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Thursday, October 18th, 2007
Trying to translate a poem I don't really understand out of a language I don't really speak fluently might seem, well, a little Quixotic. But listen -- I think it is worthwhile. It is I guess at root a way of making myself spend some time trying to get the sounds and meanings of the poetry. I have traditionally had a hard time with poetry because I pass over it too quickly and miss nuances. An exercise like this, assuming I can stick with it, will work to correct that tendency.
posted evening of October 18th, 2007: Respond
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This evening I saw the most extraordinary thing: I was walking through the park after dark, next to the duck pond. There were street lamps lit near the pond but where I was, was in the shadow of a large tree, so the only light was patches reflected from the rippling surface of the pond. I noticed a slight movement a few feet ahead of me -- it was the egret that lives in the canal next to the park, crouching over the edge of the pond like a diver. (This bird I have never seen from closer than about 50 feet.) The egret's curved neck was a matte black "S" against the glossy black of the water, for a beautiful moment before it jumped in to the pond.
posted evening of October 18th, 2007: Respond
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Want to help me come up with a new translation of Hymns to the Night? I've set up a page for translating. Update (Friday evening): Hm, haven't seen anybody else over there yet. But I have a working copy of the first chapter, and I think it sounds pretty good. I have copied MacDonald's translation quite closely in places, and introduced changes in other places. See what you think.
posted afternoon of October 18th, 2007: Respond
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Wow, that was fast! Guess I will hafta come up with some kind of security thingy. Update: Well I wrote a script for quick deletion of spam. What should I do about blocking it? A captcha?
posted morning of October 18th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, October 17th, 2007
So this: Abwärts wend ich mich zu der heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnisvollen Nacht. Fernab liegt die Welt - in eine tiefe Gruft versenkt - wüst und einsam ist ihre Stelle. doesn't sound nearly as odd to me as this: Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world, sunk in a deep grave; waste and lonely is its place. Possible reasons: - It is normal to invert elements of a sentence like that in German, where in English it sounds archaic -- I cannot vouch for the truth of the first clause here but that's what they told me in high school German. It may be that the construction would sound archaic to a native speaker of German.
- The German sounds foreign to begin with, and my ears do not pick up enough nuance to tell anything more than that; whereas the English is my own language, and I can tell straight off that it is not the kind of thing you would say, if you were speaking about turning to the holy, mysterious Night.
I am trying to figure out here, whether a more colloquial translation would be a good thing -- if the German sounds stilted in the original, then a comfortable translation would not be true to the source material.
posted evening of October 17th, 2007: 2 responses
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Here are some different editions of Novalis' Hymns to the Night: The first sentence: Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light, with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? is in praise of the light and the Day when I am expecting to find praise of Night. The opposition between the two will make up the body of this poem. I dig the sound of the poem and am intending to spend some time in the coming days thinking about its meaning, anyway if I can do so without having it sound too much like I'm writing an essay for my freshman English class. Otherwise I will just focus on the sounds. Update: In comments, Gary posts his own translation of the poem. Update: For the sake of completeness, another translation, this one by Henry Morley. (At the very end of the page.) Dick Higgins also has done a translation, but it is not accessible online.
posted evening of October 17th, 2007: 10 responses
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I really enjoyed chapter 26 ("The Mandelsloh") of The Blue Flower this afternoon -- I will try to communicate what I liked about it. This chapter had in common with the passage LanguageHat quoted, a keenly accurate eye for the domestic details of the characters' lives, combined with an eloquent tongue to bring these details to life -- a common thread through Fitzgerald's writing. Friederike's question "What is wrong with particulars? Someone has to look after them", has the sound of the author's voice about it. Writing this post brings up an uncertainty of mine about the writing I do here -- I have mentioned it before and have no resolution to bring now, but I will repeat myself. I am not writing criticism, largely because I don't know how to -- I have not read very much criticism, certainly not of the written word, and I just wouldn't have a clue how to put it together. I think what I am writing, or trying to write, is appreciations of my reading (and listening, and watching); and hoping I can do that without coming off as a buffoon.
posted evening of October 17th, 2007: Respond
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Tuesday, October 16th, 2007
Hm, no, no Novalis among my dusty German books. Leave us Google.
Note: just starting to look at the Logopœic translation of Hymns to the Night. And wow! What living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light -- with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? This is amazing, wonderful! It is going to take a long time to understand though.
posted evening of October 16th, 2007: Respond
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Ok: All the time I've had a blog I've wanted to host comments. And now I do, at least in a rudimentary fashion. You need to put <br> and/or <p> tags in your text if you want paragraph separations. html is allowed for now; indeed security is almost entirely lacking. It would probably be possible to break my software; please don't try. Or at least, send me a note if you have an idea for something that could break it. Update: I fixed it so you do not have to markup your paragraph separations. Yay me! Update as of Wednesday morning: Here are some more things you can newly do: Include apostrophes in your name/handle, and not have them show up backslash'd; include apostrophes in the body of your response, and not have the whole thing chucked out; include links in your response and not have them stripped out. I am using tidy to clean up the html in the comments and it is a temperamental thing. Powerful tho'.
posted evening of October 16th, 2007: 10 responses
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"Words are given us to understand each other, even if not completely," Fritz went on in great excitement. "And to write poetry." "Yes, that's so, Justen, but you mustn't ask too much of language. Language refers only to itself, it is not the key to anything higher. Language speaks, because speaking is its pleasure and it can do nothing else." "In that case, it might as well be nonsense," objected Karoline. "Why not? Nonsense is only another language."
Now I want to read some of Novalis' writing and see how (if) the sentiment Fitzgerald has him expressing here is played out in his poetry. I'm pretty sure I have a book of his work upstairs with the other remnants of my ill-remembered days spent studying German literature. The sentence, "Nonsense is only another language," seems interesting to me. On one hand it is obviously incorrect -- I think a root characteristic of language is, that it can "make sense", whereas clearly nonsense does not "make sense", not if it is doing its job properly. Meaningful nonsense is not nonsense in any fully realized sense of the word. (grin.) But, but, it is good fun to babble incoherently, recording the words and then poring over them trying to divine the meaning.
Michael Hofman uses this same phrase as the title for his NY Times review of The Blue Flower.
posted morning of October 16th, 2007: Respond
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