the creatures with which they were privileged to share it. (1966 272)

25That is, it is the task of the poet to give voice to lived and experienced existence, to nature as something transcending humanity, a species that is in the process of abandoning its original faculty of sharing and expressing reality in harmony with other creatures.

26In “For a Coming Extinction,” the speaker’s outrage over the human destruction of nature and the extinction of species even as sublime and myth-hallowed as the whale is expressed clearly and unambiguously:

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing (2013a 304)

27Susanne Opfermann’s translation follows the text almost literally:

Grauwal
Jetzt wo wir dich zum Großen Ende schicken
Jenem mächtigen Gott
Sag ihm
Dass wir die wir dir nachfolgen die Vergebung erfanden
Und nichts vergeben (Breinig and Donat 149)

28Yet translating “to The End” by “zum Ende” would have diminished The End to an ordinary kind of ending (in German, nouns begin with a capital letter), and thus Opfermann expressed capital End by “Großen Ende,” which in turn made it necessary not to write “Jenem großen Gott” for “That great god” but to avoid repeating the adjective by changing it to “mächtigen,” mighty. Slight shifts that make the text a little less semantically open. In the sharply ironic last line the speaker asks the dying gray whale to tell “The End / That great god” “That it is we who are important” (Merwin, 2013a 305). Opfermann’s translation reads “Dass wir es sind auf die es ankommt” (Brenig and Donat 149). It is a correct translation, but in the sense of “we are the ones that count,” “the ones who are in charge,” turning the ironic, yet somewhat resigned “important,” into a call for ecological action.

29Even in this poem with its clear message Merwin doesn’t refrain from using powerful, innovative language and imagery: “The bewilderment will diminish like an echo / Winding along your inner mountains / Unheard by us” (305). The translation has to be creative, using sound effects emulating the “echo”: “Die Verwunderung wird verraunen wie ein Echo / Das sich um die Berge in dir windet / Ungehört von uns” (Breinig and Donat 149; my emphasis). That is, the translation becomes not only interpretative, emphasis-heightening but it is also a poetic act.

30When Susanne and I asked Merwin for his permission to translate a selection of his work he insisted upon our translating just one collection, his at that time most recent, Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Shadow of Sirius (2008). His reasons, I think, were twofold. There was another German translation in the making, which was indeed a selection. Also, he meant to indicate that his books of poetry are compositions in their own right, with an internal structure that makes individual poems support one another and that creates certain groupings that further understanding. Thus, in The Shadow of Sirius, section I contains mainly poems devoted to his childhood and younger years, section II mainly his relationship with his dogs, section III mainly poems concerning his life at his old farmhouse at Lacam, in the Lot, notably after his return there, after long years of absence when he had separated from his second wife Dido who continued to live there. It also contains nature poems, poetological texts, poems on other subjects he found important during those years and that are indirectly connected with the main topic of the section in question. For instance, section II with its motto “in memory of Muku, Makana, Koa” (41) also contains poems like “Another Dream of Burial” (2013b 569) that do not explicitly refer to the three dogs mentioned in the motto but are connected with the main subject by the general thematic field of death, loss, absence, distance, and mourning.

31Merwin’s language in The Shadow of Sirius may not seem to be as complex as in earlier volumes, yet the open form and the lack of punctuation—which he had abandoned with The Moving Target in 1963—often makes for an impression of a floating or hovering of the lines. Also, the topicality of many of these poems makes it inevitable that one should pay attention to referentiality. Therefore, we tried to achieve a balance between keeping Merwin’s openness as much as possible and reproducing the very precise points of reference that should not be missed.

  • 8 The title is hardly translatable – it means or evokes something like Speaking Alien, Speaking Forei (...)

32Given the autobiographical bent of many of the poems in this volume, memory is an essential aspect. In her book-length essay on the art of translation, Fremdsprechen,8 the German writer Esther Kinsky comments on the difficulty of rendering personal memories, using books by two Polish authors remembering events and impressions of the last century:

  • 9 Ein schwieriges Gelände für jeden, der außerhalb steht. Alles mag nachvollziehbar und sogar nachste (...)

A difficult terrain for anybody standing outside. Everything may be echoed in one’s imagination and even copied formally: the broken structure, the fragmentariness, the circulating sounding of one’s own memory, the evocative repetitions – yet how thin is the ice of language to be mustered by the translator when dealing with this most inaccessible field – the recollection of another person?9

  • 10 A title we had to translate as “Noch stiller Morgen” (Merwin, 2018 15) in order to capture the doub (...)

33All of this can be applied to the difficulties when trying to translate Merwin’s memory poems. They are constructed from detailed, yet fragmentary recollections, often only images that have stuck in the mind like “one patch of sunlight moving / across the green carpet” (544) in “Still Morning,”10 a poem evoking the author’s very early childhood.

34An exemplary text among these memory poems is “The Pinnacle,” a poem about a walk the five-year-old avatar of the speaker took with his beloved old teacher, climbing up to the so-called Palisades above the New Jersey Hudson River bank (fig. 2). If one does not know what this formation of vertical rocks looks like the physical environment of this scene remains somewhat strange, and we decided to keep this strangeness by translating “Palisades” by its German equivalent “Palisaden” rather than circumscribing it. We emphasized the association of “Palisades” with a kind of fortification by translating “we went all the way / up the Palisades to the place we called the pinnacle” (Merwin, 2013b 549) by “gingen wir bis zum Ende / die Palisaden hoch bis zu der Stelle / die wir die höchste Zinne nannten” (Merwin, 2018 33). Zinne as an architectural term can mean a peaked tower but also, in military terms, a part of a battlement. On the other hand, it also fits the association with rocks and mountains as it may also be used to designate a peak or a steep rock, as in the famous Drei Zinnen in the Dolomites. To capture this latter meaning, we inserted “höchste,” highest.

Fig. 2. The Palisades, New Jersey.

Fig. 2. The Palisades, New Jersey.

© All rights reserved

35What makes this poem particularly interesting, though, is not so much the physical world of the author’s childhood it refers to but the way his memory is evoked. Its fragmentariness, its stumbling from one observation to the next, becomes evident for instance in the somewhat contradictory statement: “we went our favorite way / the first time just in case / it was the only time” (Merwin, 2013b 549). It is visible throughout by the short, hovering, halting lines whose hesitant mode is emphasized by the lack of punctuation that had by then become a standard feature of Merwin’s poetry. Abandoning punctuation does not mean that the poems are unstructured. In most of the texts in The Shadow of Sirius it is quite easy to imagine them sprinkled with commas and periods. However, to do so would not do justice to his aim: “I wanted the poems to evoke the spoken language, and wanted the hearing of them to be essential to taking them in” (635). The result are dangling sentence constructions, often the apo koinou. According to Webster’s Dictionary, this is “the occurrence of one and the same word or word group, not repeated, in two constructions” (101). And it can be more than just one word. In “The Pinnacle,” the passage quoted above continues: “we went our favorite way / the first time just in case / it was the only time / even though it might be too far / we went all the way [...].” The phrase “even though it might be too far” can be linked to what comes before and what comes after. The German version “wir gingen unseren Lieblingsweg / zum ersten Mal für den Fall / dass es das einzige Mal wäre / obwohl es vielleicht zu weit war / gingen wir bis zum Ende [...]” (Merwin, 2018 33) indicates this double direction at least as strongly. Indeed, the whole sentence, if it is a sentence, can be read back and forth, making the adventure even more daring and the teacher and young Merwin’s conversation even more loaded and meaningful.

36The heart-rending dog poems of the middle section of The Shadow of Sirius are particularly vivid examples of an art expressing strong emotions and capable of inducing similar emotions in the reader. They are memory poems in their own right. No dog lover could read them without empathizing with the poet’s mourning over his lost companions, with his longing to join them in this or some other world.

37To provide just one example, the short, three-stanza poem “Good Night” with its chain rhyme scheme—an unusual feature in Merwin’s poetry—, and with its simple language and its repetitions, is a lullaby and seems to be addressed to a child or child-substitute. But the sleep evoked here is the sleep of death, and the reassurance usually given by this form of text here is the promise of eternal love. Our translation here had to imitate the rhyme scheme a-b-c (or a-assonance)-d d-b-d-d d-a-b-d, but it was impossible to find equivalents for all the one-syllable rhyme words. Thus for

Sleep softly my old love
my beauty in the dark
night is a dream we have
as you know as you know (Merwin, 2013b 567)

38We chose to translate

Schlaf süß meine alte Liebe
meine Schönheit in der Dunkelheit
Nacht ist ein Traum den wir haben
wie du weißt wie du weißt (Merwin, 2018 89)

39As always, a German version will be longer than the English original, and its polysyllabic words will create a more complex, less lullaby-like sound effect. Had we been certain that the dog (the person) addressed is female, we might have translated “beauty” by “Schöne,” using a shorter word and sound. The gender openness of “beauty” and its double reference to an individual and an aesthetic concept, though, made it necessary that we use the equally open German term “Schönheit.” The resulting additional internal rhyme “Schönheit-Dunkelheit” in combination with the threefold occurrence of the weighty word “Dunkelheit” creates a somewhat different tone, more resembling a love poem. Our translation of the last line of stanza three, “in the love that you know” by “in der Liebe die du weißt” rather than the “kennst” to be expected here saves the rich, three-word rhyme and bends the German language, in keeping with what Pound and Merwin said about the explorative function of translations. Such enriching of the target language also occurs in “At the Bend” / “An der Biegung,” where we turned Merwin’s images “curl of sleep” and “ear of shadow” (Merwin, 2013b 568) into new composites: “Schlafknäuel” and “Schattenohr” (Merwin, 2018 91).

40The third section with its many poems deriving from Merwin’s life at Lacam above the Dordogne valley required that we should know the places referred to when trying to follow his imagery. Thus, the beginning of “September’s Child” has this beautiful description of a September morning above the river:

September light gray and rose touches the ridge above the valley
seeps upward at daybreak through its own silence
without beginning without stages with white clouds still cloaking the river
and a great ship of towers anchored on the one hill that rises through them [...] (Merwin, 2013b 596)

41We translated that very literally, also trying to echo the sound painting Merwin presents here, alliterations and assonances included:

Septemberlicht grau und rosa berührt die Hügelkette über dem Tal
sickert aufwärts bei Tagesanbruch durch seine eigene Stille
ohne Anfang ohne Stufen mit weißen Wolken die noch immer den Fluss verhüllen
und ein großes Schiff von Türmen ankert auf dem einen Hügel der sich durch sie erhebt […] (189)

42What remains enigmatic in the original and in our literal translation, though, is the image (or kenning?) of the “great ship of towers.” What it refers to becomes obvious only when you are there: it refers to the castle of Castelnau near Bretenoux (fig. 3) that you can see from Lacam, indeed from the rose garden of Merwin’s farmhouse. But the image is suggestive in itself and there is no point in trying to explain it in the translation. That is, we thought that we had to know the object of reference without having to elucidate it.

Fig. 3. Castle of Castelnau-Bretenoux

Fig. 3. Castle of Castelnau-Bretenoux

© All rights reserved

43The poem continues with an enumeration of sense impressions and of the activities by humans and animals beginning in the morning, from the opening of the markets with their “veteran vendors” to the ripening figs and the birds still flitting about in the leaves. What Merwin thematizes here and in many other texts—poems and prose narratives—are the old ways of life, the Occitan traditions down there that he loved so much, the fading customs and costumes, the replacement of traditional agriculture by modern, technology-supported farming, the disappearance of animals he had grown fond of. In a way, Merwin here translates this cultural and physical world into what Anglo-American readers might comprehend and imagine. Thus, we do not simply have the binarism of source and target language but, like in “Leviathan,” several worlds in dialogue: Occitan, French, American, historical, and contemporary. Of course, this and other poems are also projections of the social and physical reality as Merwin sees, remembers or imagines them. But you need not have seen these markets in, say, Bretenoux or St. Céré in order to follow his line of thought and feeling, and thus this poem can be translated into yet another language and cultural imaginary without previous local knowledge. As Walter Benjamin put it in his often-quoted essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (“The Task of the Translator”):

  • 11 “Die Übersetzung […] sieht sich nicht wie die Dichtung gleichsam im innern Bergwald der Sprache sel (...)

Translating, unlike poetry, sees itself not in the interior of the mountain forest that is language itself; rather, it stands outside the forest, as it were, facing it; and without stepping into the forest it calls out the original into the forest, calling from that sole place where an answering echo in the translator’s own language may be able to provide a reverberation of the original foreign language work. (9)11

44The elegiac theme of this poem can also be found, for instance, in Merwin’s prose volume The Lost Upland whose title refers to the causse above the valley and thus lets us imagine a word-play on causse and cause.

45Usually, his complaint about what has been lost is not a simple mere reiteration of the ubi sunt topos but part of his struggle against the destruction of nature, the extinction of species, the ecological crisis. A good example is the poem with the ominous title “The Silence of the Mine Canaries.” It consists largely of a catalogue of animals no longer to be seen in the neighborhood, that is, in or around Merwin’s old farm buildings at Lacam: bats, swallows, “the flocks of five kinds of tits” (Merwin, 2013b 590), the cuckoo, the nightjar, the mistle thrush, song thrush, whitethroat, and blackcap. Not everybody may be familiar with all of these, but the terms could be translated by the respective German ornithological (not the Latin, scientific) names: Ziegenmelker, Misteldrossel, Dorngrasmücke etc., because the birds do exist in Germany and are equally endangered there. The only problem here is the comparative length of the German terms which transforms the laconic short lines used by the poet. But how about the poem “The Old Trees on the Hills”? Here, the person referred to in the first lines—“When you were living / and it was later than we knew / there was an old orchard far up on the hill behind the house” (601-602)—is, perhaps, Merwin’s mother, and if so, the region referred to is Pennsylvania, not France. The birds listed here, kinglets, nuthatches, wrens, exist in Europe and America, but the bluebird is a North American species, and when we translated it by its official German name “Hüttensänger” (207), we knew that hardly anybody among our readers would be able to identify it. Should we have inserted another bird species more familiar to Germans?

46If you miss the precision of Merwin’s images, you risk making mistakes. We did just that when we translated the title of the poem “Cave” (586) by “Höhlenkeller” (153) —cave-cellar— because the description of the “rose-gray living rock / that covers the dark halls of the underworld” (586) seemed to fit the huge basement with its wall of natural rock underneath Merwin’s farmhouse at Lacam where his wines were stored, thus making the association with French cave (in the sense of wine cellar) inevitable. But when, later, after our translation had been published, we took the liberty of visiting Merwin’s study in what used to be the bakehouse more extensively, further details like the description of the ornaments on the wrought-iron stove made clear that what he had had in mind was indeed his study, the “stone hollow” “I have come back [to] through the years” (587). Therefore, we should have kept the metaphorical title “Höhle,” “cave.”

47One may ask: so what? Most of the poems in The Shadow of Sirius are highly personal, and to get all references you should be well versed in the poet’s biography and ideas. But the point is: what makes these poems relevant? Are they recollections in tranquility? The overflow of powerful feelings? What else? Doesn’t their power lie in the fact that his personal reminiscences are transformed into universal experiences, like the homecoming to a place that allows you to feel sheltered and undisturbed while being able to view the landscape and to link yourself to a regional, rural cultural tradition that involved bakehouses and made use of the rock faces that were available in order to save the building of back walls ? The poem’s conclusion, “I have come back through the years to this / stone hollow encrypted in its own stillness / I hear it without listening” (587) links his love of the old with the notion of a sepulchral quiet that speaks to him and, we may assume, makes him write. The semantic associations of “encrypt” cannot be retained in German, though, and we decided to use the dictionary meaning of “encoded,” “verschlüsselt” (153), thereby emphasizing the link to secret messages that arise out of this “stone hollow.” Merwin’s imagery here as elsewhere is precise, descriptive, but also highly suggestive.

48Which makes me return to the formal features of Merwin’s poetry. Its openness in spite of the many precise details is supported by Merwin’s use of gerunds and present participles to create a sense of flowing time and continuing processes, but these grammatical forms create extreme stylistic clumsiness when translated literally. For instance, in “The Odds”:

[…] a friend
wrote to me of how people there
were dealing with the cold
he told me that crews
were digging up the avenue
[…]
the men keeping a fire going
[…] feeding it whatever
turned up and he had been watching
two men by the barrel with three
gloves between them passing one
glove back and forth […]” (581-582; my emphasis)

49The poem uses seven continuous forms in just a few lines. None of them made it into our German version, where all of them had to be changed into preterit forms. Which doesn’t change the narrative meaning but makes for a more matter-of-factly tone: “er hatte beobachtet / wie zwei Männer am Fass zusammen drei / Handschuhe hatten […]” (134).

50This is a poem about a stranger’s observations of a form of solidarity among the workers observed and about social conditions, perhaps, as the last line hints at the politics behind the situation: “and he had tried to tell whether / it was a right or a left glove” (582) – “und er hatte versucht auszumachen ob / es ein rechter oder ein linker Handschuh war” (135), all of this told by the voice of still another person, the poet. Our translation adds another voice, another tone that may be more directly adequate to the harshness of the scene described but lacks Merwin’s derealizing sound that shifts the scene to the far-away, the hearsay, the alien. And then there is the problem that our respective notions of what working gloves, the key element and symbol, look like in the U.S., in Canada or in Germany—now and in bygone times – may differ.

51Translation of even a seemingly simple text like “The Odds” thus means imitating, emulating, but necessarily it is also a form of interpretation. According to “The Long and the Short of It,” “As long as we can believe anything / we believe in measure / […] it is there in meal and in moon / and in meaning it is the meaning” (582). Similarly, in our version, “Mit einem Wort,” “das Maß […] steckt in Mahl und in Mond / und in Bedeutung ist es die Bedeutung“ (137). Translating Merwin means aiming at a similarity of measure and of the meaning it entails, but it also means creating difference in both. Eventually it involves humbling oneself vis-à-vis the enormous emotional and intellectual impact Merwin’s work continues to have on its readers.

Fig. 4. One of Merwin’s barns at Lacam.

Fig. 4. One of Merwin’s barns at Lacam.

Photograph: Susanne Opfermann.

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Bibliographie

ALM, Michael. “Translating the source: W.S. Merwin, troubadours, and disappearing indigenous languages.” Palimpsestes, no. 36, 2022. doi.org/10.4000/palimpsestes.7849. Accessed 28 November 2024.

BALDICK, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

BENJAMIN, Walter. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.” 1923. uepo.de › 2020 › 12 › 18 › walter-benjamin-die-aufgabe-des-uebersetzers . Accessed 28 November 2024.

BREINIG, Helmbrecht. “Wa(h)lverwandtschaften: Zweifelhafte Beziehungen zwischen Menschen und anderen Tieren bei Herman Melville und W.S. Merwin.” Der Philologische Zweifel: Ein Buch für Dietmar Peschel. Eds. Sonja Glauch et al. Vienna: Fassbaender, 2016, p. 1-26.

BREINIG, Helmbrecht, and Wolfram DONAT, eds. Das auge des raben schwarz: Tiergedichte aus der englischsprachigen Welt. Gelnhausen: Libronauti, 2016.

FELSTINER, John. “Between the Earth and Silence: W.S. Merwin’s Motion of Mind.” World Literature Today, vol. 82, no. 4, 2008, p. 54-58.

HALL, Joseph, ed. Selections from Early Middle English, 1130-1250. Part I: Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920.

HUMBOLDT, Wilhelm von. “Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium in Beziehung auf die verschiedenen Epochen der Sprachentwicklung.” Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin aus den Jahren 1820–1821, Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1822, p. 239-260.

KINSKY, Esther. Fremdsprechen: Gedanken zum Übersetzen. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2019.

KÜHL, Olaf. “‘Schreibst du noch oder übersetzt du schon?’: Über Sätze und ihre Lebenswelten.” Mit anderen Worten: Zur Poetik der Übersetzung. Eds. Marie Luise Knott and Georg Witte. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2014, p. 113-133.

MERWIN, W.S. “Notes for a Preface.” The Distinctive Voice: Nineteen Poets of Today. Ed. William J. Martz. Glenview: Scott, Foreman & Co., 1966, p. 268-272.

MERWIN, W.S. “Unchopping a Tree.” The Miner’s Pale Children. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1994, p. 85-88.

MERWIN, W.S. The Mays of Ventadorn. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2002.

MERWIN, W.S. Collected Poems. Vol. 1. 1952-1993. Ed. J.D. McClatchy. New York: The Library of America, 2013a.

MERWIN, W.S. Collected Poems. Vol. 2. 1996-2011. Ed. J.D. McClatchy. New York: The Library of America, 2013b.

MERWIN, W.S. “Auf ein Aussterben, ein kommendes.” Translated from the English by Susanne Opfermann. Eds. Helmbrecht Breinig and Wolfram Donat. Das auge des raben schwarz: Tiergedichte aus der englischsprachigen Welt. Gelnhausen: Libronauti, 2016, p. 149.

MERWIN, W.S. “Leviathan.” Das auge des raben schwarz: Tiergedichte aus der englischsprachigen Welt. Eds. Helmbrecht Breinig and Wolfram Donat. Translated from the English by Helmbrecht Breinig. Gelnhausen: Libronauti, 2016, p. 225.

MERWIN, W.S. Der Schatten des Sirius: Gedichte. Translated from the English by Helmbrecht Breinig and Susanne Opfermann. Leipzig: Leipziger Literaturverlag, 2018.

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PLUNKETT, Adam. “Sound Check: W.S. Merwin’s Love of Foreign Languages.” New Republic. January 25, 2013. newrepublic.com/article/112195/sound-checkws-merwins-love-foreign-language. Accessed 28 November 2024.

SCHLEIERMACHER, Friedrich. “Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens.” 1813. Quoted from Hans Joachim Störig, ed. Das Problem des Übersetzens. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963, p. 38-70. Translated by Waltraud Bartscht. open.unive.it/hitrade/books/SchleiermacherMethods.pdf. Accessed 28 November 2024.

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Notes

1 “Entweder der Uebersezer läßt den Schriftsteller möglichst in Ruhe, und bewegt den Leser ihm entgegen; oder er läßt den Leser möglichst in Ruhe und bewegt den Schriftsteller ihm entgegen” (47).

2 “This time I will with poetic art rehearse, by means of words and wit, a poem about a kind of fish, the great sea-monster which is often unwillingly met, terrible and cruel-hearted to seafarers, yea, to every man; this swimmer of the ocean-streams is known as the asp-turtle” (8; translated by A.S. Cook).

3 For the biblical references, see Felstiner.

4 Hebrew for man, male person.

5 “Ich spreche nicht die Sprache, sondern werde von der Sprache gesprochen“ (114; my translation).

6 Cf. Merwin’s complaint in The Mays of Ventadorn: “Standing in the ruins of what is now known as Ventadour, or pronouncing the words of Bernart’s [the troubadour’s] text, it is not only the syllables of the ancient roman tongue that we want to hear, but the living flow of the whole poetry, and the best we can catch is halting, broken, and foreign. But the craving to hear it is what brings us back to all poetry, of our own time or any other, hoping that something has been carried across a great distance like water in the hands: the life of the original. Translations try again and again to convey its clear note and are left hearkening past themselves toward the elusive source” (136).

7 Durch die gegenseitige Abhängigkeit des Gedankens und des Wortes von einander leuchtet es klar ein, daß die Sprachen nicht eigentlich Mittel sind, die schon erkannte Wahrheit darzustellen, sondern weit mehr, die vorher unerkannte zu entdecken. Ihre Verschiedenheit ist nicht eine von Schällen und Zeichen, sondern eine Verschiedenheit der Weltansichten selbst. Hierin ist der Grund und der letzte Zweck aller Sprachuntersuchung enthalten. Die Summe des Erkennbaren liegt, als das von dem menschlichen Geiste zu bearbeitende Feld, zwischen allen Sprachen und unabhängig von ihnen in der Mitte; der Mensch kann sich diesem rein objectiven Gebiet nicht anders, als nach seiner Erkennungs- und Empfindungsweise, also auf einem subjectiven Wege, nähern (Humboldt 256).

8 The title is hardly translatable – it means or evokes something like Speaking Alien, Speaking Foreign, or Strangerspeech.

9 Ein schwieriges Gelände für jeden, der außerhalb steht. Alles mag nachvollziehbar und sogar nachstellbar sein: die rissige Struktur, die Bruchstückhaftigkeit, das kreisende Erforschen des eigenen Gedächtnisses, die beschwörenden Wiederholungen – doch wie dünn ist das Eis der Sprache, die der Übersetzer aufbieten kann, wenn es um dieses Unzugänglichste geht – die fremde Erinnerung? (Kinsky 85-86; my translation)

10 A title we had to translate as “Noch stiller Morgen” (Merwin, 2018 15) in order to capture the double meaning of still.

11 “Die Übersetzung […] sieht sich nicht wie die Dichtung gleichsam im innern Bergwald der Sprache selbst, sondern außerhalb desselben, ihm gegenüber und ohne ihn zu betreten ruft sie das Original hinein, an demjenigen einzigen Orte hinein, wo jeweils das Echo in der eigenen den Widerhall eines Werkes der fremden Sprache zu geben vermag” (translated by David F. Krell, direct communication). Benjamin’s text was written as an introduction to his own German translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens (1923).

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1. An Aspidochelone from a French manuscript, c. 1270. J. Paul Getty Museum
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/23967/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,6M
Titre Fig. 2. The Palisades, New Jersey.
Crédits © All rights reserved
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/23967/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 164k
Titre Fig. 3. Castle of Castelnau-Bretenoux
Crédits © All rights reserved
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/23967/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 52k
Titre Fig. 4. One of Merwin’s barns at Lacam.
Crédits Photograph: Susanne Opfermann.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/23967/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 152k
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Référence électronique

Helmbrecht Breinig, « Translating Merwin: Navigating Nature, Place, and the Apo Koinou »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 08 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/23967 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/134gq

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Auteur

Helmbrecht Breinig

Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg

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