ing Rilke 62–63). But what eludes P¤ster is Lowell’s particular tone. “One dark
night,” for starters, has a fairy-tale quality (as in “Once upon a time”) that
gives an ironic edge to the reference to Saint John of the Cross’s “Dark Night
of the Soul”—a quality lost in the German In einer dunklen Nacht. In line 2,
the pun on “Tudor (‘two-door’) Ford” disappears even though P¤ster retains
the absurdly pretentious brand name. And his rendition of the third line is
at once too speci¤c and too long-winded: Lowell’s casual “I watched” be-
comes the emphatic Ich hielt Ausschau, and Scheinwerfer ausgeschaltet (“head-
lights turned off ”) does not allow for the resonance of “lights” or of “turned
down,” which here connotes beds as well as the lights themselves. In the next
line, the image of “love-cars” lying together Rumpf bei Rumpf is that of the
trunks of two bodies or torsos locked together. But the punning “Hull to
hull,” is more sinister, referring as it does to empty vessels as well as to empty
plant husks. Lovemaking, in this context, is itself a form of death. And the
death motif is underscored in the next line, where the verb “shelves” suggests
that the graveyard is emptying its contents (the dead) on the town itself. The
force of “shelves” is dissipated in the German neigt, which means “inclines”
or “bends.” Finally, “My mind’s not right” is not just the poet’s cri de coeur
but also an allusion to Satan’s jealous response when he spies Adam and Eve
in Paradise Lost. Thus, although P¤ster’s translation—Mein Geist ist wirr—is
accurate enough, the ironic self-deprecation of the poet-voyeur is absent.
Then, too, Lowell’s semantically charged rhyming lines—“One dark night”
/ my mind’s not right,” or again, the rhyme “hill’s skull” / “hull to hull”—
have no counterpart in P¤ster’s unrhymed version.
Translation, it seems, inevitably involves such slippage of meaning, espe-
cially in the case of poetry. Why is it, then, that the modernist philosopher
perhaps most sensitive to such slippage, the philosopher who insisted that
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” that indeed “Lan-
guage is not contiguous to anything else,”^4 is read around the world in dozens
of different languages, without much concern as to the translatability of his
propositions? I am speaking, of course, of Wittgenstein, whose writings on
how words mean are not only judged to be reasonably translatable but were
originally known—indeed largely continue to be known—not in the author’s
own German but in the English of his Cambridge translators, G. H. von
Wright, G. E. M. Anscombe, Alice Ambrose, Rush Rhees, years before his
native Austria took him quite seriously. Then, too, most of these “writ-
ings” were not “writings” at all but transcriptions of Wittgenstein’s Cam-
bridge lectures as recorded by his students, lectures—or, rather, “remarks”—
delivered in Wittgenstein’s somewhat awkward, nonidiomatic English. Yet
volumes of analysis have been based on such sentences as “A picture held us
62 Chapter 4