Hypothesis

While the English and German languages are closer from a linguistic point of view, it seems that German poetry is closer to French poetry than to English language poetry. I am thinking about how a German language poet like Ingeborg Bachmann goes into an abstract inquiry about language and poetic process, much like say Anne-Marie Albiach or Claude Royet-Journoud, and not so much into description of every day life, the type you'd find in Sharon Olds, CK Williams or whoever else (my friend Joe Barnes described this as "the epiphany-in-the-kitchen" movement).

In "Böhmer liegt am Meer" ("Bohemia Lies By The Sea," trans. Peter Filkins), notice the succession of hard syllables interrupted by the soft one of alle.

Kommt her, ihr Böhmen alle, Seefahrer, Hafenhuren und Schiffe unverankert. Wollt ihr nicht böhmisch sein. Illyrer, Veroneser und Venezianer alle. Spielt die Komödien, die lachen machen

Um die zum Weinen sind.

(Come here, all you Bohemians, seafarers, dock whores, and ships unanchored. Don't you want to be Bohemians, all you Illyrians, Veronese and Venetians. Play the comedies that makes us laugh

until we cry.)

(also, I am not sure that "all you Bohemians" sounds right to translate "ihr Böhmen all." Of course, I have a shitty ear. The same could be said for "Illyrer, Veroneser und Venezianer alle." But I like Filkins' volume because it is bilingual.)

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I find myself questioning some of the moves that Filkins does when he translates Bachmann, notably in "Das deutsche Wunder" ("The German Miracle"). In German, the first four stanzas are one long sentence:

Frühmorgens, wenn
Fruchtlieferwagen durch die Stadt
poltern, wenn die S-Bahn
durch dein Bett fährt
und die Einflugschneise
tiefer hängt als sonst,

mußt du, du mußt,
du kannst nicht schlafen,

frühmorgens, wenn die
Amerikaner im geteilten
Berlin das Manöver beginnen,
wenn die Schüsse fallen, als
ging es an,

mußt du, aber du mußt nicht
du kannst auch schlafen.

Filkins chooses to cut it into two sentences in the middle:

Early in the morning, when
fruit wagons rumble
through the city, when the subway
travels through your bed
and the incoming flight lanes
are lower than usual,

you must, you must,
you cannot sleep.

Early in the morning, when the
Americans in divided
Berlin begin their maneuvers,
when shots fire as if
it was starting,

you must join in, but need not,
for you may also sleep.

It seems Filkins aims for a grammatical correctness in English while the original doesn't seem to be (of course, it's been a while since I last spoke German. As an aside, now that I have moved to San Francisco, there isn't a day I don't encounter a German- or French-speaking person. Houston was a linguistic wasteland. It was also a artistic wasteland.)

Then there is the part where the poem seems to be continuous on the page, but is divided (and numbered) by Filkins. But here, I am arguing about peccadilloes.

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Reading Ingeborg Bachmann makes me extremely unconfortable with Adrienne Rich. Rich's later work (notably School Among The Ruins) sounds eerily like Bachmann's work. Michael Hofman, the editor of Twentieth Century German Poetry wrote something along those lines about German poetry in general. From memory: "While the American confessionalists (Lowell, Plath, Sexton) aimed to be heartbreaking, Heinrich Boll simply was." Or something like that.

Ouch!

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This post was supposed to be limited to just the first sentence. Not sure how it got to be so long.