Blasse Tage: Attempt at a New Translation and Notes Towards a Theory of Translation

Mascha Kaléko (1907-1975) 

Photo: Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Marbach)

 

 

I. 

 

Whilst I'm appreciative of Andreas Nolte's efforts at bringing the work of German-Jewish poet Mascha Kaléko to a much wider (English-speaking) audience, I have to admit I'm not always comfortable with his attempts to translate her verses line by line and word for word; "keeping the content unchanged, using similar phrases and syntax, and trying to maintain the poet's often very strict meter and rhyming scheme" [1].  

It's not that this nothing added, nothing taken away approach sometimes results in a rather odd-sounding English that troubles me. Rather, it's the implication that by staying as "close and true to the original" verse as he could manage, he somehow channels the spirit of the author. For Nolte subscribes to a myth of presence; i.e., the belief that if one listens closely enough one can hear the voice (and know the thoughts) of the dead speaker behind and within the text. 

 

It's because Nolte believes in linguistic transparency, universal themes, and timeless emotions, that he also believes Kaléko's work and his ultra-faithful translations "can still reach deep into the hearts and minds of today's readers". It's because I don't believe in such things and don't subscribe to a myth of authorial presence - i.e., don't care about communing with the holy ghost of Kaléko and doing justice to her emotional sincerity - that I prefer translations that Nolte would probably dismiss as loose depictions and prosaic deviations. 

 

 

II. 

 

For me, as for Paul Ricoeur, translation is primarily a work of remembrance and a work of mourning [2]. In other words, one attempts to salvage something from the past (and, just to make it even more difficult, from a past spoken in another language) and one learns to come to terms with loss; for inavariably in the attempt to carry across one will leave something behind (no one is infallible and no translation is ever perfect - it's simply fantasy to believe otherwise). 

 

I also think that sometimes one expresses one's fidelity to a writer one loves by an act that seems to smack of betrayal. There's simply no point in attempting a literal translation of individual words and working line by line - what matters is the text itself and the vision of the world expressed. That's what you must try to translate and this sometimes requires being a bit devious and a bit daring. A good translator, in my view, is always prepared to take a risk and work with a smile on their face; aware of their own limitations, but not apologetic for them. 

 

And to those who assert that being able to speak and read only one language fluently prohibits one from ever really being a translator - You merely interepret other people's translations - I'd remind them of Thomas Kuhn's remark that even knowing two (or more) languages does not automatically make one a translator: it might be a necessary skill, but it's not a sufficient condition.

 

 

III. 

 

Finally, we come to my attempt to translate one of Mascha Kaléko's most famous poems. I provide the original German afterwards so that readers who wish to judge the success or failure of my effort can do so, but, please note, this is a first draft only and there are certain lines - including the final line - which I will doubtless revise.  

 

 

Faded Days

 

All our faded days

Accrete in silent nights

Forming a great grey wall.

Stone sits upon stone seamlessly.

All sorrows of vacant time

Are locked within the soul.  

 

 Dreams arrive and dissolve

 As day breaks in ghostly fashion.

 In us remains the eternally hesitant

 Grasping for coloured shards,

 And in the shadows of faded days

 We live, because undying.   

 

 

Blasse Tage [3]

 

Alle unsre blassen Tage 

Türmen sich in stiller Nacht 

Hoch zu einer großen Mauer. 

Stein fügt immer sich an Stein. 

Alle leeren Stunden Trauer 

Schließt sich in die Seele ein. 

 

Träume kommen und zerfließen 

Gleich Gespenstern, wird es Tag. 

In uns bleibt das ewig zage 

Fassen nach den bunten Scherben, 

Und im Schatten blasser Tage 

Leben wir, weil wir nicht sterben.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Andreas Nolte, Mascha: The Poems of Mascha Kaléko, (Fomite, 2017), lines quoted above are on pp. 7, 25, and 21.  

 

[2] Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan, (Routledge, 2006).   

[3] This verse was originally published in Mascha Kaléko, Das lyrische Stenogrammheft, (Rowohlt Verlag, 1933). It can also be found Mascha Kaléko: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2012).  

 

Musical bonus: Dota Kehr, Blasse Tage (feat. Uta Köbernick), based on the poem by Mascha Kaléko: click here.  

In Memory of Mascha Kaléko

Google Doodle of Mascha Kaléko by Ramona Ring

I. 

I must admit, I'm not a big fan of Google Doodles; i.e., the decorative changes made to the Google logo on their homepage in order to mark a wide range of anniversaries and events and memorialise the lives of dead artists, scientists, and other figures whom Google deem it appropriate that we should know (and presumably care) about.

Having said that, I was glad to see today's Doodle by the German illustrator Ramona Ring celebrating the life and work of the German-language poet Mascha Kaléko ...

II.

Kaléko quickly found success as a young poet in Berlin's avant-garde literary scene in the late-1920s and early-30s and her work captures something of the uniquely exhilarating - and uniquely monstrous - spirit of those times, as well as the daily life of ordinary citizens.

Her first collection - Das lyrische Stenogrammheft - was published in the same month that Hitler was appointed Chancellor (January 1933) and was soon subjected to Nazi censorship. Nevertheless, the following year, she published her second book, Kleines Lesebuch für Grosse.

Obviously, it would not have been wise as a Jewish woman to have stayed in her adopted homeland (Kaléko was born in what is now southern Poland) long after this date. For it was not only within her dreams that a storm was brewing. And so, in 1938, she fled Germany and emigrated to the US with her husband and child.

It wasn't until the end of the war, however, that Kaléko finally published her third volume of poetry, Verse für Zeitgenossen (1945). And it wasn't until 1956 that she could finally face visiting Berlin.

She returned to the city again in 1959, when she was awarded the Berliner Kunstpreis for literature, only to turn it down when she discovered that one of the judges - Hans Egon Holthusen, himself a poet and literary scholar - was also a former Nazi and member of the Waffen-SS.

That same year, she moved to Israel, where she continued to write poetry until her death in 1975. 

 

One of my favourite poems of hers is entitled Mein schönstes Gedicht and contains the following verse:

Mein schönstes Gedicht,
Ich schrieb es nicht.
Aus tiefsten Tiefen stieg es.
Ich schwieg es.

Which we might translate into English as:

My loveliest poem,
I didn't write it.
It rose from the deepest depths.
I silenced it.

 

 
Notes

Sadly, Mascha Kaléko remains little known in the English-speaking world and it wasn't until fairly recently that a representative selection of her poems became available in book form. See: No matter where I travel, I come to Nowhereland: the Poetry of Mascha Kaléko, trans. Andreas Nolte, (The University of Vermont, 2010). 
   

Photo of Mascha Kaléko (1933)