Translator's comment on 'War'
How odd, and what a lesson to “realists”, that the most truly realistic
description of World War II – say, of the destruction of Coventry,
Rotterdam, Dresden – was written not at the time but back in 1911. The slow caesura’d rhythm of Heym’s embodied “War”, lumbering along as if it were not a human but a Frankenstein robot walking, is suited perfectly to its macabre subject, namely to the impersonality of the masskilling Heym foresaw, just as George – also during 1911-1913 – foresaw it in his ‘Cleansing Doom’ poem; in both cases, with the same hypnotized fascination.
Here the duplication in English of Heym’s rhythms has been the
transplanter’s main endeavour, if only because nothing is so challenging as the impossible. In these four months before his death at 24, Heym became the greatest master since Hölderlin of rhythm orchestration(exceeding even his secret model, Stefan George). Of all Heym’s poems, ‘War’ was the hardest to translate. This is because most of its lines can be simultaneously scanned as six-beat and four-beat. Of the six accents in each line, the second and fourth are usually so much fainter than the other accents that they can be slurred over so as to make it a four-beat line. The result – no other poem in all literature is quite like it – is that the six-beat foreground is gradually overwhelmed by an ominous fourbeat droning in the background, which by its very monotony produces not boredom but cumulative horror. This ambiguity of rhythm is (if the poem is seen aesthetically rather than prophetically) the whole point of the German original; accordingly the transplanter has tried to retain the same ambiguity of four-beat versus six-beat in English, with the same
slurred faintness of accents 2 and 4 and the same hammering stress upon accents 1, 3, 5, 6, with every opening foot an aggressive trochee.
Page(s) 255
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