Ashes for Breakfast (2 page)

lights go on burning in the tavern at noon.

Deep-fried yellow tints the pavement

flagstone. Cars at a standstill

fade out of view without starting their engines.

And the end of a sign's not quite legible. Now

it isn't dampness that seeps through the ocher and terra-cotta

but terra-cotta and ocher that seep through the dampness.

What commends this to me is that it has so much of the “feel” of Brodsky, what I thought of as the third member of his personal trinity. The tired, almost baffled sentences, worn down to nerve and frazzled bone. Interest, personality, plight, speed of thought: are these not enough—more than enough—to furnish forth a poem, even if the original does have rhymes and bells and whistles? So, I thought, if I could get Grünbein to sound comparably dense and inhabited in English, I would be doing all right by him. Tickling his nostrils with the smoke of a satisfactory olfactory sacrifice.

As I say, Grünbein works in big poems and sequences, but it was not always thus. There are little Polaroids from his young years in Dresden, under the old management. The poet himself may be a little uneasy about these now, but his translator admires some of them very much for their unhindered voice, sprayed out across a page: big vocabulary, correct syntax, and still a sense of something being blurted. The mood of nauseated contempt in, say “All About You,” is admirable, and bound to appeal to the author, himself, once, of a volume, called
Acrimony.
A few phrases:
“einer immerfort gestrigen Politik,”
“an insistently ancestral politics”;
“zwischen Kinderwagen und Scharen räudiger Tauben, die einen Wirbel machen beim Futtern,”
“between the baby carriages and the flock of mangy pigeons that fly up in a sort of haute volée gobbling”;
“das übliche Kino des Status Quo Minus,”
“the usual BBBBBB films”;
“schlenderst du einfach ein wenig weiter zur nächsten Kreuzung, sehr langsam,”
“but instead you just gander on very slowly to the next crossing.” There are differences—inevitably, there are differences—but I like to think what I offer is harmonious and possible, with its bird words and assonances. As I say, what I'm anxious
not
to do is offer something exotic, wooden, pointless, and dead.

That poem came out of the mid-eighties, “from the Eastern part of my life,” as Grünbein inscribed my copy. Then, there is a thirty-nine-part sequence called “Variations on No Theme” (the title is pure Brodsky, the switch of geography likewise!) from the early nineties.
“Variationen auf kein Thema”
is Grünbein's “A Part of Speech,” thirteen-line sections, attractively set in and out, little essays, memories, a lexicon of modern life, autobiography in a solvent of metaphysics,
Betrachtungen.
I've had a go at the whole thing, all thirty-nine steps, but I couldn't pretend to you that they're all equally good or equally finished. In fact, the question of “finish” in poetry translation is what
macht mir zu schaffen
—does my head in, I would say in English. In fiction it's easy. I put the original away, and fiddle with the English to the point where I start to undo my corrections and put back things I had before. Then it's done. But what to do with a poem? If I “take it away,” and work at it in the same way, until every line has just enough material and just enough music and just enough interest, then surely it would become one of my own poems. And it might be a long way from the original. Is the secret, then, merely to reduce its exposure to me, “undercooking” it, as it were? Possibly—but that's precisely my objection to a lot of poetry translations, that they are undercooked. They might be glimmerings and beginnings of poems, but full of clumsinesses and dullnesses; no English poet would dream of offering something so “half-baked,” so
halbgar,
so intermittent. But it has to be in some more verifiable relation to the original. It doesn't merely face the reader; Janus-faced, it has to be looking back over its shoulder at the German, too. It's a real problem, and I don't know what the answer is. Lowell, whom my editor encouraged me to imitate, wrote in his introduction to
Imitations:
“I have tried to write live English and to do what my authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America,” and: “I have been almost as free as the authors themselves in finding ways to make them ring right for me.” But then the poets Lowell translated were, with one or two exceptions, not his living contemporaries, and he was not offering the first or principal way into their work for an English readership. There may be a little security to be had from printing the facing German texts, but that always cuts both ways, I feel, as a reader. You can't settle to anything; the original faces down the translation. Also, German comes a long way below French, Spanish, Italian, on the list of feasible foreign languages: only just above Russian, I think, in my more pessimistic moments. Anyway, on to a couple of sections of “Variations on No Theme.” First an early memory, the infant Grünbein:

What a bloody little leprechaun you once were,

    A wrinkled imp with knotted

Arms and legs. Bluish skin,

    As though kicking for your life,

Early concerned with your impending death.

    And it all began so unconsolably,

With a piercing yell, when the world

    Moved into your lungs with a rattle.

With a shock (“so much light!”), a slicing

    Of deft scissors and knives

Into the only flesh that wasn't you.

    The umbilicus was like the thread,

The Fates' love of sundering from the get-go.

I'm uneasy about my repeating “with” in a slightly different sense in lines 7 and 9, and I'm very pleased with the sudden shift of idiom, “love of sundering from the get-go,” but other than that I have nothing much to confess to, here.

The situation is very different with the other “Variation”:

Back in front of the telephone, under the cheese cloche,

    The cosh, the Alexander Graham Bell jar,

No sooner was the door shut, you froze, a cynosure,

    A dead ringer for passersby on the sidewalk,

Staring at the dial-pad, digits

    Like the stellar magic forest

In the night sky … decimal mandala

    Tempting you by its availability

Sudden nearness, whispers, betrayal,

    Egad, love, even—all of it seemingly

Hardwired, a sort of “I'll call you” life.

    The numbers no sooner punched

Than a voice explodes in your brain.

If the previous “Variation” was dutiful, this one is wildly interesting! It begins with the very first words, “Back in front,” and carries on through little rappish rhymes and raffish portmanteaux (“cosh” and “cloche”; “the Alexander Graham Bell jar”), through extravagant diction (“cynosure”) and puns (“a dead ringer”), the bizarre ejaculation “egad,” and a further pun in “punched” at the end (although the very best thing, for my money, is the phrase about the “‘I'll call you' life”). It is in an interesting relation to the German. I don't know why this happened like that to this poem. Perhaps it was the single-sentence rush of the thing; perhaps it began with the cheese cloche, and turned, as is in the nature of cheese, into a nightmare.

Another thing Lowell says in his introduction to
Imitations
—which seems to have become a sort of half-controversial Bible to me!—is this:

Boris Pasternak has said that the usual reliable translator gets the literal meaning but misses the tone, and that in poetry tone is of course everything. I have been reckless with literal meaning, and laboured hard to get the tone. Most often this has been
a
tone, for
the
tone is something that will always more or less escape transference to another language and cultural moment. I have tried to write live English, etc. etc.

This, like a lot of Lowell's critical prose, is strangely self-annulling—the tone, everything to get the tone, then (of course) not the tone, but, hey!, some other tone!—but I still think there's a germ of truth and interest and encouragement here. I'm thinking of one of the newest of Grünbein's poems that I've tackled—which, nevertheless, dates from the previous millennium: in addition to my other difficulties and humiliations, Grünbein writes new poems rather faster than I can get around to translating his old ones!—a brisk and typically stylized “autobiography” called “Vita Brevis.” Once again, Brodsky is a sort of godfather here, he
steht Pate
to the translation: as before with “A Part of Speech,” now with a fortieth birthday poem called “24th May 1980.” Both “Vita Brevis” and “24th May” have a kind of adventurous swagger about them. I love the long lines with the big caesuras:

I saw the zero beribboned, and the colossus ground down by dwarves.

The born deserter: sooner die than take aim at the heart.

I puked out of tanks, cried myself to sleep in barracks.

Shaved my skewed grin over a bucket, under canvas.

I did in my knee at soccer, but my soul fared much worse.

By way of comparison, here is a bit of Brodsky, so you might see where I—and perhaps Grünbein, too, for that matter—came by some of that sound:

From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly

width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.

Quit the country that bore and nursed me

Those who forgot me would make a city.

I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles,

worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter,

planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables,

guzzled everything save dry water.

Otherwise, just a couple of observations on the beginning and end. “In a rotten nutshell” isn't as compressed as
“Kurz und bös,”
but it tries to atone by at least containing two words or allusions to
Hamlet,
which I hope have some bearing on the speaker of the poem, and the GDR: the thing about “something rotten in the state of Denmark” (Paul Celan used wonderfully to speak of “something rotten in the state of the D-mark”!), and living in a nutshell, “and count myself king of infinite space.” Likewise, I can't come up with end rhymes like Hawaii and
dawai
—the poem is in rhymed quatrains,
abab
—but by way of compensation I offer the power and pith of English vernacular speech: “something exotic
before you hand in / Your dinner pail.
What say the Hawaiian beaches?”

Here, anyway, is the history of my apprehension, and then of my
bruk zaghaft
little shoots of translation.
Honi soit.
Finally I had the feeling I've come so far, I can't now turn back, which, as Kafka said, is the point that must be reached.

MICHAEL HOFMANN

London, June 2004

FROM

GRAUZONE MORGENS

(1988)

EINE EINZIGE SILBERNE BÜCHSE

Sardinen plattgewalzt

zwischen den Gleisen &

an den Seiten quillt

überall Sauce raus rot

wie Propangasflaschen

                                         (& ziemlich

bedeutungsarm) sie allein

unter sovielem Strandgut

im Landesinneren hält schon

was dieser Morgen an Schönheit verspricht.

A SINGLE TIN

of sardines flattened

between the tracks &

the orange sauce

squeezed out the sides

the color of propane bottles

                              (& pretty

lacking in significance) alone

among so much flotsam & jetsam

so far inland keeps

whatever this morning promises

       by way of beauty.

TRILCE, CÉSAR

An manchen Tagen wußten wir einfach

         nichts Bessres zu sagen als

                       ›Gleich passierts‹ oder ›Geht

                   schon in Ordnung … ‹ gelangweilt in

überheizten Bibliotheken wo unsere Blicke

         bevor sie glasig wurden wie

                        Rauchringe schwebten

                   unter den hohen Kassettendecken

                             alexandrinischer Lesesäle. Die

                                        meisten von uns

         wollten fort (nach New York oder

                             sonstwohin): Studenten mit

komisch flatternden Stimmen

         gescheiterte Pläne umkreisend immer im

                             Aufwind und manche vor

                   melancholischer Anarchie süchtig

                        nach neuen Totems, Idolen

                              gestriger Revolutionen und dem

                                             zum x-ten Mal

akupunktierten Leib der Magie. Man kam

         ziemlich billig wenn man den ganzen Tag

                        dort verbrachte (besonders

                  im Winter) zwischen den

                                      kurzen Pausen allein