Eric Tao
on translating Stefan George
Any translation is a tightrope act balancing the global—form, look, mood—with the local—imagery, diction, device; here is my best attempt at preserving both. I started by listing off what absolutely could not be sacrificed, the elements of the poem which made it speak to me when I discovered it in a book of German poetry one still night. Above all, it had to sound right, with four stanzas of four lines each with an ABAB rhyme scheme, the A rhymes being feminine and the B rhymes being masculine, and with a delicate parallelism between the lines of each stanza. The original poem feels perfectly balanced, one word flowing into the next. Thus, some individual meanings needed to be done away with, so George’s „Du kühler wind du heisser hauch“ (“You cool wind you hot breath”) became “you chary gust you bateless breath” with entirely transformed adjectives. Similarly, the syntax of the second and fourth lines is thrown away to make room for the rhyme scheme, meter, and feel. A minor aside needs to be made about the typography: George de-capitalizes nouns in the original, so taking his lead, I de-capitalized the beginnings of lines to create an analogous but unsatisfyingly different effect.
In the spirit of Symbolism, I have tried to preserve countless other small effects—to take the aforementioned line as an example, the binary of „kühler“ and „heisser“ transforms into another binary of “chary” and “bateless”, and the alliterative „heisser hauch“ becomes the similarly alliterative “bateless breath”. Also significant is how the hard consonants in the first half of the original line melt into the gentle and whispering „heisser hauch“, an effect which I’ve attempted to preserve in my translation. Finally, George is an outlier in the German poetic tradition in that he strays far away from the vernacular, dipping into archaic and inventive diction, so I have attempted to channel a similar register. I hope this translation has a fraction of the magic of the original so that non-German-speaking readers might be as enchanted with this poem as I was the night that I discovered it.
about the author
Stefan George (1868-1933) was a Symbolist poet and himself a frequent translator, translating his idols from Dante to Baudelaire into German. A fierce defender of art for art’s sake, George’s works are shrouded in aristocratism, classicism, and metaphor, a sharp reaction against the literary tendency of the age toward a more democratic naturalism and realism. During his lifetime, he decried the militarism and materialism of German culture, finding inspiration among Parisian bohemian poets and returning to Germany with the hope of newly invigorating the German language, starting the literary magazine Blätter für die Kunst (Journal for the Arts) to promote what he saw as “the new art.” His poems strive toward an ideal of unearthly beauty and eternal truth, and he saw the artist’s mission as the endeavor to create a noble society out of the ashes of German culture.
Like those of Nietzsche before him, George’s works were co-opted by the Nazi Party to use as propaganda, a development George personally detested, declining any association with the Party. At the time of his death, George’s legacy remained troublingly mixed, as those inside Germany declared him as the prophet of the Third Reich while those outside Germany mourned the loss of a man who had fought his whole life for a worthier future for Germany, the Nazis embodying the brutality and banality that George had spent his entire life decrying under the German Empire.
about the translator
Eric Tao is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania studying mathematics and cognitive science, and he is deeply indebted to his friends and family for their love and support. He first encountered Stefan George through Arnold Schoenberg’s second string quartet, in whose last movement there is a mystical moment where the soprano enters with George’s words: „Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten“ (“I feel air from other planets”). In his spare time, he is an avid composer and an aspiring writer, and in all these respects, an enthusiastic lover of the German artistic tradition—and of art worldwide.
photo by Katherine Rozsypalek
