Peter Viereck
Translator's comment on Goethe's 'Wanderer's Night Song'
In 1780 young Goethe pencilled these eight lines on the wooden wall of a mountain lodge. Along with Pushkin’s ‘On the Hills of Georgia’, this is the simplest great poem in history. So naïve-sounding a rhythm, diction, and feeling can only be the product of the most sophisticated craftsmanship. As with the Pushkin poem, translators have either betrayed Goethe’s simplicity by cleverness or cloyed it by banality.
To substitute for the resonance of feminine rhyme in German
(uninflected English having more masculine rhymes), I’ve increased the number of rhymes with the key word “rest”. And to prevent this
increase from becoming monotonous, I’ve used one rhyme with accent not on “rest” but on the penultimate syllable: “forest” in line four.
To enhance the hushed mood by echo, Goethe on line six alliterates the “w” of “schweigen” with the “w” of “Wald”. Analogously in line six of the English, “hushed” and “heath” alliterate. This is achieved at the cost of using an eye rhyme (heath, breath) instead of a “perfect” ear rhyme. In denotation, “heath” is not a proper translation of “Wald”. The former has mere thickets; the latter is arboreal. But the emotional connotations are partly similar: rustic, unpruned, unmapped, a wilderness for wanderers at night. I don’t want to repeat the earlierused concept of forest and woods. The reader’s ear needs the couplet ending in “eath” to escape for just a moment the restless “rest” rhymes.
To substitute for the resonance of feminine rhyme in German
(uninflected English having more masculine rhymes), I’ve increased the number of rhymes with the key word “rest”. And to prevent this
increase from becoming monotonous, I’ve used one rhyme with accent not on “rest” but on the penultimate syllable: “forest” in line four.
To enhance the hushed mood by echo, Goethe on line six alliterates the “w” of “schweigen” with the “w” of “Wald”. Analogously in line six of the English, “hushed” and “heath” alliterate. This is achieved at the cost of using an eye rhyme (heath, breath) instead of a “perfect” ear rhyme. In denotation, “heath” is not a proper translation of “Wald”. The former has mere thickets; the latter is arboreal. But the emotional connotations are partly similar: rustic, unpruned, unmapped, a wilderness for wanderers at night. I don’t want to repeat the earlierused concept of forest and woods. The reader’s ear needs the couplet ending in “eath” to escape for just a moment the restless “rest” rhymes.
Page(s) 242
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