Berlin Poetry Project

“The vanity of translation”, wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in his “Defence of Poetry” in 1821, adding: “It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.”

Yet from the ancients to the Berlin Translation Workshop held in June 2003 as part of the annual Poesiefestival, poems have been translated from one language into another, from Greek, from Latin, from the Orient, into French, German, English, and numerous other languages. The results may occasionally resemble Shelley´s violet cast into a crucible, but they can often be examples of fine sensitivity, of delicate tact, of impeccable taste.

The two volumes of poems published as a result of the Berlin Workshop, with the support of the Hauptstadtkulturfond, the Australian Council for the Arts, and the Goethe-Institute in Sydney, provide some excellent examples of poetic translation from German into English, and from English into German.

Mouth to Mouth. Contemporary German Poetry in Translation, edited by Thomas Wohlfahrt and Tobias Lehmkuhl, contains a variety of poems by fifteen poets from various German-speaking places, including Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, and Zurich. The companion volume, Hochzeit der Elemente. Zeitgenössische Australische Dichtung, edited by Ivor Indyk, contains a similar variety of poems by fifteen Australian poets, mostly born in Australia, although one was born in Germany, another in Rumania, and two in England.

‘Variety’ rather than Shelley´s ‘vanity’ is the keynote of both these books of poetic translations. Nearly all the poets also figure as translators, which the Poesiefestival was designed to encourage, and it is indeed fascinating to observe the skilful transformation of one poem into a new poem in the other language, especially where linguistic patterns markedly diverge.

Originally, English and German derive from the same Germanic roots, but their subsequent histories followed along different paths, although many words still betray their common ancestry. In grammatical terms English has become more analytic, German synthetic. German uses compounds where English prefers separate words. Some memorable examples from our poems include Luke Davies´s “flailing of the dance” becoming “Tanzgefuchtel” in Uwe Kolbe´s translation, or S.W. Watson´s “a front window necropolis” becoming in Raphael Urweider´s translation “eine schaufenstertotenstadt”. And where Ursula Krechel uses six words in “niemals mit der Spitze voran überreichen”, Peter Skrzynecki uses almost twice as many words in his English version, “never give them to anybody with the sharp end first”.

The Australian poets tend to preserve traditional poetic forms more readily than their German counterparts, such as stanzaic poems, rhythms, occasional rhymes or assonance. We become aware of them in some of the lyrics of the much acclaimed Australian bush poet Les Murray, as well as in poems by Luke Davies and Antigone Kefala. The translators´ responses are often striking. In his characteristic poem ‘The Tin Wash Dish’ Les Murray varies the opening line “Lank poverty, dank poverty” to the later “Dank poverty, rank poverty”, and later still to “Rank poverty, lank poverty”. Responding to the challenge Swiss-born Margitt Lehbert offers these renderings in her German version ‘Die Blecherne Waschschüssel’: “Dumpfe Armut, stumpfe Armut” – “Derbe Armut, herbe Armut” – “Hagere Armut, magere Armut”, a splendid poetic transformation.

Often a new and different poem results in the process of translation, and I must confess that occasionally the translated version impressed me as a better poem, a new creation, although personal taste inevitably plays its part. And this process works both ways, from English into German and vice versa. Thus I think that the German translation by Berlin-born Peter Waterhouse of John Tranter´s poem ‘I know a man who lives in the Dark’ is the better sonnet of the two. Compare, for example the contrast achieved in the original line “a terrible landscape informed with a sombre glory” with the translated version, “eine erschreckende Landschaft erstrahlt in düsterer Pracht”, with its quite superb juxtaposition of “erschreckende” and “erstrahlend”. Other examples spring to mind, such as the transformation by Sydney poet Judith Beveridge of Hamburg poet Sabine Scho´s ‘Gruppenbild’ with its largely unpunctuated stream of lines into more formal verses. Other Australian translators similarly render the popular free verse of their German originals into more conventional syntactical segments.

The poems of Raphael Urweider provided a particular challenge to Samuel Wagan Watson, who responded by turning the German run-on couplets into clearly differentiated English stanzas of varying lengths. If this implies that the Australian poets are in some respects more traditional, it offers a valuable challenge to the reader of these volumes to compare these divergent attitudes to the art of poetry.

Both groups of poets address contemporary as well as personal themes in their distinctive styles, the Australians recalling their distant origins, as when Peter Skrzynecki, in a poem about his “gentle father”, writes

Growing older, I
Remember words he taught me,
Remnants of a language
I inherited unknowingly,

rendered by Ursula Krechel

Älter werdend, erinnere ich mich
An Wörter, die er mich lehrte,
Überreste einer Sprache,
Die ich erbte, ohne es zu wissen –

Another such theme is the evocation of the vast distances familiar to people living in Australia. Judith Beveridge´s “miles from anywhere” is poignantly rendered by Sabine Scho as “irgendwo im nirgendwo”, while in Tasmanian poet Anthony Lawrence´s poem ‘The Wandering Albatross’ we discover the source of the title of the Australian volume:

What rides this marriage of elements
does so with a wingspan
hammered from great distances,

aptly rendered by Swiss poet Sabina Naef:

Was über diese Hochzeit der Elemente hinweg schwebt
tut dies mit einer Flügelspannweite
gehämmert mit großen Entfernungen.

There is truly a very rich poetic harvest in these two volumes of which this brief notice has but touched the surface. Familiar, topical, perennial themes expressed in a variety of individual styles are offered by two groups of talented poets, most of whom also acted as translators from the “other language” into their own. Shelley´s image of the violet in the crucible needs much more sensitive refinement. English and German are still kindred languages, as we cannot help recognizing when comparing, for example, the classic example of Hamlet´s last words “The rest is silence” with A.W. von Schlegel´s archetypal translation “Der Rest ist Schweigen”.

The two bi-lingual editions are

Hochzeit der Elemente: Zeitgenössische australische Dichtung / edited by Ivor Indyk. -Köln : Dumont, 2004. - 271 pages
ISBN 3-8321787-91

Mouth to Mouth: Contemporary German Poetry / edited by Thomas Wohlfahrt. - Sydney : Giramondo, 2004. - 256 pages
ISBN 1-9208820-30