Posts featuring Rainer Maria Rilke

Two Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

and I shall stand at its edge: / where there is nothing else, pain once more

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a meditation on aloneness in the form of introspective poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, elegantly translated from the German by Wally Swist. Grappling with the immense and unspeakable, The Solitary and The Lonely One are indicative of the Austrian poet’s diverse repertoire on disbelief and mysticism. Read on and ruminate.

The Solitary

Like one who sailed on strange seas,
so I’m with the eternal natives;
the full days stand on their tables,
but to me the disgrace is full of figure.

A world reaches into my face,
which may be uninhabited as the moon,
but they leave no desire alone,
and all their words are occupied.

The things that I took far with me,
look rare, compared to yours—:
in their great home they are animals,
here they hold their breath in shame.

The Lonely One

No: there shall be a tumble out of my heart,
and I shall stand at its edge:
where there is nothing else, pain once more
and the unspeakable once more in the world.

Another thing in the immensity,
which becomes dark and light again,
one last longing face
in the never-to-be-satisfied,

another utter face on stone,
willing to its inner weights,
that the expanses that silently destroy it,
force it to be ever happier

Translated from the German by Wally Swist

READ MORE…

Visual Noise: Alejandro Adams on Screen Languages

My films and fiction writing come out of notes and ideas that are rooted in this raucous inner life, this biological story urge.

Alejandro Adams is a writer and filmmaker whose pictures include Canary (2009) and Babnik (2010), both about the buying and selling of body parts. (The latter involves sex-trafficking, the former organ-harvesting.) He is also the director of Around the Bay (2008) and Amity (2012).

Though Adams is an Anglophone filmmaker—most readily understood by his audiences in terms of a broadly New World sensibility—it does not follow that his films are Anglophone or monolingual: they comprise substantial Russian, German, and Vietnamese in addition to their English. Of interest to the Asymptote reader in Adams’ work are the complex translation dynamics involved in their trans-linguistic performance and production; Adams writes in English for multilingual casts and asks them to reproduce iterations or facsimiles of certain script segments in their respective languages. Then, returning the recorded dialogue to English in post-production, Adams subtitles with at least as much attention to his cinematic vision as to denotative content. (He discusses this process in more detail in an interview with Vadim Rizov, explaining, “We agreed from the beginning that I’d subtitle it however I wanted—the whole thing is fiction, why should I have any fidelity to translating dialogue?”) I originally recruited Adams for a conversation about the forms and functions of this multilingualism in his pictures, but when we actually spoke, the conversation expanded to include a broader range of visual and sonic signification in narrative cinema.

Rachel Allen (RA): I thought we could start by talking about your second feature, Canary, which features long passages of untranslated (unsubtitled) Russian, Vietnamese, and German. There are also these long, garrulous scenes—I’m thinking of the workplaces especially—of undifferentiated dialogue. The parallel I see between those two kinds of scenes is in their seeming disregard, at least from a narrative or expositional perspective, for the semantic content of language, suggesting that the narratively relevant stuff isn’t in individual propositions. But the dialogue in those scenes is also so specific to its context, and to the individual characters within them, which suggests to me that someone is attending very carefully to the language, even at the level of individual words. I wondered if you see or feel that tension in Canary, between attention to and disregard for language. Or words, maybe: is this a film that sees distinctions between “words” and “language” and “communication”? Does Canary distrust words? (Do you?)

Alejandro Adams (AA): You’re asking if I believe in language, or words, and I’m reminded of another interview I did where the first question was “Do you believe in morality?” It was about one of my other films, but the idea that I don’t put stock in some fundamentally human aspect of existence is troubling. These questions stop you in your tracks, but they also demonstrate that these films are made by someone who obviously can’t handle water cooler talk so let’s go for the throat, no appetizer.

About words themselves and the way words are used to create a texture in the film, the hyper-specific dialogue is extremely scripted—even the overlaps, like the litany of things one can do with a partial organ. Other material is entirely improvised but orchestrated down to how many times an actor touches a child’s toy or picks up a phone. So it would seem that I have all this vision around the sonic impact of human speech, trying to make an office lobby feel as chaotic as the beachhead in Saving Private Ryan, but what I really wanted was silence.

READ MORE…

Translator’s Diary: Vincent Kling

​Like most other translators, I’m plagued by the feeling that it can be done better, though not by me, not here, not now.

This week we bring you the sixth installment of Translator’s Diary, a column by Vincent Kling, winner of the 2013 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. As Kling translates the 909-page  Die Strudlhofstiege by Heimito von Doderer for New York Review Books, he allows us to peek into the translation process, including the anxieties of the translator. You might like to revisit the first, second, thirdfourth, and fifth installments to follow his progress.  

Same Thomism, Different Place: Last month I wrote from Ghent, New York, where ten translators had gathered for a week of all-day workshop sessions. Warm thanks to Shelley Frisch and Karen Nölle for their expert guidance. Now I’m in Straelen, Germany until late June, at the European Translators’ Colloquium, meeting colleagues from all over (Turkey, Japan, Italy, Albania, Canada, and more) and free to concentrate on Strudlhofstiege. That’s just as well, because I’m at a very difficult place, working even more slowly than usual. My colleagues keep saying, “Es wird schon”—“It’ll turn out fine,” but it doesn’t feel that way.

And while I want to get back to specifics of Doderer’s novel, I’m finding more to say about Thomism, since I’m starting to consider the influence of Aquinas more and more central to my understanding of what happens in Strudlhofstiegewhat happens and how it happens.

The Word Made Flesh: To a Thomistic-minded creative writer, every use of words is an incarnation (capital ‘I’ included), an exercise in logos. All creation came about through God’s words: “‘Let there be light’: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3-5). No gap, no sequence, no first and second steps. Logos makes the word and the deed, the name of the thing and the thing itself, indissolubly identical. From the moment God gave Adam the power of naming the animals, a shadow of logos (Genesis 2:19-20); in the rapture empowering Coleridge’s Kubla Khan simply to “decree” a pleasure dome and make it rise; in the all-encompassing mythic vision of the America Hart Crane created in The Bridge; in the hermetic compression of Paul Celan’s late verse—threatening to enter a black hole of linguistic density—the dream of all writers has been to make the utterance the actuality, to make the word flesh. (The opening of John’s gospel is a kind of refresher course.)

READ MORE…