Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann

Translating at the Limits of (Another) Language: New Translations—and, Never Before Published Poetry—of Ingeborg Bachmann

Peter Filkins. Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann. Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2006. 644 pages.

Lilian Friedberg. Last Living Words: The Ingeborg Bachmann Reader. Intr. by Dagmar C. G. Lorenz. Copenhagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005. 363 pages.


In April of 2006, Poetry magazine published an all-translation issue, which includes Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon’s translation of Semezdin Mehmedinovic’s “Teeth Marks on the Apple.” In his translator’s note, Hemon writes: “It was easy for Robert Frost to say that ‘poetry is what is lost in translation.’ The great poet did not move much, was privy to what seemed to him genuine American language and experience, and did not need to see beyond home.” Ingeborg Bachmann is a poet whose work has often been accused of being “lost in translation.” This particular great poet, unlike Frost, moved frequently (from Klagenfurt to Berlin to the United States to Frankfurt), was privy to a horrific and unstable postwar experience, and lived in lands whose identities were permanently altered by violence. Bachmann’s work has not flourished in translation, but her legacy in Germany and Austria includes postwar literary stardom—her picture appeared on a 1954 cover of Der Spiegel. After that she was engaged to appear at Harvard for conferences on postwar literature, and appointed to the poetry chair at Frankfurt University in 1959. Given these successes, not to mention an enthusiastic critical reception of Die Gestundete Zeit and Anrufung des Grossen Bären, her two published books of verse, it is difficult to understand why her poetry never took hold in English form, as Celan’s or Enzensberger’s did. But Bachmann’s writing, more so than Celan’s, roots itself in what appears to be the abstract; much of it seems to test the most famous statement in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Bachmann wrote with those limits in mind—and she attempted to give language to all those unnamed places of fear, guilt and nightmare that uniquely plagued the German consciousness after World War II. The problem of a translator, then, would be to translocate, to borrow a term from Paul Celan, that particularly German experience into a new time period, country, and language.

English translations of Bachmann’s poems appeared for the first time between 1959 and 1962, in various anthologies, edited and translated by some of this century’s finest translators, including Michael Hamburger, Walter Kaufman, and Jerome Rothenberg. None of these men, however, took it upon themselves to translate an entire volume of Bachmann. Her poems—typically “Fall ab, Herz,” “Paris,” and “Herbstmanöver” and “Nachtflug,” from Die Gestundete Zeit, and “Curriculum Vitae” and “Nebelland,” among others, from Anrufung des Grossen Bären—continued to appear in various English language anthologies and journals. But it was not until 1986, thirteen years after her death, that a collection of Bachmann’s poems was translated and published in English, by Mark Anderson, who has also translated the work of Thomas Bernhard. That volume—In the Storm of Roses: Selected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann—is, indeed, a selection of poems, mostly from Bachmann’s first two volumes. Anderson’s work is difficult to compare with Filkins’, for it has been out of print for several years now.

In fact, Darkness Spoken, published in 2006, is the second, expanded version of Filkins’ Bachmann translations. In 1995, Filkins’ Songs in Flight: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann was published by Marsilio Press. Zephyr Press, the publishers of Darkness Spoken, has given Filkins a rare opportunity to showcase a revision of his previously published work. In addition, Darkness Spoken presents many of Bachmann’s poems in their very first English translations, but it also includes poems that have never before been published in English or German. Filkins accessed the Bachmann Archive in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, and there he found many of Bachmann’s unpublished poems. Most notable of them are those written in 1962 and ’63, when Bachmann was hospitalized in the aftermath of her break-up with Max Frisch. These 103 poems are the written record of Bachmann’s personal grief; many of them do not succeed as poetry, but they never delve into the navel-gazing, narcissistic compassion that bad confessionalism often does. Instead, these poems, which Bachmann’s family gave Filkins permission to translate and publish in 2000, demonstrate a capacity for grief that yields true insights into not only Bachmann’s situation, but the situation of suffering. In “Tot ist alles” (Dead is everything), for example, Bachmann begins with a syntactically commutative first line: “Tot ist alles. Alles tot” (Death is everything. Everything is dead.) The poem yields, and supports, the first line’s assertion more and more as it progresses, most strikingly in its third stanza (excerpt cut...)


Here, suffering, which Bachmann refers to as a “Todesfest,” has been given the objective correlatives of oil, salve, vomit, gasps and hemorrhaging—all on a bed. Death is everything.
Most striking of these poems are the shorter lyrics, those that present a single, unlikely image, statement or juxtaposition, such as in “Trauerjahre” (Sad Years).


The poem begins in media res, and continues in a manner that is, at its worst, elliptical and mysterious. At its best, this poem, and others like it in this newly-published set, represent an entire new style in Bachmann’s oeuvre—a style that uses crisp and simple images to effect a sort of mythic resonance.
As to the quality of these translations, it is interesting to note that Filkins’ initial published attempt—Songs in Flight—did not receive good reviews. Renowned critic and Bachmann enthusiast Marjorie Perloff questioned, in a review published by the Denver Quarterly in 1995, “just how much German this poet-translator knows.” Lilian Friedberg, who won the 2001 Kayden Translation Award for her own translations of Bachmann’s prose and poetry, was more specific in her criticism. In a 2001 article in The German Quarterly, Friedberg focuses on just how well—or how badly—the historicity of Bachmann’s poem “Nachtflug” (Night Flight) is reflected in Filkins’ work. Her cross-reading of the original with the Filkins translation—the only available English version of the poem in book form—aims to provide an answer to the question I posed earlier: Why has Bachmann’s poetry failed to find an audience with English readers? Friedberg asserts that Bachmann’s historical context is “a constructive element of the oeuvre,” and that that particular element has not been preserved in Bachmann’s poetry auf English.
By offering so much criticism of Filkins’ translations, Friedberg, also a translator of Bachmann, has raised the stakes considerably in regard to the reception of her own work. Green Integer’s Last Living Words: The Ingeborg Bachmann Reader, published in 2005, includes a selection of Bachmann’s fiction and poetry—all translated by Friedberg. Last Living Words cannot compare with Darkness Spoken in terms of comprehensiveness or annotative material, but a comparison between the choices these two translators make should help to determine who of the two is best suited to the task of reviving Bachmann’s English legacy. More importantly, a closer look at these two books will answer the question: Do we finally have a successful English version of Ingeborg Bachmann?

Yes and no. A close reading of these translator’s respective efforts in a single poem, “Curriculum Vitae,” from Invocation of the Great Bear, indicates that neither Filkins nor Friedberg have brought out all of Bachmann’s best qualities. “Curriculum Vitae’s” appraisal of the night—and humanity’s inherent inability to evoke words that describe the night—reflects on Wittgenstein’s statement, "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen" ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent").

In translocating the poem to contemporary, pedestrian English, “The night is long,” Friedberg alters the poem’s phonetic elements, as well as its syntactic tension. The most obvious formal gesture Bachmann uses in “Curriculum Vitae” is the envelope—the stanza begins and ends with the same line. As Bachmann writes it, the lines both end on the word Nacht (night). Filkins preserves Bachmann’s syntax, while Friedberg casts the line into a more conversational, plain-style, “The night is long.” In doing so, she eliminates the line’s inherent tension, which arises from placing the modifier first. And more, Friedberg’s translation eliminates the echo of Heinrich Heine’s Der Doppelganger (“Still ist die Nacht”). The loss of the Heine reference amounts to another loss—that of the poem’s historicity. Filkins, who preserves the Heine reference, captures here Bachmann’s awareness of scholarship, and, in his introduction, writes that Bachmann’s poetry evokes what T.S. Eliot described as “a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”

Friedberg succeeds in other areas, perhaps where Filkins, whose translation is more literal, may not dare to go. In particular, Friedberg translocates, rather successfully, the mysterious and martial qualities of Bachmann’s verse. That is, after all, where most pleasure in poetry lies—in mysteries. In “Nachtflug/Night Flight,” Bachmann’s, Filkins’, and Friedberg’s first stanzas read very differently.

Filkins turns “unter Einsatz der Traums” into “at the risk of a dream.” Here, he lets the translation delve into a vague, easy platitude, but Bachmann’s original text gives us so much more. While “Einsatz” can be used in terms of gambling and high-stakes, it also means military activity. In a Europe ravaged by war, Bachmann’s original indicates that dreams are yet another implement of that war. Friedberg translates “Einsatz” into “deployment,” a word that has similar martial resonance in contemporary English. In short, Friedberg preserves the violence of this poem while Filkins does not. Friedberg’s translations, though not always literal, almost always endeavor to capture the violent imagery inherent in Bachmann’s polysemous diction. At times, these translocations alter the poems utterly, as in “No Delicacies,” when Friedberg translates “Lichteffekt” as “halation,” a photographic term far too esoteric to belong in Bachmann’s plain-style.
Filkins has tweaked his work since 1995, though for the most part the translations, and their infelicities, are intact. Most conspicuous of these changes would be “Night Flight,” which Friedberg assiduously dissected in her 2001 German Quarterly article.

Here, Filkins has sought a middle ground between his original work—which is far too placid—and the work of Friedberg, who found, in her research of “Night Flight,” numerous double-meanings in the original German that were not present in Filkins’ translation. In the revision, Filkins meets Friedberg half-way, changing his original “dreamt on Calvary and on funeral pyres” into “dreamt on Golgotha and on funeral pyres.” This still does not capture the mention of Schädel—skulls, which are key artifacts of Bachmann’s post-Holocaust consciousness. Friedberg does include those skulls, albeit in a less musical line: “dreamt at the sacrificial sites of the skulls and the pyres of the stake.” In German, the line reads “geträumt auf Schädelstätten und Scheiterhaufen,” and is full of phonetic elements—the two [Sh:] sounds, as well as a fairly regular iambic pentameter (with a catalectic ending). Though Friedberg’s version better captures the line’s resonant imagery, it does so by fading into an anapestic drift that loses the poem’s phonetic and prosodic thrust.

Neither Filkins nor Friedberg have wholly succeeded in translocating Bachmann, though they both bring considerable talents to the task. Should there be a new set of translations published—and Bachmann’s international importance deserves such an endeavor—I would ask the translator to combine Filkins’ attention to the literal recovery of the text with Friedberg’s ability to accurately capture all of Bachmann’s double and triple meanings. I suggest, then, a figurative collaboration between the two translators, if not a literal one, which seems unlikely.