Mark Weiss wrote:
> Definitely not helped by his translators.
>
> The holy grail for translators is a version of the poem that loses
> nothing of the original. That's of course impossible--one understands
> very quickly (or ought to) that, since one can't get everything, one
> has to establish a hierarchy of value--what one thinks can be
> sacrificed, what not. The decision in both these cases seems to be to
> sacrifice almost everything to rhyme and meter.
I agree that the first version, even with Hungarian translator names,
seems like an effort to Anglicize Radnoti. No way for me to evaluate
this, of course. There is another version of Forced March out there
that seems more risk-taking, if throwing breaks into the line is
risk-taking, but I have no clue about whether this version gets closer
to the muscle of the language itself.
'Forced March'
You're crazy. You fall down, stand up and walk again,
your ankles and your knees move
but you start again as if you had wings.
The ditch calls you, but it's no use you're afraid to stay,
and if someone asks why, maybe you turn around and say
that a woman and a sane death a better death wait for you.
But you're crazy. For a long time
only the burned wind spins above the houses at home,
Walls lie on their backs, plum trees are broken
and the angry night is thick with fear.
Oh if I could believe that everything valuble
is not only inside me now that there's still home to go back to.
If only there were! And just as before bees drone peacefully
on the cool veranda, plum preserves turn cold
and over sleepy gardens quietly, the end of summer bathes in the
sun.
Among the leaves the fruit swing naked
and in front of the rust-brown hedge blond Fanny waits for me,
the morning writes slow shadows---
All this could happen The moon is so round today!
Don't walk past me, friend. Yell, and I'll stand up again!
-- Miklos Radnoti
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
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