Douglas Clark wrote:
> There is currently a thread on rec.arts.books concerning Michael
> Hamburger's translations of Celan and H\"olderlin. I was wondering
> if Pierre Joris would like to comment.
Well, I had a quick look at the thread, but not exactly sure what you
want me to comment about.
>
>
> REgarding the H\"olderlin I find it difficult to understand the
> acclaim for the later poems in Hamburger's translation. I do have
> other translations but it is Hamburger I tend to return to.
> I consider him a pretty lousy poet himself and am troubled that
> it may be reflected in his poetry.
I haven't recently looked at the various H translations -- but did so a
few years back when we were putting together the first volume of POEM,S
FOR THE MILLENNIUM. As I remember it, the Sieburth translations sounded
best, and we used his version of "In the Days of Socrates." Some years
ago I did a translation of the freagments but never felt I had it right,
so never published them. Mitchell always sounds like Mitchell, and I
have never much cared for his translations -- whoever the poet was he
translated. Hamburger was useful to me years ago when I first looked at
them. But there is a flatness to his language that I dislike.
>
>
> Regarding Celan outside the DEathfugue I see his work in English
> as resembling brilliant fragments and dont think any translator
> could really cope. Even Germans find him difficult, as H\"olderlin
> is difficult as he bends his language to the Greek sway.
There are many Celan poems besides the DEATHFUGUE that are not
fragments. In fact most of the early work, i.e. the volumes up to
BREATHTURN that are made up of "coherent" individual, independent poems.
It is with the late work, beginning with BREATHTURN, that the individual
poem begins to be --- or look -- more like a fragment. But, as I have
argued in a number of places (see, for ex, my intro to BREATHTURN), the
coherency is elsewhere -- & is at least double: it resides in the cycle
and in the volume. Best to read these books as sequences rather than as
individual poems. This is where Hamburger's translations are
problematic: he decided, sensibly so, to translate only those poems he
"understood." Given the sequential nature of the late volumes this of
course makes nonsense of Celan's intentions -- it's like translating a
word here or a word there while never thinking about the sentence
structure / the syntax of the whole. Also, Hamburger wants to have
_readable_ translations, (a problematic notion that clearly links to his
sense of needing to "understand" the poem), and so flattens out the
knottiness, the undecidability of Celan's polysemic ambiguities (though
all translations do that to some point, as a given meaning needs to be
decided on in the target language). i.e. H's translations read too well
-- he in fact forgets what Hölderlin should have taught him in the way
the latter tries to write Greek in German. Any translation that makes
for a _clearer_, more _simple_ poem than the original is obviously a
problematic translation.
Pierre
ps. the second volume of my Celan translations, SUNTHREADS, should be
out from sun&moon early in the new year, as well as another edition of
BREATHTURN, which is out of stock now. For contractual reasons these
books are not directly available in GB, though Peter R will no doubt get
some in.
--
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Pierre Joris
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http://www.albany.edu/~joris/
6 Madison Place
Albany NY 12202
tel: 518 426 0433
fax: 518 426 3722
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Nomadism answers to a relation that
possession cannot satisfy.
— Maurice Blanchot
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