die mit dem roten Haar
mit der langen Zunge
die mit dem Rübenmesser
mit der kranken Lunge
Reidel doesn’t capture the snark of “die mit dem.” This isn’t a major issue, but he also slightly messes up the syllabic relationship at the last line, which, following Bernhard’s scheme, should be one longer:
her with the red hair
her with the long tongue
her with the turnip knife
with the bad lungs
Replace “bad” with “rotten,” (or “sickly”), and the rhythm flows better, the grotesque character of the scene is more potent, and the original word, which literally means “sick,” is equally well rendered.
If Reidel’s translations occasionally sound rushed, the larger issue is a question of philosophy. In the past year, there was a literary spat surrounding a Man Booker International Prize-winning translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, by Deborah Smith. In the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks wrote that an overly creative translation might “wind up with a voice that may be fluent, but that sits uneasily with the content.” In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Smith countered that “because languages function differently, much of translation is about achieving a similar effect by different means.” I wish Reidel had risked a more native English voice throughout the book, and especially in “The Insane The Inmates.” When Bernhard’s language is plain and direct, however, the translations live up to the original. This, from “Bible Scenes,” is electric:
At the cemetery wall
I seek
The departed
With my hazelnut stick I beat
On the heads of the graves
I discuss with one of the corpses
The evening which is my brother
Humility is both Reidel’s greatest strength and his worst enemy in these translations. He would have done well to borrow a bit of Bernhard’s arrogance, the Zorn that allowed him to dismiss Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as the “philosopher of the petite bourgeoisie.” Bernhard is not the kind of writer you can approach with deference. Making any translation more difficult is Bernhard’s ambivalent—not to say hostile—relationship with the German language. In Extinction, Bernhard’s narrator writes that “German poets have extremely primitive tools,” that the language sounds “painful,” that “even English” is more beautiful and that German is “lacking in any musicality.” Of course, he wrote those words in a rhythmically vital, unsentimental prose. It fits with Bernhard’s sense of humor to simultaneously reject his own language and set up all his future translators for failure. It’s still worth pursuing a definitive version of the Collected Poems.
Jeffrey Brown is the editor of VAN Magazine. His work has also appeared in Slate, INTO, and Electric Literature. He lives in Berlin with his husband.
