Who or what the hell are the Unborn Grandchildren? The Unsolvable Riddle of a Poem
Obtaining my master’s degree in German Studies was a miserable chore for the most part, done, if I’m to be honest, just so that I could get the tax-free living allowance that the GI Bill furnished. Still, there were some lessons to be learned. In one class on translating poetry, for instance, we as students were given a choice which poem to translate from a pool of six works. Being lazy, I naturally selected the shortest poem, in the hopes that the translation would go fastest and be easiest.
I turned out to be wrong. The shorter the poem sometimes, the harder the translation, if only for the simple reason that one has less material to work with. Longer poems tend to either have some sort of refrain or pattern (however unintentional) that allows the translator to grasp some kind of foothold, predict the ebb and flow of where the words are leading.
A short poem leaves less room for pattern recognition. And if the poet in question is insane, the task is even harder.
It is debatable whether the German expressionist poet Georg Trakl was nuts, but it’s probably certain that he was miserable. His poem Grodek (about the battle in the Great War) certainly caused me some good bit of grief.
Georg Trakl started writing young, and had several prose pieces published before completing his degree in pharmacy. As a pharmacist, it is probable that Trakl picked up his cocaine habit (which eventually killed him) and that he also experimented with morphine.
Trakl joined the army before the war, mustered out, seemed to make a go of it as a writer before he was sent to the now-defunct empire of Galicia as a medical officer during the Great War. At one point, suffering a nervous breakdown after battle and being forced to endure the screams of dying and maimed men around him, Trakl attempted to shoot himself in the head with his sidearm.
He was thwarted by some other soldiers, and sent to a mental hospital. Some time later his sister (a pianist) committed suicide, shooting herself in the head on a trip to Berlin to recover some of the family’s furniture during a period of economic hardship. Herr Trakl himself died of a cocaine overdose some time shortly thereafter. It is rumored in some biographical sources that Trakl had engaged in an incestuous affair with his sister. It is not known whether his overdose was intentional or not.
Leaving his short and unhappy life and returning to his short and unhappy poem, however, Grodek is a mere seventeen lines long, and deals with the quiet and majestic decay that accompanies autumn, contrasted with the quick and ruthless manner in which men destroy each other.
To show how much is changed in translation (not necessarily lost) let me give two reasonable translations of the last three lines of this unwieldy mystery which has, after years of puzzling, still not yielded its secrets (at least to me).
Translation 1:
O prouder sorrow! you brazen altars
Today an immense anguish feeds the mind’s hot flame,
The unborn descendants.
Translation 2:
O prouder mourning! - You brazen altars,
The spirit's hot flame is fed now by a tremendous pain:
The grandsons, unborn.
It’s that last line which caused me such especial agony during the translation, this quandary, this stumbling block. Let’s assume a compromise between “descendants” and “grandsons,” settle on “grandchildren” for the moment, just for the sake of trying to find a point of entry into this three-word line that might as well be an ellipse rather than a coda.
Who are the “unborn grandchildren”? Are they those kids of the children the men in the trenches could have helped conceive on the homefront with their wives, if their lives hadn’t been squandered at Grodek (or Verdun or the Somme)? Or are the “unborn grandchildren” those who will eventually inherit the world, and its wars with it, doomed to repeat the cycle of death and destruction which is as ineluctable as the changings of the seasons, that molting which occurs in the autumn that Trakl uses as a point of contrast to the death men visit on each other?
I don’t know, and don’t think I’ll ever know. I’m not sure whether Trakl himself knew when he was writing the poem; for all I know he wasn’t thinking about anything besides tooting cocaine or putting a bullet in his head or screwing his sister while hammering out the final stanza that came to him like a psychographic burst from the unconscious.
It’s a pity at any rate that the other great German Expressionist poet, Georg Heym, didn’t live long enough to write about the Great War. His vision is as bleak as Trakl’s, though it is suffused with a romantic and ecstatic horror that seems to transubstantiate mundane death and destruction into something religious. It’s more Blake and Baudelaire, less Gottfried Benn.
Georg Heym unfortunately died in an accident at the age of 24, a year or two before the outbreak of the Great War would have given him a chance to die or lose his mind in any number of ways perhaps just as suitable to his romantic temperament.
How did Heym die, you ask (assuming you’re even there and not asking, “Who the hell is Georg Heym?” a reasonable question for anyone who hasn’t wasted their time and money on courses in German Expressionist poetry). Ole Georg Heym was a promising young poet who decided to go ice-skating one day with a friend on the frozen surface of the Havel River, a tributary of the Bohemian section of the Elbe (back when Bohemia, like Galicia, was still a thing). The water wasn’t frozen as solid as Heym or his friend thought, however, and when Heym’s companion fell through the thawing layer of ice covering the water, he attempted to retrieve his buddy and ended up plunging into the icy waters himself. Some nearby foresters claimed they heard Heym screaming for the better part of an hour before he finally succumbed and died in the river.
But that’s neither here nor there, and I’m getting off the topic, which is: Who or what the hell are the unborn grandchildren?
I turned out to be wrong. The shorter the poem sometimes, the harder the translation, if only for the simple reason that one has less material to work with. Longer poems tend to either have some sort of refrain or pattern (however unintentional) that allows the translator to grasp some kind of foothold, predict the ebb and flow of where the words are leading.
A short poem leaves less room for pattern recognition. And if the poet in question is insane, the task is even harder.
It is debatable whether the German expressionist poet Georg Trakl was nuts, but it’s probably certain that he was miserable. His poem Grodek (about the battle in the Great War) certainly caused me some good bit of grief.
Georg Trakl started writing young, and had several prose pieces published before completing his degree in pharmacy. As a pharmacist, it is probable that Trakl picked up his cocaine habit (which eventually killed him) and that he also experimented with morphine.
Trakl joined the army before the war, mustered out, seemed to make a go of it as a writer before he was sent to the now-defunct empire of Galicia as a medical officer during the Great War. At one point, suffering a nervous breakdown after battle and being forced to endure the screams of dying and maimed men around him, Trakl attempted to shoot himself in the head with his sidearm.
He was thwarted by some other soldiers, and sent to a mental hospital. Some time later his sister (a pianist) committed suicide, shooting herself in the head on a trip to Berlin to recover some of the family’s furniture during a period of economic hardship. Herr Trakl himself died of a cocaine overdose some time shortly thereafter. It is rumored in some biographical sources that Trakl had engaged in an incestuous affair with his sister. It is not known whether his overdose was intentional or not.
Leaving his short and unhappy life and returning to his short and unhappy poem, however, Grodek is a mere seventeen lines long, and deals with the quiet and majestic decay that accompanies autumn, contrasted with the quick and ruthless manner in which men destroy each other.
To show how much is changed in translation (not necessarily lost) let me give two reasonable translations of the last three lines of this unwieldy mystery which has, after years of puzzling, still not yielded its secrets (at least to me).
Translation 1:
O prouder sorrow! you brazen altars
Today an immense anguish feeds the mind’s hot flame,
The unborn descendants.
Translation 2:
O prouder mourning! - You brazen altars,
The spirit's hot flame is fed now by a tremendous pain:
The grandsons, unborn.
It’s that last line which caused me such especial agony during the translation, this quandary, this stumbling block. Let’s assume a compromise between “descendants” and “grandsons,” settle on “grandchildren” for the moment, just for the sake of trying to find a point of entry into this three-word line that might as well be an ellipse rather than a coda.
Who are the “unborn grandchildren”? Are they those kids of the children the men in the trenches could have helped conceive on the homefront with their wives, if their lives hadn’t been squandered at Grodek (or Verdun or the Somme)? Or are the “unborn grandchildren” those who will eventually inherit the world, and its wars with it, doomed to repeat the cycle of death and destruction which is as ineluctable as the changings of the seasons, that molting which occurs in the autumn that Trakl uses as a point of contrast to the death men visit on each other?
I don’t know, and don’t think I’ll ever know. I’m not sure whether Trakl himself knew when he was writing the poem; for all I know he wasn’t thinking about anything besides tooting cocaine or putting a bullet in his head or screwing his sister while hammering out the final stanza that came to him like a psychographic burst from the unconscious.
It’s a pity at any rate that the other great German Expressionist poet, Georg Heym, didn’t live long enough to write about the Great War. His vision is as bleak as Trakl’s, though it is suffused with a romantic and ecstatic horror that seems to transubstantiate mundane death and destruction into something religious. It’s more Blake and Baudelaire, less Gottfried Benn.
Georg Heym unfortunately died in an accident at the age of 24, a year or two before the outbreak of the Great War would have given him a chance to die or lose his mind in any number of ways perhaps just as suitable to his romantic temperament.
How did Heym die, you ask (assuming you’re even there and not asking, “Who the hell is Georg Heym?” a reasonable question for anyone who hasn’t wasted their time and money on courses in German Expressionist poetry). Ole Georg Heym was a promising young poet who decided to go ice-skating one day with a friend on the frozen surface of the Havel River, a tributary of the Bohemian section of the Elbe (back when Bohemia, like Galicia, was still a thing). The water wasn’t frozen as solid as Heym or his friend thought, however, and when Heym’s companion fell through the thawing layer of ice covering the water, he attempted to retrieve his buddy and ended up plunging into the icy waters himself. Some nearby foresters claimed they heard Heym screaming for the better part of an hour before he finally succumbed and died in the river.
But that’s neither here nor there, and I’m getting off the topic, which is: Who or what the hell are the unborn grandchildren?
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