Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

Gass is very critical of these translations, but to my ear his own is no better:
“Who if I cried, would hear me among the Dominions of Angels?”^1 The
dif¤culty, as I have suggested elsewhere,^2 is that English syntax does not allow
for the dramatic suspension of Wer, wenn ich schriee... and that the noun
phrase Engel Ordnungen, which in German puts the stress, both phonically
and semantically, on the angels themselves rather than on their orders or
hierarchies or dominions, de¤es effective translation. Moreover, Rilke’s line
contains the crucial and heavily stressed word denn (literally “then”), which
here has the force of “Well, then,” or in contemporary idiom “So,” as in
“So, who would hear me if I cried out... ?” But “So” sounds too casual in
the context of Rilke’s urgent meditation, and translators have accordingly
tended to elide the word denn completely, thus losing the immediacy of the
question. Further, denn rhymes with wenn as well as with the ¤rst two syl-
lables of den En-gel, the rhyme offsetting the intentionally contorted sound
of the verb sequence schriee, hörte so as to create a dense sonic network that
is inevitably lost in translation.
The same holds true when the German-into-English process is reversed.
Consider the famous ¤fth stanza of Robert Lowell’s Skunk Hour:

One dark night,

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;

I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,

they lay together, hull to hull,

where the graveyard shelves on the town...

My mind’s not right.

Manuel P¤ster translates this as follows:

In einer dunklen Nacht

erk lomm mein Tudor-Ford des Hügels Schädel;

ich hielt Ausschau nach Liebesautos. Scheinwerfer ausgeschaltet,

lagen sie beieinander, Rumpf bei Rumpf,

wo der Friedhof such zur Stadt neigt...

Mein Geist ist wirr.^3

This strikes me as a perfectly intelligent translation, without any of the ob-
vious glitches we ¤nd in, say, William Gass’s rendering of Rilke’s Ich verginge
von seinem stärkeren Dasein as “I would fade in the grip of that completer
existence,” or Stephen Cohn’s, “I would die of the force of his being” (Read-

Wittgenstein on Translation 61