Nearly fifteen years ago, our MFA cohort at Drew University was asked to read an essay for a seminar run by poet-translators Ellen Doré Watson and Mihaela Moscaliuc. It was Robert Bly’s “The Eight Stages of Translation,” first published in The Kenyon Review (1982), a roughly ten-thousand word piece in which Bly narrates his process for translating a Rilke poem from Sonnets to Orpheus. It offers an incredible behind-the-scenes view of a poet in the act of translation, and I can remember our professors springboarding off his approach to explore the nuanced and complex craft of translating poems.
A few years ago, I returned to some of those MFA readings: Bly’s essay, and a book of Ingeborg Bachmann poetry (my mentor Aracelis asked me to read) translated by Peter Filkins and published in 2006 by Zephyr Press. And a couple things happened from this confluence: first, I realized I was in love with one of Bachmann’s poems (“Paris”) in which I had to translate myself or no longer breathe; the other, was a more complicated awareness: in the roughly 10,000-word essay Bly references twenty-three artists and translators by name (all of them, men).
The below essay is my ongoing publication of a revision of Bly’s work. It will also end up being approximately 10,000 words, and come in eight parts. Of course, it will share my process of translating Bachmann’s poem “Paris” from her 1953 collection, Die Gestundete Zeit, while already holding in hand a translation of her work. There are some new voices I plan to add to this translation dialogue, including: Hélène Cixous, Audre Lorde, Fanny Howe, Walter Benjamin, Federico García Lorca, Tess Gallagher, Kenneth Rexroth, Jorge Luis Borges, Masanobu Fukuoka, Gautama Buddha, and Jane Hirshfield.
David Crews
Shaftsbury, VT
2024
[Revision:] “The Eight Stages of Translation” by Robert Bly, in dialogue with a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann
In this essay I will not actually offer a revision of Robert Bly’s process or approach to his stages of translation, so much as I will use them to add more voices and ideas to the dialogue of translation. It was now nearly fifteen years ago when our MFA cohort at Drew University was asked to read Bly’s essay for a seminar run by poet-translators Ellen Doré Watson and Mihaela Moscaliuc—a work of maybe 10,000 words—in which Bly offers an analysis of his process and craft translating sonnet “XXI” by Rainer Maria Rilke in part one of Sonnets to Orpheus. The essay, titled “The Eight Stages of Translation,” was first published in Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring, 1982) of The Kenyon Review and later as a book in 1991 by Ally Press, St. Paul, Minnesota.
The most interesting aspect of this essay is its human authenticity. Bly’s tone and approach hold the wonder of a pupil and an exactitude of a teacher. His paired down prose almost sounds at times like a how-to manual. He begins, as he states early in the text, by picking “virtually at random” a poem of Rilke’s to translate for the essay. He then workshops the poem at a German seminar to exact a literal translation. The eight stages unfold thereafter, working through revision and draft, changing lines, rhymes, sentence structure, asking every question possible in order to investigate the heart and artistry of Rilke’s poetic vision.
Bly translates ideas and asks questions across and about: language, narrative, gender, time (season), culture, nation, artistic voice, vision, evolution, history, religion, philosophy, meaning, ecology, [poetic]form, syntax, idiomatic speech, memory and music, tone, mood, age, bias, sensibility, class, sequence and order, word connotation. In his analysis, he references the following artists (by name) in order of appearance: Whitman, Rudolf Steiner, Vallejo, Robert Frost, Pound, William Carlos Williams, Harry Martinson, Pope, Homer, Catullus, Shakespeare, Brecht, Henry James, Neruda, J.B. Leishman, Donald Hall, Robert Hass, Hardie St. Martin, James Wright, Jimenez, Owen Barfield, Al Poulin, J.F. Angelloz.
What to do with a text like this that has, by chance, come into one’s life. Some believe certain voices should not come with us into our shared future. It is a matter of progress, evolution, it is a reckoning. And so I offer this dialogue, (I believe in revision).
1
Bly’s first stage dives into finding a literal translation of the poem at hand, though I could not pick just any poem. It would be reckless to attempt a translation of any piece of art that didn’t move me deep in my core, and so the idea for this essay did not come to fruition until I found a poem that was truly singing to me, some fifteen years after initially experiencing it.
I first read “Paris” by Ingeborg Bachmann in an edition of collected poems, translated by Peter Filkins, and published in 2006 by Zephyr Press. It was MFA, and my mentor Aracelis Girmay had asked me to read Bachmann’s work (which I did, for the most part). At the time, however, my mind was consumed with other voices and so the poem, as poems are wont to do, simply grazed my consciousness for a fleeting moment. Who would have known it could return to me more than a decade later to utterly expose the world.
The poem itself comes from Bachmann’s first collection of poetry published in 1953 titled, Die Gestundete Zeit. Filkins translates this as Borrowed Time. My forties, I had always said, was the time when I would relearn German. I had studied the language throughout high school into college, accruing enough undergrad credits to consider it a minor, and even one summer (when I was close to real fluency) went abroad to the Universitat Konstanz. Though, I was a fool in my youth. And spent the majority of my study that summer in an Irish pub drinking hefeweizens and weaving yarns in the only language of which I had any command. “We need to lose the world,” Hélène Cixous writes, “to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is. Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and immortality we carry.”
Does not life present its own contrivances. The collected poems by Ingeborg Bachmann that Filkins puts together includes the German on the left side of the page, and the English translation on the right. What better way to descend into the dark memory of a forgotten language:
Paris
Lashed to the wheel of night
the lost ones sleep
in the thunderous passages beneath;
but where we are, it’s light.
Our arms are full of blossoms,
mimosa from many years;
goldness showers from bridge after bridge
breathless into the stream.
Cold is the light,
colder yet the stone before the portal,
and the basins of fountains
are already half empty.
What will happen if we, homesick
and dazed with windblown hair,
remain here and ask: what will happen
if we can withstand such beauty?
Lifted onto the wagon of light,
and waking, we are lost
in the alleys of brilliance above;
but where we are not, it’s night.
What drew me to this poem I cannot quite say. Though I will try here to speak of the Erotic, of Bewilderment, of the Duende, and those artists who first shared these ideas with me. I will use them to explore what it means to feel entranced by a poem, the inherent music in it, no matter the language. And I will show how works of art that don’t quite materialize for us, on a personal level, can still be inspiration to pour one’s self into a revision of that very art. (Translations especially.)
To say the act of translation likens itself to the building of a bridge at this point in my life would almost feel trite. And still, bridges are here in this moment. They are essential to translating Bachmann’s poem: the speaker and her companions, the speaker and the lost ones, the speaker and the reader, the reader and the translator, the translator and the poet, the reader and the poet and the translator, the lost ones and the city of Paris, Paris now, Paris then. This is what Audre Lorde writes of in the Erotic, what comes in the power of “sharing deeply any pursuit with another person,” how it “forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and how that lessens the threat of their difference.”
What is not shared is the wild ambiguity of poetry. The narrative in Bachmann’s poem is slight, a moment full of possibility. A speaker comes to a bridge. We know very little about her, and I only think her because Bachmann does not give any clue in context as to the gender of this individual (so I default). She uses “we” at times, which could be a collective human sensibility, though I think here, literally, she may have a companion with her. They are in Paris. It is nighttime, or near morning, and they are walking. Below, she notices people living under a bridge, the lost ones she says. They are below in darkness, in the thunderous passages beneath, while she and others are above in the light. She knows, or at least knows now, these two worlds are stark in differences—one always in light, the other in perpetual darkness. There is a simplicity to the poem’s energy that almost feels offensive, as it hovers very quietly between literal and metaphoric possibilities. Very plainly, the speaker uncovers an age-old class struggle: those who have, and those who do not.
Thirty-five bridges cross the river Seine in Paris proper, the eight-mile span starting at Pont National upstream to Pont du Garigliano. Twenty-three of the city’s bridges, from Pont de Sully near Notre-Dame to Pont d’Iéna at the Eiffel Tower, are designated part of a world heritage cultural site with Unesco. The oldest bridge in Paris, Pont-Neuf (“new bridge”) at the tip of Île de la Cité, was constructed in the seventeenth century, the first bridge built entirely of stone. It also features pedestrian walkways. Bachmann does not locate readers to any of these specific bridges. Only the poem’s title sets the place. Though I feel convinced I could one day find this very spot of which she writes. I vowed that before I shared my own translation of this poem, I would first find this very bridge.
2
One of the more complicated aspects of creating art, especially the writing of poems, is that, often, there will be more people who don’t connect with any one poem than do. Perhaps, that’s what makes finding specific poems that speak to us so special. It can also be the case that one might feel moved by a poem—by its inherent energy, mystery, music—and still feel like meaning is not entirely within grasp. This possibility is an important creative energy and often leads to the long dialogue of artists in conversation with other artists. Robert Bly claims even a great poem should be translated freshly every twenty years. It’s rooted, he suggests, in “an awareness of how fast the spoken language changes.”
Bly’s second stage of translation attempts to find the problems in meaning that arise in studying a literal translation of a poem. Though, the more likely scenario for a reader like me is that I will find a translation that does not quite feel authentic imaginatively. Could this not be the very creative energy needed to, as Bly suggests, attempt a fresh translation of a piece of art. Already having a translation available, what I will refer to here as the “found” translation, makes the process a bit more complicated. It adds tunnel vision or raises the question of how close to the original the translation comes: in vision, tone, language, form. It also reminds me that no one is an island and that this world of art, creativity, expression, and translation is a long evolutionary lineage of artists in continual dialogue with other artists who have come before them.
The translation seminars I experienced at MFA helped highlight how complicated the art of translation can truly be. For a translator must consider not just navigating content and form, but the inherent vision and bewilderment in a work of art. I would argue Bewilderment, in the sense of what Fanny Howe writes of it, is essential for works of art that last the ages. It comes in many forms including: mystery, tension, pathos, and music. From here, a translator too must account for the age-old axiom of what’s lost. In this sense, a translator's job is to figure out what's the least amount to lose.
Professor Ellen Doré Watson cautioned us as student-translators to continually try and stay as true to the original poem whenever possible, how this would help preserve the artist’s real intent. (And I remember believing in the heart of that endeavor.) Walter Benjamin enters the other side of the dialogue: “No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove in likeness to the original.” Bly’s intuition falls somewhere in between. His fidelity to deep questioning through the continual deconstruction of text, ideas, inherent structures of language and culture keeps his task of translating Rilke close to the original artist’s vision. If one compares his translation to those of other translators, however, it is also clear creative risks have been taken.
How could they not: for it is poetry. Fanny Howe writes, “One definition of the lyric might be that it is a method of searching for something that can’t be found.” If a lyric poem in its inherent nature means to ultimately capture that which is ineffable, then a translation of a poem makes this bridge ever more tenuous. For Bachmann’s “Paris,” I wonder about place, setting, tone, and vision. These questions directly correlate to the extended metaphor of light and night, details on weather, the qualities that come in a poem of witness, and ideas of Beauty. The questions that arise beg for exploration which, in my humble opinion, proves an authentic reason to strive for a fresh translation.
Filkins opens, “Lashed to the wheel of night,” lashed through the verb geflochten. It sets a stark and somewhat abrasive feel to the poem, and immediately I wonder if the speaker who found herself in this scene through what seems like happenstance, would declare a thought such as this with what sounds like great authority. The poem’s narrative, for the speaker and those with her, has a sort of quiet quality to the moment. It’s like they don’t have anywhere to be, like they’re wandering. I don’t believe she was planning to stop at this very bridge, and I don’t believe she planned to confront such a complicated moment of empathy and pathos.
The time of night (or day) matters as well if one is to consider how this scene affects the speaker. Night is bookended by twilight and dawn and, depending on when the speaker and her companions stop on this specific bridge at this specific moment to come upon these lost ones, would greatly affect their response to the scene. Is this a night on the town? (It’s Paris.) The good tension in poems of witness come from a speaker caught in a similar sort of limbo as that, or who, is being perceived. It comes as a very subtle tension and enters the poem here almost without the help of language. “Mentally,” Howe writes, “an effect precedes its cause because the whole event needs to unravel in order for it all to be interpreted.”
The repetition of night both in the beginning and end of the poem make it a vital use of extended metaphor. It is tricky too because one could very easily associate night with nature. Perhaps these lost ones could be considered by some as victims of natural occurrence. And still, if anyone would truly understand the great history of all hitherto class struggle, it would be Parisians. (The Pont de la Concorde was built during the French Revolution using stones from the demolished Bastille and, according to the bridge’s engineer, Rodolphe Perronet, it was done so that “the people could forever trample on the old fortress.”)
References to weather come into the translation and they cause me to wonder about setting and mood. Two of these references include: "goldness showers from bridge after bridge" (line 3, stanza 2) and later with "windblown hair" (line 2, stanza 4). The verb showers takes me to rain and a romantic image of falling light, like a painting by Seurat or J.M.W. Turner. I wonder how this feels against the 1950s realism of street art with which Bachmann’s sensibilities seem to share. The line also proves a vital detail that could help locate this Paris poem, for prepositions shape time and space. If one would agree it’s not possible to look beneath a bridge upon which one is standing, then the speaker must be standing on one bridge looking down to another. Or, at least from the side. That means, this poem took place where at least two bridges are within sight of one another. Of the thirty-five bridges, aforementioned, is it possible from one particular spot to see light falling bridge after bridge spanning the Seine? The use of stream at the end of the second stanza also interests me. Is it possible this poem doesn’t even take place on one of famous thirty-five bridges that cross the river Seine? And if not, why use stream? (There is weight to a river.)
The third stanza opens with an image of light being cold, and the stone before the portal being cold. I wondered about the word, portal. While the word is both specific and precise in this context, capturing architectural composition (being an approach to a tunnel or bridge), it also feels as though it says more than the absence it means to describe. Bly suggests tone is not the ear turned outward toward human speech but the ear turned inward toward the complicated feelings the poem is carrying. Does portal get to the Bewilderment (or limbo) of this speaker or to the harsh poverty to which she is noticing? Likewise, in the first stanza are there really passages under the bridge? That word, with all its syllables, sounds like rooms or thresholds into other dimensions and takes me out of the cold realism of Bachmann’s moment.
Essentially, the scene: the speaker, and whomever she is with, are walking along the river Seine and stop at a bridge to see homeless people living under it. The bridge must be a suitable place for cover, and I am guessing it is made of thick stone to give shelter from the elements. It also, as the poem alludes, seems close to one of Paris’s famous water wells. (More on this later.) If it is literally night, then the light falling onto this bridge and the others most likely proves humanmade. The scene has a weight to it, the weight of witness and realization. Only, the realization does not offer resolution. The tone and the words must reflect the tension of this limbo. I then think of windblown hair, because if there is one thing that will get me to not stop when I am walking—it's wind. If we are to imagine the speaker stopping at a bridge in a quiet moment of contemplation, would that happen on a cold, windy night?
A major shift happens at the fourth stanza where this moment of contemplation between those who have and those who do not causes the speaker to turn inward. She asks a very deep question: "what will happen / if we can withstand such beauty?" Withstand, (my mind races). I like the idea of the word in the sense that the speaker feels at a standstill in the moment, in this scene, and yet all these decisions on words make me curious to workshop a literal translation of Bachmann’s poem. Fanny Howe writes, “The same demystification can happen with the close reading of a text; sometimes a surface reading seems to bring you closer to the intention of the poem." (By the final stanza the speaker actually states that they are lost as well.)
3
Bly’s third stage is a return to the literal translation to find where meanings were lost. This, however, feels too intellectual too early for me (especially, when translating lyric poems). The inherent energy of a lyric poem resides in the music and one should proceed with caution that the music never be compromised by an inherent need for meaning and understanding. Lorca proclaims the Duende’s arrival means a radical change in forms. This suits the task of translation (forms, I hear).
This proves the stage when a translator must feel a sense of mystification by the original poem, even in a language not quite familiar. “Bewilderment,” Fanny Howe writes, “is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.” She continues, “It breaks open the lock of dualism (it’s this or that) and peers out into space (not this, not that).” To get closer to Bachmann’s poem, I feel the urge to be lost in it. My memories of German are hidden in dark rooms. My mind enters these poetics of space and grasps at the air. Every so often an echo returns. (That’s what Benjamin suggests a translation is: an echo.) I must return to the poem’s inherent music. Bly claims that no one can translate well from a poem he hasn’t learned by heart, that to put the poem in one’s mind and memory is to feel its music and rhythms first in the body. (I memorized this poem months before imagining this essay), found myself reciting it to anyone who would listen—friends, fieldmates, my folks on the phone three states away.
“At certain points,” Fanny Howe writes, “wandering around lost produces the (perhaps false) impression that events approach you from ahead that time is moving backwards onto you, and that the whole scenario is operating in reverse from the way it is ordinarily perceived.” Is it possible the translation percolating in my body (this music) has already been written, have I perhaps already stood upon this Paris bridge. How have I been lost?
Paris
Aufs Rad der Nacht geflochten
schlafen die Verlorenen
in den donnernden Gängen unten,
doch wo wird sind, ist Licht.
Wir haben die Arme voll Blumen,
Mimosen aus vielen Jahren;
Goldnes fällt von Brücke zu Brücke
atemlos in den Fluss.
Kalt ist das Licht,
noch kälter der Stein vor dem Tor,
und die Schalen der Brunnen
sind schon zur Hälfte geleert.
Was wird sein, wenn wir, vom Heimweh
benommen bis ans fliehende Haar,
hier bleiben und fragen: was wird sein,
wenn wir die Schönheit bestehen?
Auf den Wagen des Lichts gehoben,
wachend auch, sind wir verloren,
auf den Straßen der Genien oben,
doch wo wir nicht sind, ist Nacht.
[This is an ongoing publication, please check back for updates.]
TEXTS
“Bewilderment” by Fanny Howe (The Wedding Dress, University of California Press, 2003); Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann translated by Peter Filkins (Zephyr Press, 2006); Die Gestudnete Zeit by Ingeborg Bachmann (R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1953, printed in 1983); In Search of Duende by Federico García Lorca, translated by Christopher Maurer (A New Directions, 1955, reprinted 1998); “Poetry in Translation” by Tess Gallagher (A Concert of Tenses, University of Michigan Press, 1986); The Eight Stages of Translation by Robert Bly (Ally Press, 1991); The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, translated by Masanobu Fukuoka and Larry Korn (New York Review of Books, 1978'; The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard (Beacon Press, 1958); “The Poet as Translator” by Kenneth Rexroth (The World Outside My Window, A New Directions, 1987); “The Task of the Translator” by Walter Benjamin, translated by Harry Zohn (Illuminations, Schocken Books, 1969, reprinted); Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Hélène Cixous (Columbia University Press, 1993); “Uses of the Erotic” by Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider, Cross Press, 1984, reprinted 2007); “Word-Music and Translation” by Jorge Luis Borges (This Craft of Verse, Harvard University Press, 2002)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ingeborg Bachmann was a poet, dramatist, essayist, novelist, writer of short stories and opera. She was born in Klagenfurt, Austria on the 25th of June, 1926. She died on the 17th of October at the age of 47 in Rome, Italy.