Marjorie Perloff devotes a long essay in Jacket 14 to teasing out the implications of what is on its face a strange statement of Wittgenstein’s:
Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosophie dadurch zusammengefaßt zu haben, indem ich sagte: Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten. Daraus muß sich, scheint mir, ergeben, wie weit mein Denken der Gegenwart, Zukunft, oder der Vergangenheit angehört. Denn ich habe mich damit auch als einen bekannt, der nicht ganz kann, was er zu können wünscht.
I think I summed up my position on philosophy when I said that philosophy really should be written only as a form of poetry. From this it should be clear to what extent my thinking belongs to the present, the future, or the past. For with this assertion, I have also revealed myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to do.
–Culture and Value, 1933-34
(Another analysis of this passage occurs in the final section, “The End of Philosophy,” of a Doro Franck essay on style; Franck translates the last sentence more accurately as “For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do [my emphasis].”) Perloff begins with a fascinating discussion of the problems involved in translating a line of Rilke:
We usually think of the ‘poetic’ as that which cannot fully translate, that which is uniquely embedded in its particular language. The poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke is a case in point. The opening line of the Duino Elegies —
Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus den Engel Ordnungen? —
has been translated into English literally dozens of times, but, as William Gass points out in his recent Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, none of the translations seem satisfactory. Here are a few examples:
J. B. Leishman (1930) —
Who, if I cried, would hear me among the
angelic orders?A. J. Poulin (1977) —
And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic orders?Stephen Cohn (1989) —
Who, if I cried out, would hear me — among the ranked Angels?Gass is very critical of these, but his own is, to my ear, no better:
Who if I cried, would hear me among the Dominions of Angels?The difficulty, as I have suggested elsewhere, is that English syntax does not allow for the dramatic suspension of Wer, wenn ich schriee… and that the noun phrase Engel Ordnungen, which in German puts the stress, both phonically and semantically, on the angels themselves rather than their orders or hierarchies or dominions, defies effective translation. Moreover, Rilke’s line contains the crucial and heavily stressed word denn (literally ‘then’), which here has the force of ‘Well, then’ or, in contemporary idiom, ‘So,’ as in ‘So, who would hear me if I cried out…?’ But the translators cited above seem not to know what to do with denn and hence lose the immediacy of the question. Then, too, denn rhymes with wenn as well as the first two syllables of den Engel, creating a dense sonic network inevitably lost in translation.
She follows this with a discussion of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s translation of William Carlos Williams’s “Between Walls”; only then does she begin considering Wittgenstein. She finishes with two highly unliteral versions of the Rilke poem, the second of which begins: “I hate this place. If I were to throw a fit, who/ among the seven thousand starlets in Hollywood/ would give a flying fuck?” Much food for thought throughout.
Which ranked angel’d hear me if I were to shriek?
Wittgenstein was, as I remember, a patron of both Rilke and Trakl. Like Bertrand Russell, W. seems to have been highly conflicted about his inherited wealth. He gave the money through an intermediary, without personal contact, and I don’t know whether or not he admired the poets’ works. But giving the money specifically to poets was his intention.
Almost the whole first generation of W.’s disciples missed the point of a lot of what he was doing. They went so far as to censor a letter in which he made a sympathetic comment about Heidegger. Toward the end of the PI something like “Perhaps it’s possible that these words of mine will bring light to some brain or another; but of course, it is not likely.” This is usually interpreted as a sign of clinical depression or perhaps some grand existential pose, but actually I think that he was telling us what he thought of his British colleagues and students.
Ha! I like that interpretation.
I like “among the angels’ orders” — which seems oddly not to have been used by any of the translators listed. Is this not the most straightforward translation of “aus den Engel Ordnungen”? I mean my German I ear says, “Engel is dative not genetive becauses it does not have an ‘n’ tacked on to the end of it” but there is ample room for confusion (snoitcerid htob ni) between dative and genetive cases when translating between German and English.
And, how is it “that English syntax does not allow for the dramatic suspension of Wer, wenn ich schriee” — to my ear the English “Who, if I screamed” sounds almost exactly the same — the only thing missing is the blurring of meanings “if” and “whenever” that you get with wenn. And this blurring is immediately resolved by the following word, hoerte. I don’t think I understand what is meant by “dramatic suspention” — does it have something to do with vocal pauses — these are equally present in the English.
I too wondered about the suspension thing, especially since most of the versions she quoted use the same suspension; I gave her the benefit of the doubt because her “as I have suggested elsewhere” implied that there were subtleties that weren’t obvious at a glance but would be clear upon reading her writings “elsewhere,” but maybe I shouldn’t have.
And I agree, “among the angels’ orders” is good.
Wittgenstein, ouch.
“The only way to do philosophy is to do everything twice.”
(And those of us corrupted by Heraklitos at a too-early age turn away in despair….)
I think the first version I ever read of that Elegy was something like: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” It seems like the problem could be solved with something like “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies/ranks/orders/ordinances/ranges of angels” &c. I think English “puts the stress, both phonically and semantically, on the angels themselves” fine with the enjambment, which is actually what happens in Rilke’s poem (and which she doesn’t seem to get, as she quotes it as one line).
I don’t know much about German, but Flemmings’ translation, although a little clunky, didn’t seem bad:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
And Lord, I can’t stand those two “translations” at the end. If the authors are trying to “prove” translation is impossible, well, hey, they succeeded magnificently. I have to say sometimes I think Perloff has been swallowed by structuralism/postmodernism/deconstruction/whatever those crazy hepcat kids call it nowadays, as though she were a goat and it were a boa constrictor. It’s not that she’s a bad thinker per se; she was just engulfed. But I say this as the burnt child of graduate school who takes the long way round anything fireishly theoretical.
I would also make the tired comment that sure, you cannot translate sound effects, rhyme, consonance, dissonance, etc., from one language to another. Granted. That’s a long way from saying translation is itself impossible, which far too many theoretical high-minded people writing about translation seem far too eager to say. All communication is imperfect translation when you think about it — how often do we really feel we understand what another person is actually saying? Modern theoretical critics remind me of someone who is so pleased with the newfound (to them) power of syllogisms they waste your time expecting you to laugh at their silly proofs of how Ray Charles = God.
Bah, I sound grumpy and pompous. A dragonly combination.
Bless you, Moira, your dragonly presence is always welcome here, as are all fulminations against theory run amuck! And that Flemmings version does sound nicely Rilkean. I didn’t particularly agree with Perloff’s approach to Rilke, but I’m always fascinated by detailed discussions of translations.
((blush)) Well, good. Lord knows grad school is enough to drive anyone to be as abstraction-less as Hume’s version of an animal mind (the animal is surprised every day by the sun going up? Did Hume have pets?).
In English, at least, the names of the orders are also the words for the angels belonging to that order. Thus the first (lowest) order is the order of angels, and its members are angels stricto sensu; the second order is of archangels, and consists of archangels, and so on up to cherubim and seraphim, the sixth and seventh orders.
So here’s my translation: “Who, if I screamed, would hear me among the dominions and thrones?”
@JC: but that’s not different in German; it’s just that Rilke, like people frequently do outside angelological discussions, ignores it and calls all of them “angels”. So, for my taste, your version strays too far from what’s there in the German version, without need.
And nobody notices that the original is misquoted? aus den Engel Ordnungen is not grammatical. Google immediately confirms it’s aus der Engel Ordnungen, a genitive construction, “of the angels’ orders”, “of the orders of the angels”, whatever that means. The word order, unlike in English, is obsolete in German, so a deliberate archaism here (which of course fits the meaning). The orders are in the dative, but the angels and their article are not.
Without the archaism, we’d get aus den Ordnungen der Engel. Or perhaps aus den Engelordnungen, but such a compound noun would be stressed on the first part, which would ruin the meter.
I’m delighted to have this interesting thread revived; this time around, what struck me in the post was this:
I thought “Aha, but I’ll bet the Russians handle that well, they’ve got lots of sentence particles!” So I went on a search and was disillusioned:
Крикни я, кто бы услышал меня из ангельских сонмищ?
–Олег Дарк
Кто из ангельских воинств услышал бы крик мой?
–Владимир Микушевич
Если я закричу,
кто услышит средь ангельских чинов?
–Ольга Слободкина
Кто бы из сонма ангелов мой крик одинокий услышал?
— Вячеслав Куприянов
Кто, если вскрикну, услышит меня в построеньях
ангелов?
–Владимир Летучий
Кто, когда крикчал я, меня услышал всё ж из ангельских
рядов?
–Роман Пилигрим
The only one that seems to notice the denn is the last one, by Roman Piligrim, and 1) I don’t like “всё ж” for denn; 2) he’s putting it in the past instead of the conditional, and 3) “крикчал”?? (There is no verb крикчать; it’s a blending of крик and кричать, and WTF, this is Rilke, don’t mess around.)
“Literally ‘then'” is wrong; that’s dann. Denn here expresses that this is a rhetorical stupid question, along the lines of “seriously, who would ever hear me”.
In Russian I can’t come up with anything better than ну, but most likely that just means my Russian isn’t good enough. In FYLOSC I’d bet on па, an apparently very useful word that Russian seems to lack.
And I just noticed that the six translators whose versions I quoted have six different renderings of Ordnungen: сонмищ, воинств, чинов (very Petrine!), сонма, построеньях, рядов.
And чинов makes me think of the tsarist table of ranks: presumably the
seraphimarchangels are mere Collegiate Registrars, like Pushkin’s stationmaster, while thearchangelsseraphim are Active Privy Councillors and have hereditary noble status. [Corrected per comments below; I didn’t study angelology, obviously.]Denn here expresses that this is a rhetorical stupid question
Then ж is a good idea in something like “kto zh”. I’d also bet that angelic ranks precede Peter’s by some centuries.
The orders of angels are first attested in De Coelesti Hierarchia by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite ca. 500 C.E. They were basically accepted as canonical by Pope Saint Gregy about a century later.
Pseudo-Dionysius assigned the common names “angels” and “archangels” to the lowest ranks and made the Hebrew-named cherubim and seraphim the highest. To fill out the nine choirs, he seems to have just chosen a bunch of suggestive-sounding nouns, as there was apparently little to no existing tradition describing (or even indicating the existence of) these intermediate orders.
I meant, the word чин in Russian had been being applied to angels much earlier than Peter appropriated it for his Table.
the seraphim are mere Collegiate Registrars, like Pushkin’s stationmaster, while the archangels are Active Privy Councillors and have hereditary noble status.
You’ve got your angelology backwards: as Brett notes, seraphim are far above mere archangels. The full list, low to high: angels, archangels, principalities; powers, virtues, dominions; thrones, cherubim, seraphim. The first three are traditionally responsible for humans and nations; the second three take care of miracles and the control of the universe generally; and the highest three are the personal servants of God, especially God the Son. Wikipedia.
(ObHat: First three and second three sound fine, but third three sounds bizarre, and likewise with fourth four, fifth five etc.)
You’ve got your angelology backwards: as Brett notes, seraphim are far above mere archangels.
Oops! Reverse the ranks, then. We didn’t learn about these things in Bible class as far as I remember (I don’t even know if Lutherans do angelology).
Catholics do, and yet I didn’t learn anything about this in 12 years. I think since the Second Vatican Council the attitude has been to avoid temptations to put the LOL in angelology.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Pseudareopagite?
I think since the Second Vatican Council the attitude has been to avoid temptations to put the LOL in angelology.
I LOL’ed!
But Rilke stated “The ‘angel’ of the Elegies has nothing to do with the angel of the Christian heaven (rather with the angel figures of Islam)” and (not that I claim any expertise in the question) I don’t think Islam has any conception of angelic hierarchies similar to Christianity.
Ordnungen (plural) is odd here in German anyway. I don’t think I’ve seen it used for groups or ranks before, except in biological taxonomy as the obvious calque of ordines Linnaei.
Ordnung is a technical term in set theory, the English is “order” or “ordering”. Dichte lineare Ordnungen = “dense linear orderings”.
The non-poet speaks:
Were I to cry out, then, who among the angelic orders would hear me?
The non-poet falls into quietude.
Islamic angels are divided into functional classes, but there is no hierarchy among them except for the four archangels Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and Azriel (Uriel to the Christians, the angel of death).
The non-poet, having encountered silence, feels impelled to speak again.
I don’t pretend that my rendition of the Rilke line is good poetry. But it does differ in one detail from the others given. I did not feel constrained to translate wenn as ‘if’. And the reason, I submit, is this. Translating poetry among European languages seems to be a matter of bodily, or perhaps literally, transferring the words and structures over to the other language, then rearranging and selecting until it sounds like poetry. The difficulty of getting Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich right in English is a low-level syntactic one of getting the details of English structure to match the German. Needless to say, this precludes translating wenn as anything but ‘if’.
But if you are translating from languages far removed from English, this tinkering to get the elements to match up is quickly transformed into a task of a totally different magnitude. When translating from Japanese, for instance, (I do not doubt that something similar applies to other non-European languages), you are not worrying about replacing moshi‘s with ‘if’s (although a poet deliberately using moshi might require an emphatic rendition of ‘if’), you are worrying how the entire sense can be put across, possibly using different words, word-orders, and constructions. This frees you from mechanically using an ‘if’ just because it’s there in the original (it probably won’t be) and frees you to consider other options. The translator must virtually rewrite the poem from scratch.
As I said, I do not pretend that my line is a good translation, but I do suggest that it diverges from the other versions precisely by departing from the practice of ‘tinkering’ with literal translations.
In this case at least, that’s a good idea: German has no construction at all similar to were to. The only way to avoid wenn (or falls – “if”, “in case”, without possible connotations of “when”) would be: Schriee ich, wer hörte mich denn…; this word order, by its rhythmic effects, deemphasizes “who” and emphasizes “cry” in a way that were to does not.
(BTW, schriee is about as awkward as it looks. It’s clearly a deliberate archaism, otherwise avoided in favor of the analytic alternative würde schreien.)
German has no construction at all similar to were [I] to
In English it’s a frozen subjunctive II.
German has no construction at all similar to were to. The only way to avoid wenn (or falls – “if”, “in case”, without possible connotations of “when”) would be: Schriee ich, wer hörte mich denn…
Wollte ich schreien, wer hörte mich denn … In the high-register tradition, the subjunctive form of wollen in this example is not understood as meaning “if I wanted to ..”, but rather something more like “if I were to …”
@Stu Clayton: Yeah, I learned (or picked up) that sense of wolte even in high school German. But that was decades ago, and it might have been archaic even then. I think the construction appeared in the translation of Der Herr Der Ringe that a friend bought,* although Tolkien himself did not use English were in that sense.
* Sadly, the copy was defective, with a large part of the text missing and replaced with a duplicate of a previous section.
Agreed on wollte: definitely archaic, but that’s only appropriate here.
BTW, German does not have separate capitalization rules for headlines: Der Herr der Ringe.
I know. My point is that **wäre ich zu schreien and anything similar is completely ungrammatical.
BTW, German does not have separate capitalization rules for headlines: Der Herr der Ringe.
English doesn’t capitalize articles either (not that that invalidates your point, but you might choose another example).
True.
@dm
Re “I am + infinitive” this construction is peculiar to Modern English (or late Middle English), and comes from an original infinitive noun phrase. Compare “ich bin am kommen” in Rhineland German. I know this is not quite the same thing, the idea is that the “preposition + verb” is treated as “preposition + noun”. I suppose the subjunctive is used (in writing!) in statements like “were I to tell you” because (a) “if I told you” could be ambiguous without the rest and (b) it sounds more polished.