Poets of Poets

On the supposedly untranslatable

In his Miscellaneous Observations, Novalis remarks that a true translator must be “the poet of the poet.” I like that formulation, especially in the original, “der Dichter des Dichters”, the genitive case producing a characteristic pattern of variation and repetition. These fine components of speech, modified through inflection and grammatical gender, are what truly resist translation, at least in German. This cuts against the impression, common even among educated readers, that rarefied words cause the most trouble in translation. This was the premise behind the Dictionary of Untranslatables, a French compendium of literary, philosophical, and political terminology from 2004. As a reference work, it has a lot of merit, providing deep context for word usage across history. But certain basic errors of approach compromise the dictionary, foremost in my mind being the implication that loanwords remain foreign in their adopted language, even after long use, likely an artifact of the dictionary’s French origin. A little basic introspection language use proves this to be false. Shampoo and schadenfreude pass through our lips, at least in English, just as easily as anything from Anglo-Saxon.

Even a word like Geist—, to take a particularly fraught example—, can be imported directly, its meaning intact, provided the reader is comfortable with philosophical terminology, not an unreasonable assumption to make about someone wrestling with Hegel. That Geist can mean both spirit and intelligence is often the first thing that students learn about the philosopher and his philosophy, oftentimes the last. A detailed discussion of the word can be found on Wikipedia. But the adoption of loanwords isn’t just confined to abstruse philosophy. Mountain climbers use piton and crevasse as a matter of course, regardless of whether they care to know any more French than that. Armchair military historians will acquire reams of terminology for the specialized units, tactics, and equipment present in any era. Part of what makes The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich appear dated is William Shirer’s translation of Freikorps and Lebensraum into “free corps” and “living space”, words that might have been obscure in 1960 but which nowadays appear frequently and without much, if any, parenthetical explanation. Nouns come easy.

But because “der Dichter des Dichters” contains not only German vocabulary but also German grammar, the barrier to simple importation is higher. The poet of the poet, auf Englisch, will have to do for now, even if it represents a loss, more of a loss, I think, than rendering Geist into spirit. That modifying genitive got me thinking about my own poetics of the poetry of poets. This not only involves an understanding of their language and how I might augment it for rhetorical effect, what Novalis calls grammatical and modifying translations, but also generating some definite image of the writer in my mind. This image can come from the work or from the biography, but more often than not, it’s some chimera of the two. For Hilbig, I see him shoveling coal into a boiler, the air around him filled with a viscid haze of grease and soot. For Kleist, it’s him seated at an army camp, a brace of loaded pistols and a military strategy game on the table with him. As the men pass by, officers and common soldiers alike, Kleist enjoins them to sit down and play the game with him, though none takes him up on the offer. For Jean Paul, I picture him stopped in front of a trellis. Bright flowers are growing rampant on a vine, maybe clematis, maybe passionflower. He reaches into the foliage and picks up between his thumb and forefinger a large green grasshopper. Examining it face to face, he thinks about the permissibility of eating such a creature according to Jewish dietary laws, before putting it back on the vine. These are just some images that come to mind when translating.

Evening Cloudflare

The train monitors were scrambled, times and stations garbled into static, like one of those popular optical illusion posters sold in mall kiosks late last century. The glitches might have been from the impending weather (thunderstorms) might have been from the current weather (a weekslong heatwave) or might been, so if found out later, from a breakdown in a certain ubiquitous cybersecurity application. Whatever the cause, everything seemed so worn down.

The walk home from the station needed to be brisk. Clouds darkened the entire western horizon, blocking off the sunset. The first few drops fell scattered on the pavement, a patchwork of asphalt and cobblestone, excavated by the municipal “wodder department” for retrofitting the mains. Heavy rainfall would send sewage bubbling to the surface. It looked like that rainfall was imminent.

Without umbrellas, we hoofed it through the last few blocks, the spindly little street trees gnashing in the wind. Our progress was arrested by a small orange tabby curled up at ground-floor window. It gazed at us with its bright orange eyes, stood up, arched its back, and nuzzled the glass, inviting us to pet it, though the intervening window and the impending storm made that impossible. We waved goodby and jogged on, making it to the porch not more than a minute or so before the rain. Great flat sheets of lightning crossed the sky. The streets were filled with stormwater, though none seemed to be bubbling up from the surface. For the first time in weeks, seemingly, a cool The world seemed to be regaining some of its poise, some of its equilibrium.