Justin Chen
Lit. in Translation
10/10/02

Deutsche Gefangenschaft der Todesfuge

Celan’s hauntingly morbid poem, “Todesfuge,” utilizes a repeated theme with subtle variations to develop a sense of passion and terror within an essentially unchanging structure. The shocking lines that break free every now and then from the confines of the poem’s sing-song cadence mirror the terrified cry of a Jew within the inescapable walls of the concentration camps during the Holocaust. An accurate translation, then, must be able to express this sense of helpless passion seeping out of every line—a kind of “Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte, / in der betäubt ein grosser Wille steht”—while still paying attention to all the other, more concrete problems of translation. The translation in the course reader largely succeeds in this daunting task.

One important formal characteristic of any poem, including this one, is the meter. While the original German mostly utilizes lines with five stresses, the translation already breaks from this pattern in the first line (which is repeated four times throughout the poem) by providing a line with only four strong beats. While this might seem to be a significant departure from the original, it nevertheless seems to work in the English, for a strong sense of rhythm is established without sacrificing the literal meaning of the German text. The translation in fact sets up a sort of triplet rhythm, with one strong beat followed by two weak ones: “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening…” I would argue that the number of stresses in the line is not quite so important as preserving the overall rhythmic cadence, which the current translation does manage to do.

To retain the single soft beat from the feminine adjective ending in “Schwarze” (using musical terminology again, more of a duple than a triplet figure), the translator has several rather unsatisfactory options: “blacker,” “blackest,” “coal-black,” or “blackened,” to name a few. Of these, the latter seems most appropriate, as it remains truest to the original word. (The other choices seem to present the milk in comparison to other objects that are not present within the poem itself.) Thus, the line could be translated as “Blackened milk of day we drink it at evening.” The advantage of this translation is that a strong stress now lies on “Blackened” (just like in German the emphasis is on the first syllable of “Schwarze”) as opposed to “Black milk of daybreak,” in which the stress is less clearly on any particular word, and this translation also contains five strong beats, like the original.

Another instance in which the German-English translation runs into problems with cadence is in the haunting refrain that ends the poem but also appears throughout: “dein goldenes Haar Margarete / Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith” (which incidentally very much contains a “triplet” feel with emphases on “gold,” “Haar,” and “re,” followed by “asch,” “Haar,” and “mith”—further validating the translation’s switch to a four-footed first line as discussed above). The nominative adjective endings again lend the lines a lilting rhythmic quality that is difficult to reproduce in English—this time, it is not really possible to add a similar suffix to “golden” and “ashen” to reach the appropriate syllabic content, and thus the translation uses simply, “Your golden hair Margareta / Your ashen hair Shulamith.” However—and this is where the remarkable acuity of the gradual transition to German words comes in—by the end of the poem, the translation reverts to the original “dein goldenes Haar Margarete / Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith.” The untranslatable quality of Celan’s meter is therefore preserved as the poem slips into the rhythmic cadence of the German original without investing new meaning through translation. This switch also thrusts the poem squarely back into the format originally intended by Celan—that insistently repetitive and defined structure described above out of which the passionate horror of the Holocaust struggles to escape.

Of course, this discussion brings us inevitably to the question of the largest liberty taken in the translation—that is, the gradual replacement of English translations with their German originals as the poem progresses. While this technique is generally rejected (correctly) for not fulfilling the true task of translation and for assuming too much linguistic versatility on the part of the reader, in this particular case, the fugue format of the poem goes a long way toward to alleviating these misgivings. Most importantly, with the exception of the word “Deutschland,” most of the German words that are introduced as the poem progresses are first presented in a translated form earlier. Nor does the switch from English to German occur suddenly—different words or phrases are gradually added in, taking advantage of the poem’s repetitive fugue format. Furthermore, the parallels between most of the German and English are unmistakable, making it difficult to argue that the German becomes incomprehensible to the average reader—some of the German words used in the translation are close cognates to their English translations (Haar/hair), while others are words already common to the speaker of English (Meister/master, found in the American Heritage dictionary, and Deutschland/Germany). And finally, as in the case of the “dein goldenes Haar Margarete / Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith” couplet, or “der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland,” awkward attempts to match the German cadence seem to falter in comparison with the strength of Celan’s original verse.

Perhaps the largest question that remains, then, is whether this trick of the translation somehow imbues the German language with a sense of evil, for as the German (quite literally—the German man) in the poem grows more aggressive, so too does the translation’s use of German phrases grow more overt. Yet I would argue that this sort of secondary effect may actually be appropriate to this particular poem, in which Celan’s complex relationship to his native tongue emerges achingly from his verse. His early turn, “er pfeift seine Rüden herbei / er pfeift seine Juden hervor,” seems to subtly suggest the dehumanizing nature of German syntax with those two slight prepositions, “herbei” and “hervor.” And in the one true rhyme of the entire poem, “der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau / er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau,” the specific rhyme that Celan chooses conjures up images of blue-eyed Aryan oppressors who, stereotypically, are also known for being precise and methodical (genau), just as the rhyme itself is within the context of the poem. In retaining this crucial rhyme, then, the translation acknowledges Celan’s understanding of his own use of the German language, and it attempts once again to capture the restrained formal qualities of “Todesfuge” that make its underlying message about the atrocities of the Holocaust all the more frightening to a reader of German, English, or both.