I have been translating this poem, and got stuck on one word, Auen. All the dictionary tells me is that Aue means a river meadow. I must be missing something. The stanza in question goes:
O Mädchen, immerfort von Dir
Erzählen lichte Auen,
Und überall, so deucht es mir,
Könnt ich Dein Antlitz schauen.
I made of it so far:
O maiden, evermore of thee
To tell luminous ???,
And everywhere, so it seems to me,
I could behold thy countenance.
As you can see, I’m badly in need of help with this stanza.
Your translation is not bad at all; what you missed is the German habit of putting the subject after the verb, which is common and quite legal. “Erzaehlen” [sorry, I can’t find the umlaut at the moment] does indeed represent the infinitive “to tell,” but in this case it’s the present form of the verb. Here the verb goes with the plural “light [or bright, or luminous if you will I suppose] meadows.” So it’s
literally, word for word into English: “…of you tell bright meadows”
reformulating word order as it would be done in English: “…bright meadows tell of you.”
Poetry is tricky because there isn;t always necessarily a subject in sight, but if it were a regular prose sentence you’d recognize that the only possible subject is “lichte Auen,” and you’d be able to take it from there.
Und darf ich bitte fragen, wer hat das Gedicht geschrieben?
He’s so in love that everything seems to suggest her. It’s that magical phase of infatuation where Stephen Mitchell translates Rilke to say “The room, the whole springtime, is filled with you.”
The word choice in the original is highly artificial and poetic. I’d use simpler English to bring out the almost hallucinatory imagery.
Oh darling, open meadows
constantly speak of you.
It seems to me that I could
see your face everywhere.
I took a couple of courses with Kenneth Koch. He’s a reasonably well known poet who made his early reputation translating French poetry. From his suggestion list:
Don’t worry about following the meter and rhyme. If you preserve that you’ll probably lose more important things.
Use natural English word order. It’s okay to move words between lines if that’s the way the sentence would read in English.
Think about the original writer’s technique. What methods produce the poem’s effect? Find choices that reproduce that in English.
“Thee” and “thou” are archaic. You” feels more natural to modern English speakers.
One of the easiest ways for a young person to get published is to translate poems.
May I try the other stanzas?
The month of May sang its sweetest song for you;
The world became wondrous lindens
And you inspired the blooms on the garland
That wound around your brow.
Oh darling, open meadows
Constantly speak of you.
It seems to me that I could
see your face everywhere.
Your breath holds every perfume;
Then let me drink its bliss:
I see you in every shrub
That winks with white blossoms.
BTW the Rilke quote is somewhat out of context. I don’t have the original on my shelves right now, but he was saying that love expends people’s vital essence. If memory serves, “Though someone might say, ‘The room, the whole springtime, is filled with you,’ we breathe ourselves out and away…” It’s from one of the Duino Elegies.
Thanks for passing along those suggestions. I agree with them all (especially not trying to reproduce meter & rhyme—that just does not work), except for the matter of the 2nd person singular. Thee and thou are the only words to convey the 2nd person singular in English. They were perfectly acceptable in poetry for several centuries after they were no longer used in ordinary speech.
If I were translating German hip-hop rap or something (don’t ask me why I would do that, this is just hypothetical), I would translate Du as ‘you’, but this poetry is different. The poet deliberately wrote in an old-fashioned German style, and in my translation I was trying to be faithful to his aesthetic endeavor (your advice #3). You may call it “artificial,” but another way to look at it is that poetry does not necessarily have to imitate everyday speech. At least it didn’t for many centuries; it was accepted that poetry is a different use of language and can follow its own conventions. This is why the 2nd person singular was acceptable in English poetry long after no one spoke it any longer—until maybe the middle of the 20th century. Perhaps the current orthodoxy is that poetry has to be just like everyday speech and avoid artifice at all costs. But considering the scope of centuries, that is a fairly recent fashion, and this poet was reaching back to earlier traditions; he wasn’t interested in following current trends.
As for wunderlinde, I suppose linde could be read either way, now that you mention it, as ‘gentle’ or ‘linden’, but the former seemed better to me. The original German may carry resonances of both meanings, but in translation you have to choose just one.