Some poems from Gitanjali

Ever since Tagore himself translated his poems into prose to form the English Gitanjali, it has been generally assumed that fully rendering the poetic form of his lyrics into English, making a consistent attempt to repeat their rhymes, metre and music, is a Himalayan task. Even translators who are themselves published poets, such as William Radice, have abandoned rhyme in a fairly large proportion of their English versions, adducing supplementary arguments such as that the original rhymes and rhythms of a song's text will not be heard when the song is sung. With the greatest respect for their pioneering efforts on behalf of Tagore, I am not quite convinced. The effect of Tagore's songs does rely partly on the concordance of their phrases, both in the music and in the poetry, and when the two reinforce each other the effect is palpable. There is no getting away from it: the majority of Tagore's poetry uses rhyme and metre, and is written in a heightened, musical diction. It may not help his popularity to say so, but what I have read of Gitanjali in the original reminds me more of Tennyson's In Memoriam, say, than any work of a twentieth-century poet. If few of us read Tennyson today, maybe that is our loss! Among middle-class Bengalis his popularity, like that of Matthew Arnold and other nineteenth-century poets, still rides high. Together with Tagore himself, who read and wrote criticism on them, they form the basis of a community of taste with an ear and values different from our own - something worth respect rather than dismissal.

Another factor militating against poetic translations is the present desire for semantic exactitude, already commented on in this blog. The original meaning must be preserved: a vina remains a vina, even if Tagore himself translated it (out of cultural consideration) as a harp or a lute. If one considers the emotional tone and the poetic rhythm to be more important, however, such anxieties recede into the background. The following translations follow these priorities more than those of the present. They are free with the original imagery, keeping to what I consider poetically important but changing or introducing details elsewhere. (In no. 26, to me it is important that the speaker is a woman - hotobhagini - but the question in the final line, for instance, is entirely my composition: it rhymes and is I hope in keeping with the mood of the poem.) Even if they cannot capture Tagore's mastery, I hope they convey some of his music. Read them less as the work of a poet or scholar and more as you would (if you are a musician) the anonymous, rhymed translations in old Victorian editions of German Lieder:

No. 26 ("She je pashe eshe bosechhilo")

He came beside my bed and sat
But I was sleeping late.
Woman! What tiredness was that
Which seized you, oh unfortunate!

He entered at the still of night,
Lute in hand; and when touched right,
Its soft, deep-sounding melody
My dreaming mind would sate.

I wake, and see the south wind blow
Past the doorway madly rushing,
And still his scent floats in the air,
My senses in the darkness brushing.

Thus does night upon night pass by -
His body ever passing near - oh why
Can I never feel his garland's touch?
Must this be my fate?

No. 72 ("Ke go antarataro she")

O, this inwardness is his -
With what hidden touch he frees
The pain and knowledge of what is.

Into my eyes he puts his spells,
With his music my heart swells,
And his pulsing rhythm tells
Of happiness, sorrow, ecstasies.

In gold and silver, blues and greens
Life's cloth is woven with his sheens;
Some day that veil will part which screens
Him from my heart's entreaties.

The days and years are onward rolled,
Yet secretly my mind's consoled:
In new shapes and guises old
He sends his eternal rain of bliss.

No. 74 ("Aar nai re bela, namlo chhaya")

Evening falls; across the earth its shade
Is cast -
And pitcher in hand to the stream I hurry
At the last.

To watery music the clouds move
In uneasy courses up above
And onto strange paths I must rove
Following echoes past.

Along the lonely road at this late hour
No travellers go;
Restless is the river of desire
When new winds blow.

I cannot say, shall I return or not?
Whom to meet it may still be my lot -
From the farther bank I know not what
Melody drifts low.

No. 84 ("Heri aharaho tomari biroho")

Always your longing I see - its pain unceasingly
Reaches across the spaces it can find;
From hills to flowering wood, from sky to ocean's flood
In every form and place to be outlined.

In star upon star, waiting through the night,
Gazing down unblinking, distant, bright,
In branches bowing before the monsoon's might
Through all your melody of longing wind.

In home after home tonight the unending pain
Of this deep longing new strength will attain
And in new loves and wishes, alas, remain,
Through ecstasy and suffering, still blind.

All my own life's trouble spurning
In new melodies flowing, turning
This longing of yours rises, burning
Through the centre of my mind.

- and the opening poem of the Bengali Gitanjali, "Amar matha noto kore dao":

Bring me, Lord, in the dust to kneel
At thy feet,
Sink all my pride, and make me feel
With tears' relief replete.

For me to pay my pride's expense
Is to myself mere insolence;
If round my soul I'll set a fence,
Then thee I'll never meet.

Let me not seek my name to publish
Through works of my own;
Rather fulfil, oh Lord, thy wish
In my life alone -

I yearn only for thy peace
In my heart; thy greatest grace
Shall stay with me, shadowing my face
And lead me before thy seat.

Democracy and the humanities

With that title, a certain grandiloquence cannot easily be avoided. And there has been plenty of it in the press lately; but I say - "Friends, Cantabrigians, Faculty-Men, lend me your ears; I come to bury the humanities, not to praise them..." Even that would be unnecessary: they will anyway be buried inexhumably under a forthcoming landslide of bureaucratic antipathy and enormous tuition fees. All I want to ask is: are they being buried alive? Or are they actually dead already?

For though we hear much, including from leading professorial lights such as Martha Nussbaum, about the role of the humanities in public life, in fostering democratic values and a sense of meaning beyond the utilitarian, not much progress has been made in establishing whether they do that as well as they might in their current form. And my intention here is to argue that they fall well short. In fact, they are not even living up to their name, for there is little that is humanist, or even humane, about the unhealthy combination of louse-combing textual and artefactual obsessiveness on the one hand with Grand, but increasingly bizarre Theory on the other that currently predominates in humanities faculties. I would not want to make sweeping denunciations without offering examples of how things could be done better. So such examples will be offered: in each case showing how things were done better, approximately 100 years ago. (Often they were done even better than that 200 years ago; but a single century is quite enough time to cover in a blog post.)

The problems that could be identified with the bulk of present-day academic writing on the arts and humanities are many, but I want to pick out two interrelated points that bear on the question of democracy or the public sphere - one of style, the other of intellectual content. The first is that the favoured writing style in the academy is not one that courts a wider audience than the academy itself. With some exceptions, of course; but not enough. I used to buy the TLS quite often, thinking it represented a desirable intellectual generalism, until I realised I could get a more interesting and personalized selection of the same sort of academic book review by spending an hour in the library Periodicals room. Part of the problem here is the metaphors in currency, which are often quite dazzlingly abstract and depersonalized: structuralist, in other words, even where the author claims to be poststructuralist, New Historicist, postcolonialist or whatever it might be. And this merges (in a way that will become clearer when we look at some quotes) into my second point of intellectual content - the presently professed lack of faith in individual personality and autonomy, the dissolution of subjectivity or the "death of the author". Both esoteric style and fatalist philosophical content are, it is hardly difficult to see, quite precisely unsuited to fostering democratic ideals or practical discussions in the public sphere.

I mentioned a sort of covert structuralism. Here is an example, presented in the context of an academically celebrated postcolonial critique of culture by the Indian theorist Homi K. Bhabha -

"The linguistic difference that informs any cultural performance is dramatized in the common semiotic account of the disjuncture between the subject of a proposition (enoncé) and the subject of enunciation, which is not represented in the statement but which is the acknowledgement of its discursive embeddedness and address, its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and a specific space. The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot 'in itself' be conscious. What this unconscious relation introduces is an ambivalence in the act of interpretation. The pronominal I of the proposition cannot be made to address - in its own words - the subject of enunciation, for this is not personable, but remains a spatial relation within the schemata and strategies of discourse. The meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the one nor the other" (The Location of Culture, p. 36)

This can I think fairly be taken to represent Bhabha's theory of literary interpretation and communication, and it is "spatial" rather than "personable", to use Bhabha's own terms. The talk is of "places" (in place of I and You), "mobilizing", "positionality", "passages": these are metaphors, let us remind ourselves, but grandly strategic ones. They enforce a sense of personal powerlessness that goes far beyond what might be understood (it isn't easy!) as the substantial point of Bhabha's argument - that even literary statements depend on their audiences and contexts in ways that are hard to calculate. If that is what he means, then here is Tagore making the same point, in a much easier and more personable fashion, in the 1907 address "Literary Creation":

"Man's thoughts are gratified if they get these three opportunities: to blossom, to fruit, and to drop onto fertile soil. Thoughts, like living things, constantly urge us towards this fulfilment; hence the unabated exchange of embraces and whispers among human beings. A mind looks for another mind to relieve it of the burden of its thoughts, to have its own ideas contemplated by another. That is why women gather at the waterside steps, friend runs to friend, letters go to and fro...
"Thus throughout human society, the thoughts of one mind strive to find fulfilment in another, thereby so shaping our ideas that they are no longer exclusive to the original thinker. This often goes unnoticed. A little reflection would make us agree that when we say something to a friend, the statement moulds itself to some extent in accordance with our friend's mind. We cannot write to one friend exactly as we write to another. My idea adjusts itself somewhat to the particular mind of the particular friend in whom it secretly seeks fulfilment. In fact, what we say is shaped by the conjunction of speaker and listener.
"In literature, for the same reason, the author tries to fit the work, even if unwittingly, to the nature of the person to whom it is offered. The folk epic of Dashurathi is not Dashurathi's sole possession; it is written in collaboration with the society that listens to it. It does not contain the thoughts of Dashurathi alone; the love, hate, piety, belief, and taste of a given circle at a give time find spontaneous expression within it... Therefore, that which survives does not speak only of itself; it speaks of the world around it, because it survives more by the force of its surroundings than by its own strength."

Comment on the difference in prose quality is superfluous: even though this is a modern translation, it always comes through with Tagore, who also wrote exquisitely in English. Bhabha has won a Bad Writing Competition for another sentence in the same book I have quoted. My point however is more substantial. You cannot accuse Tagore here of any Romantic hero-worship of the figure of the author. His point is indeed that "negotiations" are taking place, to use a current term, in literary creation, and some of them are even "unwitting" (- which could equally be translated "unconscious"). But they are also rhetorical, emotional, and founded in human relationships, where Bhabha's are "strategic", institutional, and decidedly inhuman. Tagore prefers to phrase them in that way; and who can blame him. Bhabha, on the other hand, tries to present what is in truth a metaphorical (and rhetorical) effect of his text as the inescapable reality of communication. He does not succeed in explaning how this inhumanly "spatial" reality serves human needs; Tagore's clustering thought-fruits and his women at the waterside steps do that far better.

Is this comparison unfair? Bhabha is an academic theorist; Tagore was a poet. But he was also a critic, literary professional and a man of the university (albeit his own, rather eccentric university, Visva-Bharati). And on his side, when questioned in a newspaper interview Bhabha will say things such as the following, which in intention at least sounds almost Tagorean: "In a world that is increasingly instrumentalist and consumerist, I think it is very important to set up against such a world the great aspirations of literature and poetry, of painting and music, because art and aesthetic experience adds ardour and passion to our principles and our beliefs. It should be seen as an essential part of our freedom and not an optional part of our lives." If he really believes this, then why does his own criticism add so little "ardour and passion"? Why does it celebrate not "freedom" and "great aspirations", but obscure and uncanny spatial strategies?

Let us move on to another example. Here is a modern critic who makes much capital out of resisting Bhabha's sort of language: Harold Bloom, celebrating timeless literary and humanistic values in his book How to Read and Why. This is how he begins to instruct the reader on how to read poetry:

"A first principle for how to read poems: closely, because a true criterion for any good poem is that it will sustain a very close reading indeed. Here is William Blake, giving us a lyric that again seems simple and direct, 'The Sick Rose'... The ironies of 'The Sick Rose' are fierce, perhaps cruel in their relentlessness. What Blake depicts is altogether natural, and yet the poem's perspective renders the natural itself into a social ritual in which phallic menace is set against female self-gratification (the rose's bed is one of 'crimson joy' before the worm finds it out)" (pp.71-2)

Since I. A. Richards and William Empson between the wars, the technique of "close reading" has become a literary-academic sine qua non: unless you can appreciate and produce interpretations such as the above, you are not invited to the party. What did literary criticism look like before close reading, then? Like this: George Saintsbury on Thomas Browne -

"The finale of Hydriotaphia has rung in the ears of some eight generations as the very and unsurpassable Dead March of English Prose. Every word of this chapter is memorable, and almost every word abides in the memory by dint of Browne's marmoreal phrase, his great and grave meaning, and the wonderful clangour and echo of his word-music. 'Time, which antiquates antiquities' will have some difficulty in destroying this. And through all the chapter his style, like his theme, rises, till after a wonderful burst of mysticism, we are left with such a dying close as never had been heard in English before, 'ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as with the moles of Adrianus'...
"Christian Morals is entirely of a piece with the other books - the same gorgeously Latinised terminology, which somehow never becomes stiff or awkward; the same sententious weight, which is never heavy or dull; the same cunning construction of sentences and paragraphs; and above all, the same extraordinary power of transforming a commonplace into the eternal idea corresponding to it by some far-reaching image, some illustration quaintly erudite, or even by sheer and mere beauty of phrase and expression.
"For this is the great merit of Browne, that, quaint or gorgeous, or even, as he sometimes may seem to be, merely tricksy - bringing out of the treasures of his wisdom and his wit and his learning things new and old, for the mere pleasure of showing them - thought and expression are always at one in him, just as they are in the great poets. The one is never below the other, and both are always worthy of the placid, partly sad, wholly conscious and intelligent, sense of the riddles of life which serves them as background" (George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (1913), pp. 451-2)

Again, there is simply no competition when it comes to the writing. Nor is there on the question of erudition: Bloom may be considered the best-read man alive by modern standards, but his acquaintance with literature is paltry compared to Saintsbury's, who could jump from Shakespeare to Corneille to Crabbe to Martial in a few lines and never needed to read anything in translation. Yet the real question is not of expertise, but of approach: were Bloom to continue expounding on Blakean sexual politics it would not increase your desire to read more of the poetry, whereas if you do not know Browne, you will most certainly want to now. (I hope you might want to read more Saintsbury too: he has been unjustly forgotten, and most English majors have simply never heard of him.)

When referred to at all, Saintsbury is usually categorized as an "aesthetic" critic, and it might be hard to see at first how aestheticism has anything to do with democracy or the public sphere. But it does, because what a critic such as Saintsbury gives you is a sense of the humane and "personable" value of a given author, something with a far more natural and widespread appeal than an analysis of fierce ironic mechanisms, or the necessity of understanding a rosebud as a vulva. Yes, his metaphors sometimes become uncomfortably culinary, "as if he were proposing a picnic" to quote John Gross; but his philosophy is refreshingly straightforward: "read, and as far as possible, read everything", without prejudice, and cultivating a "constant habit of looking at everything and every writer in conjunction with their analogues and opposites" - in other words, utilizing comparison rather than analysis. You need to read a lot to do this at the level Saintsbury does, but you do not need to read in any specially "close" way, for which you have been expensively trained. You simply need to be part of what Saintsbury called the "general congregation of intelligent people". In spirit, that is democratic criticism: its ideals are essentially Arnoldian, even if Saintsbury was a High Tory himself.

It is the same with art history. Criticize Kenneth Clark's patrician tones all you like: he was the last representative, in the age of television, of a humanist critical tradition that goes back through Bernard Berenson to the great Germans of centuries previous. His picture of the canon is insensitive to the place and perspective of a great many alternative identities: in that sense his rhetoric is exclusive. But is it more inclusive to write sentences such as the following?

"Once we insist that sexual difference is produced through an interconnecting series of social practices and institutions of which families, education, art studies, galleries and magazines are part, then the hierarchies which sustain masculine dominance come under scrutiny and stress, then what we are studying in analysing the visual arts is one instance of this production of difference which must of necessity be considered in a double frame: (a) the specificity of its effects as a particular practice with its own materials, resources, conditions, constituencies, modes of training, competence, expertise, forms of consumption and related discourses, as well as its own codes and rhetorics; (b) the interdependence for its intelligibility and meaning with a range of other discourses and social practices" (Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminity, Feminism, and Histories of Art, p. 9)

The relentless pluralization alone becomes rhetorically wearisome. That is an interesting point to dwell on, actually: I might agree with Pollock that many of these abstract entities ("discourse", "history of art", "hierarchy") can and ultimately should be construed in more than one way; but does this need to be insisted on at every moment? The effect is not of liberation but of bewilderment: I cannot imagine all the points in these multiply interconnecting series, and as with Bhabha, my own sense of human agency and autonomy is thereby diminished.

I could carry on with other disciplines, including music, and philosophy (whom would you rather read, Nietzsche or Foucault? Or psychoanalysis: Freud's Introductory Lectures, or Lacan's Ecrits?). Just about the one discipline of which all this does not hold true is history: and it is there that scholars are making up the deficit of readable books on the arts aimed at a general audience - Tim Blanning's The Triumph of Music, Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory and Rembrandt's Eyes. Popular philosophical writers and broadcasters such as Alain de Botton or Bryan Magee have also done a commendable job with everything from Proust to architectural criticism to the great philosophers. Perhaps this will be dismissed as a lamentable return of what Hermann Hesse called the Age of the Feuilleton, in which journalistic values took precedence over academic integrity. But if one takes a closer look at that late-Victorian/Edwardian period when intellectual celebrities such as Tagore, Mark Twain, Georg Simmel, Henri Bergson et al travelled the world giving public lectures to large audiences, there is much we ought really to be envious of. If poetry, philosophy, classical music, and painting do not enjoy the vital popularity they once did, the attitudes of the academy are largely to blame.

The Romantic art of translation

For Florian Scheding and Rama Pekua - friends and literary Liebhaber

Wanderer's Night Song

Across the hilltops,
Restfulness;
Over the treetops
Stillness hangs in the air.
The birds have silenced their song.
Wait: before long
You too will rest there.

Hopefully some of you reading this will recognize it as an Anglicization of the most famous lyric poem in German literature: Goethe's "Wanderers Nachtlied (II)". Having composed it yesterday afternoon lying on my bed I make no particular claims on its behalf. Instead the idea for the following arose when I decided to test my version against those I could find on the internet. The results were interesting; some, in fact, could only be described as alarming. First of all, here is the original:

Über allen Gipfeln
ist Ruh.
Über allen Wipfeln
spürest du
kaum einen Hauch.
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
ruhest du auch.

Milan Kundera finds a beautiful way to introduce the poem into his novel Immortality (1988). Read by an expatriate German to his daughter, it becomes first a lullaby, a bond between their childhoods in different countries, different languages; then, at the very end of his life "she realized that the poem speaks of death... She whispered with him 'Warte nur, bald ruhest du auch', soon you too will rest. And she recognized the voice of Father's approaching death: it was the calm of birds in the treetops". Here is the literal prose translation in the English text of Kundera's novel:

On all hilltops
There is peace,
In all treetops
You will hear
Hardly a breath.
Birds in the wood are silent.
Just wait, soon
You too will rest.

As Kundera himself admits, "in a literal translation the poem loses everything". Well, perhaps not quite everything. But on a technical level this little lyric is cut like a jewel: "every line has a different number of syllables, there is an alternation of trochees, iambs, dactyls, the sixth line is oddly longer than the others, and even though the poem consists of two couplets, the first grammatical sentence ends asymmetrically in the fifth line, which creates a melody that had never existed before, in any poem, as magnificent as it is ordinary".

One might, then, think that a translator's task would be to try and match that technical achievement, creating an equivalent of equal structural brilliance. And expectations were raised when I found the following translator's gloss, which seemed to be fully aware of the versifying subtleties that would be required:

"So naïve-sounding a rhythm, diction, and feeling can only be the product of the most sophisticated craftsmanship... Translators have either betrayed Goethe’s simplicity by cleverness or cloyed it by banality. To substitute for the resonance of feminine rhyme in German (uninflected English having more masculine rhymes), I’ve increased the number of rhymes with the key word 'rest'. And to prevent this increase from becoming monotonous, I’ve used one rhyme with accent not on 'rest' but on the penultimate syllable: 'forest' in line four. To enhance the hushed mood by echo, Goethe on line six alliterates the 'w' of 'schweigen' with the 'w' of 'Wald'. Analogously in line six of the English, 'hushed' and 'heath' alliterate. This is achieved at the cost of using an eye rhyme (heath, breath) instead of a 'perfect' ear rhyme. In denotation, 'heath' is not a proper translation of 'Wald'. The former has mere thickets; the latter is arboreal. But the emotional connotations are partly similar: rustic, unpruned, unmapped, a wilderness for wanderers at night. I don’t want to repeat the earlier used concept of forest and woods. The reader’s ear needs the couplet ending in 'eath' to escape for just a moment the restless 'rest' rhymes."

The analysis sounds sensitive, convincing: the author is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and according to one of his colleagues “no one has ever translated Goethe as well into English”. One's expectations rise still higher. Here is the poem that resulted:

To every hill crest
Comes rest.
In every tree crest
the forest
scarcely draws breath.
Each bird-nest is hushed on the heath.
Wait a bit; soon you
will find rest too.

And...nascetur ridiculus mus! Since the perpetrator can easily be discovered by clicking the above links, there is no point in preserving his anonymity any longer. In fact there is an added incentive. His surname sums up the defining quality of his translation: Peter Viereck (Peter Square). Everything else that he apparently wanted to avoid - "cleverness", "banality", "monotonousness" - is nonetheless, unfortunately, present. The last two lines are more catastrophically clunking than a fatal accident in a lumber yard.

So translation is evidently an art, and not a science. One cannot create a good poetic rendition by analysis, though one can certainly use analysis in demonstrating why a rendition is good or bad. To make a start with Herr Square's version: "comes rest" in line 2 introduces a disruptive movement of arrival that does not appear in the original, and is entirely out of place; Goethe's forest does not "draw breath", and still less does it do so "in its tree crests" ( - though Goethe had a high opinion of his own scientific work, this poem is not known for contributing to the discovery of photosynthesis); and "Warte nur" is not successfully rendered by "Wait a bit", any more than it would be by "Hang on", "Hold up", or "Can we stop for a breather, I've got a stitch". All these are faults of Viereck's poem as a poem, as well as qua translation: they all disrupt the Stimmung, the mood that the poem tries (and already has precious little space) to create.

And that ultimately subjective, non-technical factor, "mood", leads me onto a defence of the other part of my title - translation as Romantic art. For one thing that the Romantics believed in firmly was that the "holistic" aspect of the arts, the ability to imbue creative expression with the unity and self-evidence of a simple, intuited truth, was imaginative and emotional, not rational. As August Wilhelm Schlegel put it, "concepts outline each thing for itself, whereas in reality, nothing ever exists for itself; only feeling perceives the all-in-all". In Romantic poetry, as in music, there is always a subjective essence - be it an emotion, an Idea, or a vision - which casts its light across the poem's accidents of sound and sense. And if sceptics would identify those accidents literally and not philosophically, I can only respond that I find considerably fewer of them in the following nineteenth-century rendition of "Wanderers Nachtlied" by the much-despised Longfellow than in the twentieth-century version by Viereck:

Over all the hilltops
Is quiet now
In all the treetops
Hearest thou

Hardly a breath.
The birds are asleep in the trees:
Wait; soon like these
Thou too shall rest.

In a context like this one sees how the Romantic habit of simple rhyming (now/thou, trees/these) can be unobtrusive and well-judged: it does not have to be "trite", as it is so often accused of - even in a translation by a second-rate poet. (A better target for charges of "triteness" would be bad twentieth-century rhymes, which plumb unsounded depths of banality - viz. "you/too"). But to see what a great Romantic poet can really do with rhyme and rhythm, just look at a passage from Shelley's incomplete (sadly, scarcely begun) 1822 translation of Goethe's Faust. The second stanza of the "Prologue in Heaven" is spoken by Gabriel:

Und schnell und unbegreiflich schnelle
Dreht sich umher der Erde Pracht;
Es wechselt Paradieseshelle
Mit tiefer, schauervoller Nacht;
Es schäumt das Meer in breiten Flüssen
Am tiefen Grund der Felsen auf,
Und Fels und Meer wird fortgerissen
In ewig schnellem Sphärenlauf.

Here is John R. Williams' translation (available in Wordworth Classics):

The earth in majesty rotating
Spins on itself as swift as light,
Celestial radiance alternating
With dread impenetrable night.
In rocky depths the foaming ocean
Surges with elemental force,
Swept on by the eternal motion
That speeds the worlds upon their course.

The metre, rhyme-scheme and meaning are all preserved: deviations are extremely minor, and indeed quite felicitous ("unimaginably fast" in the original is pictured "as swift as light", and the sea's "broad streams" become elemental surges). All things considered, philologically, this is a model translation. But now read Shelley's version:

And swift and swift, with rapid lightness,
The adornèd Earth spins silently,
Alternating Elysian brightness
With deep and dreadful night; the sea
Foams in broad billows from the deep
Up to the rocks, and rocks and Ocean,
Onward, with spheres which never sleep,
Are hurried in eternal motion.

The sheer force of movement here is unmatched in Goethe's original. Goethe could have had it, of course - there is no suggesting he was not a master of verse effects. The reason why he did not is that the variety of verse-forms in Faust is motivated by the speaker and the tone and context of the scene as much as by the poetic imagery. Theatrically speaking, there should be a certain stiffness and ceremony to these lines, so that when Mephistopheles enters he can the more effectively puncture the mood - "apologies, I'm not capable of such high-flown phrases!".

Shelley, obviously, is more interested in the poetry for itself, commenting in awed tones in his translator's note, "it is impossible to represent in another language the melody of the versification; even the volatile strength and delicacy of the ideas escape in the crucible of translation". For all that he succeeeds extraordinarily well. It is the energy which most convinces, felt in the enjambment of the fourth line, and even more in the repetitions, which Goethe separates (schnell and Fels) but Shelley thrusts together: "And swift and swift", "Up to the rocks, and rocks and Ocean..."

For another example, one which I hope will better illustrate the specific importance of "mood" or "tone", let us make a linguistic passage in the other direction. (Apologies to those who do not read German: I will try and back-translate where it seems worth it). Here is the first half of the soliloquy from Hamlet as our starting-point:

To be, or not to be - that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep -
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

German readers will already have the well-known translation of this echoing in their heads - it is probably one of the most successful Shakespeare translations ever made. But before we come to it, let us look at two rather less well-known (and less successful) renderings. Both are by famous German poets of the eighteenth century. Here is Wieland's prose version from the 1760s, before German literature had entirely rejected the French code of bon goût:

Sein oder nicht sein - - das ist die Frage - - Ob es einem edlen Geist anständiger ist, sich den Beleidigungen des Glücks geduldig zu unterwerfen oder seinen Anfällen geduldig entgegenzustehen und durch einen herzhaften Streich sie auf einmal zu erledigen? Was ist Sterben? Schlafen – das ist alles - - und durch einen guten Schlaf sich auf immer vom Kopfweh und allen andern Plagen, wovon unser Fleisch Erbe ist, zu entledigen, ist ja eine Glückseligkeit, die man einem andächtiglich zubeten sollte – Sterben, schlafen - - Doch vielleicht ist es was mehr - - - wie, wenn es träumen wäre?

- - Da steckt der Haken - - was nach dem irdischen Getümmel in diesem langen Schlaf des Todes für Träume folgen können, das ist es, was uns stutzen machen muss. Wenn das nicht wäre, wer würde die Miβhandlungen und Staupenschläge der Zeit, die Gewalttätigkeiten des Unterdrückers, die verächtlichen Kränkungen der Stolzen, die Qual verschmähter Liebe, die Schikanen der Justiz, den Übermut der Groβen ertragen, oder welcher Mann von Verdienst würde sich von einem Elenden, dessen Geburt oder Glück seinen ganzen Wert ausmacht, mit Füβen stoβen lassen, wenn ihm freistünde, mit einem armen, kleinen Federmesser sich Ruhe zu verschaffen?

The contrast with Shakespeare's own style could hardly be greater! Wieland's urge to tone the violent impulses down and introduce a more elegant turn of phrase must have once been an anticipation of his audience's social sensibilities; today it reads like a strange exercise in moralistic featherbedding, delivered with all the rhetorical force of a professorial retirement lecture. The slings and arrows are thrown out and replaced by "fortune's insults", which, however they are to be treated, must always be met "patiently", and the "heartache" and "thousand natural shocks" become an inconvenient "headache" and a lot of other "vexations" which can be "got rid of by a good sleep"(!)

Going almost (but not quite) as far in the other direction, here are Herder's verses, full of Sturm und Drang excitability:

Sein oder nicht sein? – das ist nun die Frage!
Ob’s edler, im Gemüte fortzudulden
Des Schicksals Tückepfeil und Hohngeschoβ?
wie oder aufzustehn den Trübsalsstürmen
und widerstehnd sie enden! – Sterben! – Schlafen!
Nicht mehr? Und schlafend sagen können: aus ist
das Herzach, aus die tausend Erdenstöβe,
die Fleisch wir erbeten! – So ist’s Vollendung,
andächtig recht zu wünschen – Sterben! – schlafen! –
Nur schlafen? – wohl auch träumen! Ah! da liegt’s!
Denn in dem Schlaf des Todes was für Träume
da kommen, wenn nun aus ist Lebenslärm,
das macht uns Halt! – Und die, die Rücksicht ist’s,
die Jammer macht so langen, langen Lebens.
Denn wer ertrüg’s, die Hieb’ und Streich’ des Unfalls,
Gewalt des Drückers! stolzer Narren Schmach,
den Stich verschmähter Liebe! der Gesetze
Betrugverzögerung – Staatsmanns Hoffart! Spott
den’s leidende Verdienst vom Bub empfängt –
kann man sich selbst je los und ledig machen
mit bloβem Dolchstich –

Where Herder succeeds is in using the peculiarly German resource of compound nouns to express the metaphor-packed pithiness of the original. "Tückepfeil" und "Hohngeschoβ" are fine strokes, quite legitimately transferring the force of fortune's "outrageousness" (explicated as "cunning spite" and "mockery") to the "arrows" and "missiles". Where he goes too far is in reducing other parts of the text to a barely filled-out procession of exclamation-marks. While one must grant that the German Ausrufezeichen is more common, and does not by itself convey such an excitable atmosphere as it does in English, moderation would surely have been urged had Herder noticed that Shakespeare's text uses not a single exclamation-mark. Any vor sich hin, soliloquizing tone is abandoned: Herder's text berates heaven and earth.

Finally, here is August Wilhelm Schlegel's canonized version:

Sein oder Nichtsein; das ist hier die Frage:
Ob's edler im Gemüt, die Pfeil' und Schleudern
Des wütenden Geschicks erdulden, oder,
Sich waffnend gegen eine See von Plagen,
Durch Widerstand sie enden? Sterben – schlafen –
Nichts weiter! Und zu wissen, daß ein Schlaf
Das Herzweh und die tausend Stöße endet,
Die unsers Fleisches Erbteil, ’s ist ein Ziel,
Aufs innigste zu wünschen. Sterben – schlafen –
Schlafen! Vielleicht auch träumen! Ja, da liegts:
Was in dem Schlaf für Träume kommen mögen,
Wenn wir die irdische Verstrickung lösten,
Das zwingt uns stillzustehn. Das ist die Rücksicht,
Die Elend läßt zu hohen Jahren kommen.
Denn wer ertrüg der Zeiten Spott und Geißel,
Des Mächtigen Druck, des Stolzen Mißhandlungen,
Verschmähter Liebe Pein, des Rechtes Aufschub,
Den Übermut der Ämter und die Schmach,
Die Unwert schweigendem Verdienst erweist,
Wenn er sich selbst in Ruhstand setzen könnte
Mit einer Nadel bloß?

The precision is striking enough, especially when one considers that Schlegel, unlike Herder, produced 17 plays' worth of this perfectly-turned blank verse. As the great Swiss Germanist Emil Staiger remarks, in the introduction to Schlegel's critical writings from which I have taken the above extracts, "Schlegel preserved the original wording to a quite remarkable extent...and yet there is a faint Romantic tinge to his Shakespeare". And there is nothing wrong with that; indeed for Staiger it may have guaranteed that "Shakespeare...worked his way into the German soul". It takes, perhaps, a great cultural movement in the present to do justice to one of the past.

If that last sentence has any truth to it, it will be worth our while expanding the frame of cultural reference. For on this model, it is not so much the fine threads of intellectual and cultural history linking the German Romantics and the English Renaissance that matter (many of them, such as the self-evident command of classical rhetoric, or the adherence to what E. M. W. Tillyard called the "Elizabethan world picture", had indeed been irremediably broken). Rather, it is the imaginative connection, the fact that the Romantics felt that Shakespeare was a "Romantic" poet, and were determined to use all the resources they could find to emulate and extend his achievement. And that imaginative connection to Shakespeare was felt well beyond Europe. The Bengali cult of Shakespeare began only slightly later than the German, in the nineteenth century. As a teenager, Rabindranath Tagore was already trying his hand at rendering Shakespeare into Bengali. He did all the witches' dialogues from Macbeth (quite a linguistic challenge when one thinks about it!); here is the opening of the play -

( ডাকিনী । ম্যাক‍্‌বেথ্ )
দৃশ্য : বিজন প্রান্তর । বজ্র বিদ্যু ৎ । তিনজন ডাকিনী ।

১ম ডা — ঝড় বাদলে আবার কখন
মিল্‌ব মোরা তিনটি জনে ।
২য় ডা — ঝগড়া ঝাঁটি থামবে যখন ,
হার জিত সব মিট্‌বে রণে ।
৩য় ডা — সাঁঝের আগেই হবে সে ত ;
১ম ডা — মিল্‌ব কোথায় বোলে দে ত ।
২য় ডা — কাঁটা খোঁচা মাঠের মাঝ ।
৩য় ডা — যাক্কেথ সেথা আস্‌চে আজ ।
১ম ডা — কটা বেড়াল ! যাচ্ছি ওরে !
২য় ডা — ঐ বুঝি ব্যাং ডাক্‌চে মোরে !
৩য় ডা — চল্‌ তবে চল্‌ ত্বরা কোরে !
সকলে — মোদের কাছে ভালই মন্দ ,
মন্দ যাহা ভাল যে তাই ,
অন্ধকারে কোয়াশাতে
ঘুরে ঘুরে ঘুরে বেড়াই !

Without bothering with stage directions, parts etc., but just to give you an idea of the harsh music of Tagore's rendering, here is a rough transliteration:

Jhor badole abar kokhon
Milbo mora tinti jone?
Jhogra jhanti thambe jokhon
Har[o] jit sab mitbe rone.
Sanjer age hobe shey to -
Milbo kothay bole dey to.
Kantha koncha mather majh.
Macbeth shetha asche aaj.
Kota beral! Jacchi o re!
Ei bujhi byang dakche more!

Moder kache bhalo-i mondo
Mondo jaha bhalo je tai,
Ondhokare kuyashate,
Ghure ghure ghure berai!

The last four lines correspond to the chorus couplet, "Fair is foul and foul is fair/ Hover through the fog and filthy air", giving Rabindranath twice as many syllables to play with. And he knows how to use them: "ghure ghure ghure berai" is a poundingly energetic line to close the scene on (a typically Bengali compound verb, with berano meaning "to travel" and ghora feeling very much like a cognate of the Italian [fare un] giro, to "go around" in both the loose and the literal senses; the witches don't hover, they whirl off into the stormy air!). The other famous chorus is treated in the same way: "Double, double toil and trouble/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble" becomes -

দ্বিগুণ দ্বিগুণ দ্বিগুণ খেটে
কাজ সাধি আয় সবাই জুটে ।
দ্বিগুণ দ্বিগুণ জ্বলরে আগুন
ওঠ্‌রে কড়া দ্বিগুণ ফুটে ।

Digun digun digun khete
Kaj sadhi aay sobai jute.
Digun digun jwalre aagun
Othre kora digun phute.

- with six "doubles", and an added instruction to work harder at collecting their ingredients! The interesting points are those where Rabindranath has to decide how to translate the untranslatable: he leaves the "harpier" (in the third line of Act IV/i) as a "harpy", which presumably would mean little to a Bengali; however, the witches themselves become dakinis. In Hindu mythology these are female spirits. But far from being generally imagined as potion-stirring hags, they are more usually young and beautiful, using their charms to seduce and trick men who cross their path. Quite how this might have affected (or might still affect) a Bengali reading of the witches' (or dakinis') encounters with Macbeth, I will not try to guess: it would certainly have made the text's reference to the witches' "beards" (Act I/iii, line 46) doubly puzzling!

Tagore's other translations include poems by Byron, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and some short lyrics from Heine. In his reminiscences he reports learning to read German from a missionary, so the Heine translations were direct and not via English. Here is one:

নীল বায়লেট নয়ন দুটি করিতেছে ঢলঢল

রাঙা গোলাপ গাল দুখানি , সুধায় মাখা সুকোমল ।

শুভ্র বিমল করকমল ফুটে আছে চিরদিন!

হৃদয়টুকু শুষ্ক শুধু পাষাণস্ম সুকঠিন!

Nil baylet noyon duti koriteche toltol
Ranga golap gal dukhani, sudhay makha sukomol.
Shubhro bimol korokomol phute aache chirodin!
Hridoytuku susko shudhu pashanoso sukothin!

Die blauen Veilchen der Äugelein,
Die roten Rosen der Wängelein,
Die weißen Lilien der Händchen klein,
Die blühen und blühen noch immerfort,
Und nur das Herzchen ist verdorrt.

I can't find an acceptable English version, but the point of the poem is Heine's comparison of the various parts of the beloved's body with flowers - eyes blue violets, cheeks red roses, hands white lilies; these are forever in bloom, he says, but the part that matters most, the heart, is withered. Tagore's version again virtually doubles the poem's length, with eight-foot lines instead of the quadrameter of the original, and he adds in extra imagery. In this context one naturally tends to assume the additions are part of the same general, rather cliched Romantic vocabulary: the "liquid clearness" of her eyes in line 1, her "nectar-filled" cheeks in line 2 - but in line 3 we suddenly hit something unmistakeably Indian: korokomol literally means "hand-lotus"! And suddenly Heine's chance colour association (lily-white skin) is linked up to a whole Sanskritic system of lotus-based symbology, in which "lotus hands", "lotus feet" and gods seated on lotuses (think the Indian equivalent of Botticelli's Venus in her shell) are all already culturally established as familiar poetic and artistic icons of formal perfection.

This is, finally, to raise (hopefully from a somewhat shifted perspective) the familiar questions - how "cultural" should a translation be? How "faithful"? If we translate Tagore, should we be as radical as he was in approaching Heine? Should his lotuses become our lilies? That is certainly not the current solution; most Western readers of an author such as Tagore want an "Indian flavour", and there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. Many of his poems and songs are so bound to the landscape that inspired them that a re-imagining in Western terms would be impossible anyway ( - as impossible as trying to imagine the frozen landscape of Schubert's Winterreise while lying sweat-soaked under a mosquito net). All I want to raise here is the point that "faithfulness" takes many forms, and we need to be much more aware than we perhaps are (given the existence of Viereck-style travesties) of the complex relationships between letter and spirit.

The twentieth century wanted to simplify those relationships, and in literature just as in music, visions of getting closer to the Urtext, the authentic, original, stripped-down version came to dominate. As Andre Aciman observes in relation to the Scott Moncrieff (1922) and Lydia Davis (2004) translations of Proust, even for that most digressive, shadowy, and ramifyingly suggestive of all literary texts, a certain Puritanism has taken hold. Aciman objects to this, and on principle at least, I think rightly so. To capture the beauty of some passages, he suggests, "you may need to do something no translator will admit needs doing: you may have to depart from the text in order to capture not just its meaning, but its cadence, its luster, its magic. In other words—and I should bite my tongue—you may need to pad, to adorn, to interpolate" (all the things of which Scott Moncrieff stands accused). Of course one may not have to make such a departure: Schlegel's Hamlet does not, nor Longfellow's Goethe. But what they and Tagore have in common is that the judgement of poetic necessity and licence remains poetic. It never becomes Puritan or professorial.

Proust and the webcam

With grateful acknowledgements to Anna Goodman...

The real title of what follows ought to be "Proust and metaphor", since this is what has recently recaptured my interest in the writer whom I all too regularly cite as my favourite of all time. But since one can easily imagine (without needing to seek them out) a hundred academic essays bearing such a heading, all substantially more comprehensive than what I am about to offer, I decided on something a little more piquant. Proust and the webcam genuinely do have something to do with one another, and something surprising, namely the former uses the latter as a metaphor even though it does not exist yet. (All quotes with page numbers that follow are from the first volume of the Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation, Remembrance of Things Past.)

"'I gather that Mme de Villeparisis', [Albertine] remarked to Octave, 'has been complaining to your father'. I could hear, underlying the 'I gather', one of those notes that were peculiar to Albertine; every time I realised that I had forgotten them, I would remember having already caught a glimpse behind them of Albertine's determined and typically Gallic mien. I could have been blind and yet have detected certain of her qualities, alert and slightly provincial, in those notes just as plainly as in the tip of her nose. They were equivalent and might have been substituted for one another, and her voice was like what we are promised in the photo-telephone of the future: the visual image was clearly outlined in the sound" (p.992)

Et voila, la webcam! Quite how a visual image could be "clearly outlined in sound" is clearer in the case of the Proustian imagination (the tenor of his metaphor) than in any conceivable "photo-telephonic" apparatus (the vehicle). The corresponding visual image here is surely not an accident: the narrator is picturing Albertine wrinkling the tip of her nose slightly just as she lets her voice take on the characteristic note of social disapproval. Perhaps the details of digital communication, the translation of both the tip of the nose and the tone of voice into identical binary strings, could form some sort of analogy - to us - for the way they blend in Proust's mind; needless to add, they were not accessible to him!

And with that example we get a sense of how unusual Proust's use of metaphor was. His images are very often as rechérché as the "lost time" of his title. Commentators have in fact suggested a connection: for Wallace Fowlie the juxtapositions of separated moments of time created by the workings of involuntary memory parallel the "function of a metaphor which brings together objects which have no relationship in ordinary life...explain[ing] the unknown by the known". This last is a very common observation about metaphor, particularly if we are allowed to equate knowledge and vision, and thus assume its equivalence to the other common observation that metaphor explains the invisible through the visible. It surely has some truth to it: why else do music and religion both so persistently invite metaphorical language? But Proust loves to disrupt this neat reasoning: even the very Proustian metaphor that Fowlie inserts just before his (proto-Rumsfeldian) identification of metaphorically known unknowns - the "waiters in the restaurant of Rivebelle, compared, in their agility and flight, to angels" - actually contradicts it. After all, we have much more definite knowledge of waiters than we do of angels.

In fact on turning to the passage that Fowlie appears to quote, one finds a metaphor even more extended and unusual. Proust only implies the angelic status of the waiters: the direct comparison is of the restaurant's round tables with heavenly bodies, which soon expands into an entire pre-prandial cosmological vision -

"I looked at the round tables whose infinite assemblage filled the restaurant like so many planets, as the latter are represented in old allegorical pictures. Moreover, there seemed to be some irresistible force of attraction at work among these divers stars, and at each table the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were not sitting, with the possible exception of some wealthy Amphitryon who, having managed to secure a famous author, was endeavouring to extract from him...a few insignificant remarks, at which the ladies marvelled. The harmony of these astral tables did not prevent the incessant revolution of the countless waiters who, because they were on their feet instead of being seated like the diners, performed their gyrations in a more exalted sphere... Seated behind a bank of flowers, two horrible cashiers, busy with endless calculations, seemed two witches occupied in forecasting by astrological signs the disasters that might from time to time occur in this celestial vault fashioned according to the scientific conceptions of the Middle Ages" (p.868)

The incessant revolutions of the scene are elsewhere acknowledged to have been artifically enhanced, namely by the narrator's consumption of a "dose of beer, and a fortiori of champagne...adding...a few drops of port which I was too bemused to be able to taste"! In this case, then, the narrator's perceptions are not purely the result of perceptiveness: but that does not stop him "pitying all the diners, because I felt that for them the round tables were not planets and that they had not cut through the scheme of things in such a way as to be delivered from the bondage of habitual appearances and enabled to perceive analogies" (p. 869). The situation makes light of a serious point, one which Alain de Botton (whose How Proust Can Change Your Life should not be disdained by the Proustophile: de Botton's style and succinctness are truly enviable) regards as a principle of Proustian philosophy - the need to destroy our habitual lack of sensitivity to the world. In this, the use of metaphors or analogies that begin with the usual and transfigure it by reference to the unusual is enormously helpful. They do not have to select a mundane subject and find a transcendent image for it, as with the astral tables. The relationship can go the other way too, as with an example cited by de Botton:

"Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to 'come on' for a while, and so goes 'in front' in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself."

An example like this is, as well as being exquisite, important in emphasizing that Proust's technique is not mere poetic hyperbole. The moon is a conventional "poetic" image, an actress waiting to come on stage is not, but this is irrelevant: the second is a more unusual and interesting sight, and thus a fit vehicle for refreshing our perceptions of the first.

On returning after many years to the most famous passage of Proust, which itself I expected to find no longer capable of making me hold my breath in the way it did at first reading - the tasting of the madeleine - I was after all captivated, and moved, by two extremely peculiar images that Proust employs, neither of which I have ever found reference to in their original context:

"I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have reognised their voice the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.

And so it is with our past" (p.47)

"And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea" (p.51)

For all that the Japanese have been long known for their ingenuity with paper, one almost wonders whether this game really exists... But of course by this point in a first reading (this is the last paragraph of the passage), one has also ceased to pay attention to the literary means by which the epiphany is being communicated. The Proustian metaphor functions, as one blogger puts it in a suitably extravagant metaphor of his own, "like one of those massively complex atoms created in cyclotrons that disintegrates radioactively in milliseconds"; it catalyzes the reaction going on in the reader's own experience. New Critical readings of metaphor that analyze it as a "structural element" would surely find Proust wanting: frequently metaphors vanish mid-sentence, as happens even in an oft-quoted passage such as the following, in which the vase persists for no more than four or five words:

"An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connexion between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them–a connexion that is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which just because it professes to confine itself to the truth in fact departs widely from it–a unique connexion which the writer has to rediscover in order to link for ever in his phrase the two sets of phenomena which reality joins together."

But the pleasure created by the metaphor lasts much longer; for (to end with another technological Proustian metaphor) -

"Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people" (p. 932)