Subject: RE: The Dwarf's Song
From: Cecilia Baader (ceciliabaader@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri May 25 2001 - 21:32:38 GMT
--- Zack Wyatt <zwyatt@stanford.edu> wrote:
> The most confusing part of Rilke's poem is the final stanza -
> especially what 'light and clear' refers to. Any help?
Before I begin, let me first insert the disclaimer that my German
language skills are poor at best and that this is a very off-the-cuff
look at the stanza in question. (Where is Bruce when you need him?
Bru-uce?) However, to answer Zack's question about the meaning of the
mouth, I think you need to go back to the German:
Ob er mir zürnt für mein Gesicht
mit dem mürrischen Munde?
Es war ja so oft bereit, ganz leicht
und klar zu werden im Grunde;
aber nichts kam ihm je so dicht
wie die großen Hunde.
Und die Hunde haben das nicht
Now, in the original translation that I pulled from the website, the
translator takes a very literal view of Rilke's text:
Is it because he's angry about my face
with its grumpy mouth?
In principle, its always been ready
to be light and clear;
but nothing ever came as close
to it as the large dogs have.
And dogs don't have that.
However, with Rilke, you absolutely cannot take it literally. The real
difficulty in reading Rilke is to try to glean the real meaning behind
his very broad words. Something that's always been very cool about
Rilke is the way that he manages to use these crazy words with multiple
meanings.
Take for example "Gesicht". The literal translation is "face".
However, it can also mean "point of view". That is, "Is it because he's
angry about my point of view?" is a very real meaning to the same lines.
Or "mürrischen", which can mean "grumpy" or "dour". "Munde" is Mouth,
but the word is very close in appearance to the Latin "mundo", or world.
Think about how the mouth is what the dwarf is using to communicate his
world view. His skewed and sad world view.
So one begins, in only those two lines, to see the extreme difficulty of
dealing with translations. And don't think that Rilke didn't know all
of those things when he wrote those lines. A man of his ilk would have
been educated in the Latin (and the Greek) just as well as he would have
been educated in the German. So the first two lines may be speaking
about the Dwarf's face in terms of a literal translation, but a
translation that takes the meaning into account would need to use
possibly broader terms in a mix with the more concrete facial metaphor.
There are other intracacies. The German "leicht" can be "light" or,
perhaps more appropriately "easy". And "klar" is certainly clear, but
it is also "serene". Ah, you say. And the language in those lines can
be smoothed out a great deal. Again, our original translator kept to
the literal meaning of the lines. The translator chose "ready" for
"bereit", but it could also mean "prepared" or "inclined". In which
case, the meaning leans more towards the ability of the mouth to lose
its dour outlook upon the world.
Then we get the last lines, in which the Dwarf admits that nothing comes
close except for the large dogs. What's interesting about the large
dogs is that the German "großen Hunde" is very close in sound -- and
Rilke used a play upon sound quite a bit in his poetry -- to the word
"geschunden", or the oppressed. Ah, you say. Ah. So nothing comes
near except for the untouchables, and the untouchables have "nicht".
Nothing.
The trick is to get the metaphor in there but still manage to get the
dual meanings across. This is precisely why people both love and hate to
try to translate Rilke. My translation of those lines might lean more
toward:
Could he dislike my face
with its dour Mouth?
Whenever I could, I made it
basically easy and serene;
However, nothing came near
except dogs.
And the dogs have nothing.
The problem with any translation is that the translator has to make
certain choices, has to find a median between the literal meaning and
the intended meaning. So what you read when you come across a
translation must therefore at least partially reflect the translator's
view of the poem. My reading is almost diametrically opposed to the
translation that I posted earlier, from the website. This is just my
reading of the German, and I am admittedly an amateur at this. However,
given my reading of the poem, does this help to answer some of the
questions that you posed, Zack?
Regards,
Cecilia.
(Time for me to GO.)
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