Reviews

concept-term ‘translation’ – together with its predictable baggage

of STs and TTs – is too hampered by the weight of tradition and
assumption to embrace the creative work now demanded of it. How
might we translate ‘translation’ for the generative future envisioned
by Scott? Reading Translating Apollinaire spurs us to imagine other
possibilities: transmedialization, transposition, generative rewriting,
translational creativity, transformational translation . . .
Susan Harrow
University of Bristol
DOI: 10.3366/tal.2016.0240

Hans Magnus Enzensberger: New Selected Poems. Translated by David

Constantine, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Michael Hamburger, and
Esther Kinsky. Pp. 400. Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2015. Pb. £15.

Now in his eighty-seventh year, Hans Magnus Enzensberger enjoys

international stature as the grand old man of German letters. His
political essays and the positions he has taken as a public intellectual,
especially his oft-cited letter of 1968 in the New York Review of Books
explaining his decision to abandon a position at Wesleyan University
in the USA and decamp to Cuba, have in the English-speaking world
sometimes overshadowed his reputation as a poet of wit, verve, and
depth. The current volume should go far to bring Enzensberger the
poet to the attention of those lacking a solid command of German.
The title of this volume alludes to the collection Selected Poems,
which appeared in 1994 with translations by Michael Hamburger and
Enzensberger himself. All 71 of those poems are included in the New
Selected Poems, together with material from three subsequent collections
of Enzensberger’s poetry published in English, here presented with
originals and translations on facing pages: 22 poems from Kiosk
(translated by Michael Hamburger and Enzensberger in 1995), 25 from
Lighter than Air (translated by David Constantine and Enzensberger in
2002), and 12 from A History of Clouds (translated by Martin Chalmers
and Esther Kinsky in 2010). Although these and other translations have
helped develop appreciation of Enzensberger in the English-speaking
world, the present collection is to be welcomed for bringing together
in a bilingual edition 130 poems from the more than 1,000 for which
Enzensberger was responsible over a 40-year period, from 1960 to
2003. It thus allows English-speaking readers to savour Enzensberger’s
journey from angry young man to elderly sage. This new collection

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also includes Michael Hamburger’s original introduction to the 1994

Selected Poems.
The first poem, taken from Landessprache, 1960, introduces a
pugnacious young Enzensberger with its opening salvo: ‘Was habe ich
hier verloren | in diesem Land, | dahin mich gebracht haben meine
Älteren | durch Arglosigkeit?’ Hamburger renders these lines ‘What
am I doing here, | in this country | to which my elders brought me
| intending no harm?’ There follows an indictment of the country
as a ‘Musterland, | Mördergrube, in die ich herzlich geworfen bin
| bei halbwegs lebendigem Leib’: ‘model country | murderers’ den
into which I’ve been heartily thrown | half living still, half alive’.
The final eponymously titled poems from Die Geschichte der Wolken,
2003, dispense both with the first person (except as the general plural
‘wir’/‘uns’) and with political polemics. Instead, they continue the sense
of ‘lateness’ noted in Hamburger’s Introduction with regard to the
1991 Zukunftsmusik (Music of the Future), both in a personal sense of
‘one man’s time running out’ and in a political and cultural dimension.
Thus the first of the twelve ‘meditations’ deploys anthropomorphic
imagery to link clouds to humanity, then undermines this association.
Here the translation is Esther Kinsky’s:

Dann wieder prahlen sie Then again they boast

mit eitlen Künsten, verfärben sich,
äffen alles, was fest ist, nach.
Ein Spiel ist ihre Geschichte,
unblutig, älter als unsre.
Historiker, Henker und Ärzte
brauchen sie nicht, kommen aus
ohne Häuptlinge, ohne Schlachten.
of vain feats, change colour,
ape all that is solid.
A game is their history,
unbloodied, older than ours.
They don’t need historians,
henchmen, medics, make do
without chiefs, without battles

In between the earlier and the most recent works, one finds a
broad array of poems of varying lengths and genres. Selected Poems
included the long and complex ‘Sommergedicht’ (‘Summer Poem’)
and ‘Die Frösche von Bikini’ (‘The Frogs of Bikini’), the latter a
meditation of 400 lines on the threat of nuclear apocalypse as it
affects the human psyche. The additional verse in this new volume
includes more short poems, many of them in the region of twenty
lines. Here Enzensberger continues addressing his habitual concerns:
the inequitable distribution of wealth, the promise and disappointment
of science and technology, and the corruption of mass media. The
lyrical voice, though, assumes a less aggressive tone than in some of

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the earlier verse, modulating trenchant social and political critique

with the poet’s characteristic wit and, perhaps, a certain resignation.
The selections from Leichter als Luft, for example, reflect the title’s
suggestion of levity, though often with a sombre undertone of life’s
transience. The title poem begins with the assertion ‘Besonders schwer
| wiegen Gedichte nicht’ (‘Poems | do not weigh all that much’),
then, after five strophes that glance at tennis balls, helium, St Elmo’s
fire, natural and transcendental numbers, various kinds of smoke,
‘das Ich’ (‘the first person’), and the Zeppelin, concludes: ‘Vieles
bleibt ohnehin | in der Schwebe. | Am leichtesten wiegt vielleicht, |
was von uns übrigbleibt | wenn wir unter der Erde sind’: in David
Constantine’s version ‘Much in any case | hangs in the balance. | Least
of all perhaps | weighs what remains of us | when we are under the
ground.’
Although Enzensberger has translated into German writings from
many different languages, English is the only one into which he
has translated his own verse, most notably the entire 33-poem cycle
Der Untergang der Titanic (The Sinking of the Titanic, 1978), of which
13 items, chosen by the poet, appear here. His early translations
of modern American poetry, by William Carlos Williams among
others, played a critical role in his own artistic development, and his
renderings of Edward Lear and Hilaire Belloc are linked to the verbal
playfulness in many of his poems. Of the translations in this volume,
Enzensberger’s own are the least literal. His indulgence in poetic
licence prompts the admonition in the acknowledgements that readers
should not construe as ‘mistranslations’ the significant discrepancies
between Enzensberger’s versions and his German originals. These
deviations are more prevalent in the earlier translations than in the
ones added for this volume. Some of Enzensberger’s own English
versions simply drop lines that were present in the German text.
For example, the English version of ‘Restlicht’ eliminates the four
concluding lines in which the poetic subject, the ‘ich’, is suddenly
expanded to a plural ‘wir’ (‘we’) by the presence of a ‘sie’ (‘she’).
The German original thus opens up the ending to encompass a
shared experience of what is earlier described as ‘die von Minute
zu Minute | kleiner werdende Zeit’, ‘the minute by minute |
diminishing time’, whereas the English translation concludes with the
lines ‘In the half-light before I go to sleep | I feel no colic, no real
pain.’
Sometimes Enzensberger’s translations change specific details. He
does not hesitate to add explanatory terms for a non-German
audience, for example the specification of ‘Berlin’ in ‘Die Frösche

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von Bikini’, where ‘auf einer staubigen Bank | am Mariannenplatz’

becomes ‘on a dusty bench | Berlin, Mariannenplatz’; or ‘in Friedenau,
| dem Stadtviertel, wo er wohne’ appears as ‘in Friedenau, his own |
quarter of Berlin’. But in ‘Automat’ (‘Vending Machine’) from a 1980
volume, he not only converts the four Marks (‘vier Mark’) into ‘four
dimes’ but repeats it twice more, so emphasizing the erasure of the
human in economic transactions more strongly than in the German,
where there is no repetition.
In ‘Nur die Ruhe’ (‘Keeping Cool’), a whimsical vision of doomsday
preachers, the ‘belvedere across the valley’ will resonate with non-
Germans more than the ‘Bismarck towers in the mixed forest’
(‘Bismarcktürme im Mischwald’), just as they will understand ‘they
have returned their hired cars in good time’ much more readily than
the German ‘Rechtzeitig haben sie ihre Fernseher abgemeldet’ (‘They
have de-registered their televisions on time’). But other authorial
alterations cannot be explained so easily. In the German, once the
‘Weltuntergang’ (‘end of the world’ – the three syllables more emphatic
than Enzensberger’s monosyllabic ‘Doom’) fails to occur, the faithful
return to buy watering cans (‘eine Gießkanne’), whereas in the English
translation they must content themselves with toothbrushes. In the
concluding lines, the tardy apocalypse still appears to its English
prophet a ‘tranquilliser of sorts, a sweet consolation’, but without
the additional statement from the German that it tastes like manna
(‘mundet wie Manna’). On the other hand, Enzensberger’s ‘Day of
Reckoning’ for the German’s more neutral ‘wenn es so weit ist’ (‘when
the time comes’ | ‘when things get that bad’) intensifies the apocalyptic
vision of the doomsday preachers.
Although none of the other translators in this volume goes as far
as Enzensberger himself in altering the verbal texture, they have
made adjustments to the anglophone reader’s cultural horizon. For
example, in the opening lines of ‘Prästabilierte Disharmonie’ (‘Pre-
established Disharmony’), with their reference to violence against
unwanted foreigners, Constantine substitutes ‘asylum-seeker’ for
‘Tamil’, sacrificing ethnic specificity to political clarity: ‘For every man
smashing his beer bottle | on the asylum-seeker’s head’ (‘Für jeden,
der seine Bierflasche | auf dem Kopf des Tamilen zertrümmert’). And
in other poems ‘deutsch’ appears as ‘English’ (language) or ‘British’
(citizenship). In the poem ‘Sich selbst verschlückende Sätze’ (‘Self-
demolishing Speech-Act’) ‘Deutsch | beteuert er, spreche er nicht’
becomes in Enzensberger’s hands: ‘He protests that he does not speak
English.’ In ‘Gutes Zureden’ (‘Persuasive Talk’) we find for ‘Bei jeder
sich bietenden Gelegenheit | deutsch sein oder links oder maskulin’,

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Hamburger’s ‘At every possible opportunity | to be British or Left or

masculine.’
In general, though, specific references to German society seldom
occur. The poem that opens the selections from Kiosk includes
an authorial note urging translators to replace the words ‘the
German Federal Republic’ with the official designation of their
own country, a request that Michael Hamburger has rejected,
arguing: ‘this would call for a translation much more free than
the one provided. It is the reader who is invited to try out that
substitution in her or her mind, with appropriate modifications of
terminology and reference.’ Even without this invitation, the nature
of Enzensberger’s targets inevitably elicits such substitutions from
readers.
For translators into English a bigger challenge than the precise
references to German culture and society comes from Enzensberger’s
predilection for wordplay. Two poems in the volume exploit the
evolution of the lexicon and the demise of archaic vocabulary as
reflections of social change: ‘Verschwundene Arbeit’ (‘Vanished Work’),
from Zukunftsmusik (1991; translated by Enzensberger), and ‘Klinische
Meditation’ (‘Clinical Meditation’), not in the original Selected Poems,
translated by Michael Hamburger. The former celebrates terms for
antiquated or traditional professions: ‘Lumpenhändler’ (‘rag-and-
bone-man’), ‘Waidmüller’ (‘woad-miller’), ‘Pfragner’ (‘corn-chandler’),
‘Schlözer’ (‘rushman’), ‘Zedler’ (‘beekeeper’); and concludes with
memories of the ‘ice man’. The latter poem enumerates
various obsolete ailments: ‘Stockflüsen’, ‘Herzkuchen’, ‘Vapeurs’, ‘der
Englische Schweiß’, and others. Michael Hamburger renders these as
‘chronic coryza’, ‘caked hearts’, ‘vapours’, ‘the English malady’ – none
of which can keep pace with ‘progressive pathogens’. Then, in one of
those twists favoured by Enzensberger, the poem ends with an ironic
dismissal of modern medicine, ultimately helpless in the face of death:
‘Triumphantly science bends | over the whitest of beds | and mumbles
its prayers for the dead’ (‘Triiumphierend beugt sich die Wissenschaft
| über das weißeste aller Betten | und murmelt ihr Totengebet’).
In this poem the translator must sometimes choose between clinical
accuracy and register or richness of sound. For example, whereas ‘der
englische Schweiß’ commonly referred to an infectious disease, ‘the
English malady’ denoted a neurological disorder. And while ‘gout’
might approximate ‘die Mauke’ better than ‘the scurvy’, the disyllable
provides a better ending to the line metrically. The English equivalents
of ‘Drudenzopf’ tend to refer to Poles, less evocative of arcane science

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than witches. Hamburger captures the facetious tone by inserting the

jocularly archaic ‘the’ before some of the terms (‘the witches’ braid’,
‘the scab’).
Enzensberger also enjoys experimenting with the compounds so
common in German. For those puns that simply cannot be conveyed
in English, readers with a modicum of German can savour the original
on the facing page. Enzensberger’s translation of the poem ‘Fehler’,
in which he transposes the final misspelling (‘feit’ for ‘fehlt’, meaning
‘is missing’) to the title, giving ‘Eror’ instead of ‘Error’, provides
countless examples: ‘Geburtsfehler und Fehlgeburten’, constructions
not captured by ‘a miscarriage and a congenital defect’; or the repeated
‘ver’ prefix in the sixth stanza: ‘Fehler um jeden Preis zu vermeiden, |
das wäre verfehlt. | Man gesteht ja, räumt ein, | daß man sich vertan
hat, | verschrieben, verrannt’ (‘To avoid mistakes at any cost | would be
wrong. We concede, admit, confess that there have been | certain slips,
howlers, goofs and gaffes.’ Here the aggregation of synonymous nouns
achieves an effect akin to the piling up of ‘ver-’ verbs in the German.
Other poems confront the translator with series of compound
adjectives. In ‘Die Reichen’ (‘The Rich’) Hamburger finds an apt
solution to the sequence ‘zahl-, stein- und segensreich’ with his ‘rich in
numbers, good heels, and blessings’, where the implied ‘well-heeled’
approximates the colloquial German ‘steinreich’. In the ‘Hymne an
die Dummheit’ (‘Ode to Stupidity’) the series ‘stock-, stroh- und
hundsdumme Dummheit’ – literally ‘stick-, straw-, and dog-dumb
stupidity’ – presents colloquial synonyms for ‘very stupid’ without
English equivalent. Hamburger uses the first two, more for their sound
than for their meaning, then substitutes a different animal for the
third, recognizing that Anglo-American readers would resist the notion
of canine stupidity: ‘stick-, straw-, goose-brained stupidity’.
In many of the examples above, the historical proximity of
German and English invites translators to meet a different challenge.
Constantine’s rendering of ‘Grünes Madrigal’ (‘Green Madrigal’)
succeeds in retaining the rhymes and metre in an idiomatic diction.
The third strophe, ‘Die Gräser, wie unverschämt | sie jede Autobahn
sprengen | wuchern und wühlen und drängen!’ thus becomes ‘And the
grasses, how shamelessly | they explode every motorway, | rampant,
insistent, burrowing away’. The final strophe, ‘Was heißt schon
Becquerel, Co2 , | Krytogamen fühlen sich wohl dabei. | Rührend, die
Sorge ums Knabenkraut. | Was ist mit unserer eignen Haut?’ appears
as ‘All the talk about becquerels and CO2 : | cryptogams do very nicely,
thank you. | Wild orchids: sweet, the way we fuss | But what about us?’

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The translation manages the rhyme, and in part the metre, without
sacrificing any of the original lexicon.
New Selected Poems, building on the earlier Selected Poems, presents
a generally well-rounded sample of the early-middle and late
Enzensberger as poet. Some of the many shorter poems from his
Geschichte der Wolken (A History of Clouds) could have balanced the
rhapsodic tendency of the final ones included here, for example,
the first strophe of the eleventh in the series:

Über Fehler sind sie erhaben. They are above mistakes.

Daß eine von ihnen mißraten wäre,
wird so leicht niemand behaupten.
Was da in einer Minute
niederprasselt,
sind Millionen von Graupeln;
Jede einzelne ist perfekt.
Kein Blitz, der dem andern gliche.
Und das alles ohne Gehirn!
No one will be quick to claim
that one of them is misshapen.
A minute-long shower
sends down millions of sleet flakes.
Every one is perfect.
No two flashes of lightning alike.
And all this without a brain!

Although this is one of the elderly poet’s voices, other poems from
Die Geschichte der Wolken reveal more of the lexical energy and humour
marking his whole career, still present even now in reflections on aging
and mortality.
Most of the translations adhere to Enzensberger’s consistently
ordinary diction – except, of course, in texts where he ventures into
the realms of mathematics, science, and technology. Among the few
exceptions are Constantine’s ‘ghostly currents crepitate in your hair’
for ‘Ströme knistern im Haar | geisterhaft’ from ‘Geräusche’ (‘Noises’).
Surely ‘crackle’ for ‘knistern’ would reflect the original’s register more
appropriately? A few words will send American readers scrambling for
the dictionary: ‘skint’ for ‘armes Schwein’ (literally ‘poor pig’, but why
not just ‘poor devil’?), ‘Ludo’, and ‘plimsolls’ for ‘Turnschuhe’, for
which Hamburger in a later poem uses the more widely recognized
‘trainers’. And finally in ‘Von oben gesehen’ (‘Bird’s Eye View’), a
poem celebrating the poetic process, Hamburger strikingly turns the
simple, everyday adjective ‘aussichtslos’ (‘futile’ or ‘hopeless’) into
the colloquial British noun-phrase ‘a mug’s game’. Here, however, the
translator is slyly obtruding himself into the poem, perhaps to make
a statement about literary translation as a creative act, for A Mug’s
Game is the title of Hamburger’s own memoir, published in 1973. Thus
he invites readers of the English version to ponder the poem as a
rumination on the dual arts of writing poetry and translating it:

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Schwindelfrei Immune to dizziness

wie ein alter Dachdecker, like an old roofer,
behende, von denen, agile, not noticed much
die auf dem Boden by those who have their feet
der Tatsachen bleiben, on the ground of facts,
nicht weiter beachtet, to conjure
zu zaubern

freihändig, without holding on,

mit geübtem Griff, with a practised grasp,
wenn alles gut geht, when all goes well,
hoch oben high up
ein unscheinbares Wunder to bring off
zu vollbringen, an inconspicuous miracle,

ja, das ist, yes, that,

aufs Ganze gesehen,
aussichtslos,
gewährt aber hie und da
schräge Blicke nach unten,
in kleinere Abgründe,
Zimmer,
seen all in all,
is a mug’s game,
but here and there allows
slanting glances downward,
into smaller abysses,
rooms

wo, je nachdem, where, as the case may be,

staubsaugende Frauen women with vacuum cleaners
oder ächzende Freier or moaning lovers
auf ihre Art, in their way,
doch mit rührendem Eifer but with touching zeal,
ankämpfen contend with
gege die Schwerkraft. the force of gravity.

The bird’s-eye view, the agility, the practiced grip, coalesce into the
magic (‘zaubern’) and miracle of the translator’s craft attested by
this volume. Although the translator’s work, like the poet’s, remains
inconspicuous, little noticed, in opening up new literary vistas it
enables readers to flee, however, briefly, the ‘ground of facts’ defining
their own linguistic and cultural space.
Cecile Cazort Zorach
Franklin & Marshall College
DOI: 10.3366/tal.2016.0241

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