Blue Hydrangea / Blaue Hortensie. By Rilke, and me.

"So like the last bit green in artists' paint pots ..."

 

This is a painting of Marie-Hortense, Cézanne's wife, painted by the artist in 1877. According to a lecturer I heard at the Rilke Society in Wolfenbüttel in 2009, Rilke is referencing Marie-Hortense, and this & other paintings of her, in his poem Blaue Hortensie - Blue Hydrangea, first published in Neue Gedichte - New Poems, in 1907. Our single blue hydrangea is still out in our garden, has been out since we got back from Scotland on 18th July, but has the look now of blossom fading fast. This plant was given to us as a present by Petra Bridstrup, a long-time English student of mine, when we had a big garden party in 2008. Let's have a look at & listen to Rilke's Blue Hydrangea, in my own English translation:

     So like that last bit green in artists' paint-pots 
   are these here leaves, dry and coarse and raw
   behind the flowers' umbels, whose blueness
   isn't from the petals but's reflected from afar.

   Reflected inexact and washed with tears
   as if it wants to lose it in its turn,
   and like in writing paper, old and blue
   violet is in them, and grey and yellow too.

   Washed out as if from out a child's apron 
   with which nothing more will happen, no longer worn:
   how we feel the shortness of one small life.

   But suddenly, the blue seems to renew
   itself among the umbels, and then you see
   a touching blueness cheer before the green.

I know that with my choice of those 'umbels' I'll be making no friends for myself, particularly amongst the anti-elitism brigade. Screwed-up my chances of getting on an A-Level Comparative Literature course, haven't I? Like, W.T.F's an umbel? Rilke chooses the word 'Dolden' in line 3 & 13 of the original. While this is definitely more frequently used German lexis today than umbel is in English, it is also a word that sounds simultaneously clumsy & beautiful in the mouth, at least to non-native German speakers, & I wanted to capture that clumsy prettiness in the translation. 'Blossom' wouldn't do this, & hydrangeas when in blossom are past the stage of having 'buds', so ... umbels it had to be, a word I didn't know until today. The OED defines an umbel as, "a flower cluster like that of cow-parsley with stalks springing from a common centre to form a flat or curved surface.'' Cow-parsley is one of those wild flowers I've often seen on walks, but never known the name of. 
And here's the blue hydrangea from our back garden: 

   
Why does the OED use cow-parsley as an example to help the reader understand what an umbel is, and not hydrangeas? Reflecting on that OED umbel definition, I'm thinking it's not too good: I'm not really seeing what cow-parsley shares in terms of form with a hydrangea. Have other recent translators of the New Poems avoided the umbelliferous trap all together when translating Blue Hydrangea? Rilke translations are a world unto themself, almost as complex as umbels -- which good ones have you read? - please post me! -- but for a full book trans. of the New Poems, you could go for:

* Joe Cardora's forthcoming translation, pub. by Copper Canyon Press, out November of this year.

There are however outstanding translations out now that you can get from the Scottish Poetry Library -- anyone else out there like me enjoying the wonderful European loan service -- or which you can buy. More on this most hottest of topics soon.

Stephan Heym readings & the Weakness of Worthiness

(In the 1920s the banqueting hall of Hamburg's Literaturhaus -- location for the Heym reading last Saturday -- was used for Ausdruckstanz - expressionistic dance. No Ausdruckstanz in evidence at the Heym reading, sadly.  This is Hans-Ludwig Boehme's awesome photo of Arila Siegert dancing in Dore Hoyer's audruckstanz cycle 'Afectos humanos', and I recognise Mr Boehme and/or his descendants as the copyright holder of this image.)

What do you get when you put three Left party members of the Bundestag in front of microphones for 80 mins. to read excerpts out the life work of one of the GDR's most famous literary dissidents, Stephan Heym, who'd be 100 this year, if he were still alive? You get a lot of earnestness, you're a bit better educated at the end of it, but you certainly don't get many funnies: ''There was no wrecks and nobody drownded, / Fact, nothing to laugh at at all.'' (Marriot Edgar)

To all citizens of Scotland, & Scots in the diaspora, (post you can comment on)

Pilkington Jackson's Bruce statue at Bannockburn: did Pilkington know that Bruce was a thug?

 have any of you not yet read Andy Wightman's The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who owns Scotland and how they got it (2013)? If not, you really should, attentively, in its entirety. By the term 'Citizens of Scotland' I mean all those currently resident in Scotland, irrespective of whether or not these people have got permanent resident status, or whether these people are asylum-seekers or people born in Scotland, whether they're living off benefits or going out to a paid-job everyday. If you argue in detail for intelligent, low-cost policy like Wightman does, then you don't waste your time supporting or enforcing stupid, high-cost policy, like over-policing borders – apparently in Salmond's future models we'll still be paying for an over-policed UK border – or persecuting minorities who can't be squeezed into the template of Mrs & Mr Normal. Wightman's is the first book I've ever read on public policy that's electrified me. He campaigns for diversifying Scottish land-ownership – our current pattern is the most feudal, most concentrated in western Europe – and taxing speculation on urban & rural land, so that people who want to get up & do something with their hands & minds get rewarded. Rather than rewarding those who happen to have the hundreds of thousands spare to invest in chunks of land, do nothing with it and enjoy returns of up to 200% – value added by the economic activity of normal workers, i.e. us – for that doing of nothing.

To all citizens of Scotland, & Scots in the diaspora, (no comments version)

Pilkington Jackson's Bruce statue at Bannockburn: did Pilkington know that Bruce was a thug?

have any of you not yet read Andy Wightman's The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who owns Scotland and how they got it (2013)? If not, you really should, attentively, in its entirety. By the term 'Citizens of Scotland' I mean all those currently resident in Scotland, irrespective of whether or not these people have got permanent resident status, or whether these people are asylum-seekers or people born in Scotland, whether they're living off benefits or going out to a paid-job everyday. If you argue in detail for intelligent, low-cost policy like Wightman does, then you don't waste your time supporting or enforcing stupid, high-cost policy, like over-policing borders – apparently in Salmond's future models we'll still be paying for an over-policed UK border – or persecuting minorities who can't be squeezed into the template of Mrs & Mr Normal. Wightman's is the first book I've ever read on public policy that's electrified me. He campaigns for diversifying Scottish land-ownership – our current pattern is the most feudal, most concentrated in western Europe – and taxing speculation on urban & rural land, so that people who want to get up & do something with their hands & minds get rewarded. Rather than rewarding those who happen to have the hundreds of thousands spare to invest in chunks of land, do nothing with it and enjoy returns of up to 200% – value added by the economic activity of normal workers, i.e. us – for that doing of nothing.

Cold Country - my next book?

Kaltland -- or Cold Country, a translation that even those of you out there not much into your German might have got -- is the book I'd like to translate next. It's the hidden story of what happened to ordinary Germans during reunification. Or, as the books editors write in their foreword, it's a story of dislocations, of seeing through & beyond a polarised debate:

"One group prefers to remember, with tears in their eyes, their GDR of shiny-happy kid’s TV-programmes, while another group remains unremittingly furious about the Socialist Unity Party state, and the Stasi terror. The West Germans have, for their part, largely accepted that they don’t need to remember the social and cultural conditions in their Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), because they were ‘the winners’, and the bigger Germany today is still the same state in which they grew up. This error has been made possible by the marginalisation, from the start, of the dislocations of the post-reunification period, which have been marketed as collateral damage. Damage which, in any case, seems largely to occur on the ‘territory joining the parent organisation'. (This is the standard German legal terminology to describe the new states, which made up the former GDR. The German word is Beitrittsgebiet.) Massive violence against asylum-seekers, leftists, homosexuals, people with disabilities and the homeless was one part of these dislocations, as were the mass redundancies of women in paid work, who had to go ‘back to the kitchen.’ Add to this the Boer-like mentality of West-Administrators, drawn by the the bait of the ‘Bush Bonus’ (A sizeable salary bonus for civil servants from West Germany, paid for relocating to the new, former East German states). Add the often downright criminal decisions of the receivers administering former state institutions and enterprises, the versatile, widespread petty fraud enacted against gullible New-Citizens, the use of young unemployed people to clear contaminated military land, the exploding human-traffic in girls and women from Eastern Europe, and a violent black-market in Russian weapons. Just to mention a few examples."

(My own translation from the foreword written by The Editors, Karsten Krampitz, Markus Liske & Manja Präkels. Pub. by Rotbuch, 2011. I refer to the German law of quotation for my right to quote from this, my own translation.)