On Translating Poetry

Is there any activity more frustrating than translating poetry?  Robert Frost maintained that  the meaning of poems is conveyed through "sentence sounds".  If this is so, then the translator’s efforts are doomed from the outset. The great American poet Robert Lowell got around this dilemma by reworking poems in other languages into brand new poems: Lowell poems.  That was what he achieved in Imitations, which included "translations" of Rilke and Heine, as well as Greek, Russian and French poets: he took extraordinary liberties in rendering these into English.  "I have been reckless with literal meaning," announced Lowell in his introduction to his poems: "I have dropped lines, moved lines, moved stanzas, changed images and altered metre and intent."

So translating poetry may be an exercise in hubris, but where would we be without these translations?  We are blessed in the English-speaking world with having gifted translators of German poets: the translations of Rilke by Robert Haas and of Celan by Michael Hamburger and John Felstiner come immediately to mind. The situation of German translations of American poems, however, is terrible. Elizabeth Bishop is recognized as one the greatest American poets of the past 50 years, yet I could only find one selection of her poems in German translation on Amazon (Die Farben des Kartographen). And that is out of print!  On the other hand, Amazon has the entire ouvre of the minor poet and humorist Charles Bukowski in German – a slection of 119 books altogether!  What gives?  Why is American literature ignored, and what in the world is being taught in the Anglistik departments at German universities?

Here is my attempt – in honor of spring – at translating a poem of Hilde Domin, who died in February at the age of 96:

April

Die Welt riecht süß
nach Gestern.
Düfte sind dauerhaft.

Du öffnest das Fenster.
Alle Frühlinge
kommen herein mit diesem.

Frühling der mehr ist
als grüne Blätter.
Ein Kuß birgt alle Küsse.

Immer dieser glänzend glatte
Himmel über der Stadt,
in den die Straßen fließen.

Du weißt, der Winter
und der Schmerz
sind nichts, was umbringt.

Die Luft riecht heute süß
nach Gestern –
das süß nach Heute roch

(April

The world smells sweetly

of yesterday.

The fragrances linger.

You open the window.

All springs

enter with this one.

Spring, which is more

than green leaves.

One kiss recovers all kisses.

Always this shimmering smooth

sky above the city

into which the streets flow.

You know that winter

and pain

are nothing that can kill you.

The air smells sweetly today

of yesterday –

which smells sweetly of today. )

Hilde Domin Poetry Gedichte Robert Lowell