German Art After 1960 at SFMOMA includes two huge Anselm Kiefer canvases, heavy oil paintings matted with straw. Sulamith (1980) depicts a low groin-vaulted interior like a crypt, built of brown and blackened stones. Small flames burn at the end of a row of alcoves. The painting’s name — Hebrew in origin, a princess in the Song of Songs — is scratched into the upper left.

Margarethe (1981) looks like a series of wicks, each a long bent tangle of straw topped with a little painted flame. Ash dapples the ground, and the background sky is dotted with what could be stars behind a cool milky-grey wash like wet smoke. The name “Margarethe” is scrawled prominently across its center in dark-grey looping cursive. In an earlier, cheerier watercolor version of this composition, Kiefer paints golden wheat bowing under a blue sky.

The museum insciption explains these titles refer to the Paul Celan poem Todesfuge (Deathfugue), in which the narrator — a Jewish prisoner forced by his blue-eyed guard to dig graves in a German concentration camp — repeats “your golden hair Margarete” (dein goldenes Haar Margarete) and “your ashen hair Sulamith” (dein aschenes Haar Sulamith).

Goldenes and aschenes are descriptors rich with nonvisiual connotations. Obviously blondness is of vain importance to aryanism, but gold specifically has been a German national color since the Napoleonic Wars: in the tricolor, gold is classically associated with the promise of a liberated future, the goldene Licht der Freiheit (golden light of freedom). Sulamith’s ashen hair, on the other hand, confirms the Jewishness of her name. “Ashen hair” aligns Hebrew-Biblical mourning (II Sam. xiii. 9; Josh. vii. 6; Job ii. 12¹) with the Nazi extermination camps’ crematoria.

“Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng;” does Celan address Sulamith directly? Are the prisonsers digging a grave for her? Is ein Grab in den Lüften (approx. “a grave in the air”) a metaphor for cremation, or an image for collective memory? When you read Todesfuge in English, your interpretation of these ambiguities is at your translator’s mercy. Each takes a different approach. Together they demonstrate the difficulties of translation, broadly, but also — by necessarily foregrounding different aspects, and falling short in different ways — they reveal what resonates in the original.

Todesfuge (1948)

Paul Celan, born in 1920 to a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernăuți (Chernivtsi), survived a Romanian forced labor camp, lost his parents to the S.S., and began publishing original poetry pseudonymously after the war. Here he’s recorded reading Todesfuge:

Todesfuge

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken und trinken
wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei
er pfeift seine Juden hervor lässt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde
er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng

Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt
er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau
stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags und morgens wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen

Er ruft spielt süsser den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft
dan habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau
er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er spielt mit den Schlangen und träumet der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

Translations

After seeing the Anselm Kiefer paintings, I found and typed translations of Todesfuge by John Felstiner, Michael Hamburger, Jerome Rothenberg, and Karl S. Weimar respectively (all reproduced below), and generated these files highlighting their pairwise differences:²

Each translator has his editorial priorities. Weimar carefully preserves the original’s meter, Hamburger its verbal simplicity. Felstiner’s untranslated German phrases fragment the closing stanzas. I’ve included short notes on what sets each apart.

One could spend ages doing these comparisons. Weimar critiques several prior translations I haven’t read: Gertrude C. Schwebell’s (1962), Donald White’s (1966), and Joachim Neugroschel’s (1971). Felstiner notes at least “fifteen published English translations of Todesfuge (and several unpublished),” and that was almost forty years ago! These are just a few examples.

John Felstiner (1986)

Deathfugue

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air where you won't lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling he whistles his hounds to stay close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us play up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air where you won't lie too cramped

He shouts dig this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are so blue
stick your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margareta
your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays with his vipers

He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland
he shouts scrape your strings darker you'll rise up as smoke to the sky
you'll then have a grave in the clouds where you won't lie too cramped

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland
we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink
this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue
he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

Published in “Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan,” 2001.³

Felstiner published his notes, which describe Celan’s personal history and the poem’s cultural significance in postwar Europe, under the title “Paul Celan’s Todesfuge” (1986).⁴ After Todesfuge achieved wide recognition, Felstiner recalls, Celan’s verse grew more abstruse; he resisted Todesfuge’s inclusion in anthologies; he resented the poem’s public palatability (what Felstiner politely terms “too congenial a reading,” the one that wound up in German grade school textbooks).

Like any good translator, Felstiner hems and haws over words: “what do you do, for instance, with Meister — a god, a champion, a guildsman, a master of arts or theology, a labour-camp overseer, a musical maestro, a rabbi, the ‘master’ race, not to speak of Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger von Nurnberg…” He gives special care to the flawed assonance of Rüden (hounds) and Juden (Jews) in the first stanza, explicitly rejecting Rothenberg’s “draw near”/“appear” rhyme in favor of “stay close” and “into rows.” Actually, Weimar’s solution — “come up” and “come out” — best captures the original effect.

Words aside, Felstiner’s translation is my favorite among these four because it captures the tumbling, subtly accelerating cadence of Celan’s reading. “In translating,” Felstiner writes, “I [went] back again and again, longingly, to Celan’s own recorded voice — he read with ‘a cold heat,’ one friend said — to absorb his rhythms, pauses, emphases, retards, quickenings, caustic articulation.”

The translation’s progressive dissolution back into German is key: at first, “Death is a master from Deutschland,” then “Death is a master aus Deutschland,” “ein Meister aus Deutschland,” and finally “der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland.” In the final couplet, even the names are left unadapted. The effect is undeniably fuguelike (feverish swirling, multiplicity of voices).

Of course, Celan’s original doens’t have this progression or anything like it. Weimar’s structural analysis considers the Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland refrain a distinct “voice,” distinguished by the repetition. Break each repetition into translated and untranslated portions and the repetition is gone.

What place does a change this blatantly editorial have in translation? My anthology of Felstiner’s translations includes original German texts, in which a detail-oriented non-germanophone can spot the original repetition. Readers with a dedicated interest in Celan translations might have more “neutral” (less editorial!) points of reference, like the Hamburger translation below. Less dedicated readers might not recognize the translator’s hand.

Felstiner’s preface to “Selected Poems” argues this license is authentic: Celan himself relied on it for his translations into German.

For Celan as translator, faithful often did mean fresh. Vis-à-vis French or Russian or English verse, he was given to fracturing, contracting, omitting, specifying, intensifying, inventing, repeating where the original had no repetition, changing nouns into verbs, indicatives into imperatives or gerunds, and so on.

[…]

Too easily, I believe, lyric poetry gets labeled untranslatable, especially in the case of someone [Celan] whose personal losses rendered his German language at once precarious and privileged, inalienable yet irreplicable; someone calling himself “whitegravel stutterer;” someone speaking from his “true- / stammered mouth” about “eternity / bloodblack embabeled,” blutschwarz umbabelt. But then why not think of translation as the specific art of loss, and begin from there?⁵

Michael Hamburger (1972)

Death Fugue

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined

He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play on for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents

He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith

Published in “Poems of Paul Celan,” 1972.⁶

Hamburger seems to assign the adverbs süßer and dunkler strangely: they describe the calls rather than the playing. This construction is true to the original word order, and with the right punctuation the call could read as a forced second-position verb:

He calls out, “more sweetly play death…”

Unfortunately, there isn’t any punctuation to prompt this interpretation, so we read “He calls out more sweetly, ‘play death…’” Even if they were punctuated, these lines would be awkward. Distracting. I’m doubly puzzled because Hamburger isn’t always precious about word order: er pfeift seine Juden hervor lässt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde is rendered as “he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave.” Maybe Hamburger just prefers awkward phrasings.

Otherwise, this translation seems the most neutral of the bunch — the closest to word-by-word translation, without left fragments of German or unseemly new images…

Jerome Rothenberg (2005)

Death Fugue

Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night
we drink and drink
we scoop out a grave in the sky where it's roomy to lie
There's a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it's nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start flashing he whistles his dogs to draw near
whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand
he commands us play up for the dance

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at dawntime and noontime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
There's a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it's nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite we we scoop out a grave in the sky where it's roomy to lie

He calls jab it deep in the soil you men you other men sing and play
he tugs at the sword in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you men you other men play up again for the dance

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
there's a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite he cultivates snakes

He calls play that death thing more sweetly Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland
he calls scrape that fiddle more darkly then hover like smoke in the air
then scoop out a grave in the clouds where it's roomy to lie

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland
we drink you at dusktime and dawntime we drink and drink
Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue
he hits you with leaden bullets his aim is true
there's a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
he sets his dogs on our trail he gives us a grave in the sky
he cultivates snakes and he dreams Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland

your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite

Published in “Paul Celan: Selections,” 2005,⁷ but this translation is much older — Rothenberg translated Todesfuge for a City Lights booklet published in 1959.⁸

Frankly, this one isn’t for me. “Roomy” and “scooping” have childish sounds and sandcastle connotations. “Sword” is an improbable translation of Eisen (lit. “iron”). Why is den Tod rendered “that death thing?”

Why is Meister — which has a musical second meaning — rendered “gang-boss,” apparently referring to the blue-eyed commandant? In the other translations, this stanza suggests personification by melding fragmented references to Death, the musical master from Germany, and the gang-boss. Eliminating the musical connotations of Meister aus Deutschland eliminates a character from that trio and bluntly joins the other two.

I get the impression Rothenberg injects what Weimar calls an “artificially poetic element.” Steigen is a simple verb suggesting motion (lit. “to climb”), but Rothenberg picks “hover,” suggesting stillness. Abends becomes “dusktime;” mittags, “noontime;” morgens, “dawntime.”

The uncapitalized sie in the original first stanza is a third-person pronoun (the other translations here use “it,” then switch to “you” in later stanzas when Celan uses du). Did Celan really mean the formal, second-person, capitalized Sie or, more likely, does this translation efface the third- to second-person shift?

Another pronominal controversy: Weimar complains Rothenberg defuses the dramatic tension of Celan’s original by using “who” instead of “he” in the first and second stanzas.

The actions are simple and swift and Celan’s intention, clearly reflected in the almost breathless monotonous way in which he himself reads the work and in the complete absence of the printed text, is to infuse the poem with a relentless, irresistible momentum […] Both Schwebell’s and Rothenberg’s translations destroy this unity of short, tense, disconnected sentences, especially when they render the domonstrative pronoun der (l. 5 [Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt…]) as a relative pronoun.⁹

Elsewhere he calls Rothenberg’s word choice “boldly scabrous.”

Like Felstiner, Rothenberg leaves Deutschland (and its prepositions) untranslated, but the untranslated phrases don’t progress stanza to stanza. This is a reasonable minimum: can you really imagine Hamburger and Weimar’s blue-eyed men writing to “Germany?”

Karl S. Weimar (1974)

Fugue of Death

Coal-black milk of morning we drink it at evening
we drink it at noon and at daybreak we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the skies there is room enough there
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it darkens to Germany your golden hair Marguerite
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are shining he whistles his dogs to come up
he whistles his Jews to come out to shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us strike up a tune for the dance

Coal-black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at daybreak and noon and we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it darkens to Germany your golden hair Marguerite
Your ashen hair Shulamite we shovel a grave in the skies there is room enough there

He shouts dig deeper into the earth you here and you there start singing and playing
he clutches the gun in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
dig deeper your spades you here and you there keep playing that dance tune

Coal-black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noon and at daybreak we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a man lives in the house your golden hair Marguerite
your ashen hair Shulamite he plays with his vipers

He shouts play the death tune sweeter death is a master from Germany
he shouts strike up the fiddles more darkly you'll rise like the smoke to the sky
you'll have your own grave in the clouds there is room enough there

Coal-black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at evening and at daybreak we drink and we drink
death is a master from Germany his eye is blue
he hits you with bullets of lead his target is you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Marguerite
he sets loose his dogs after us he gives us a grave in the sky
he plays with his vipers and dreams death is a master from Germany

your golden hair Marguerite
your ashen hair Shulamite

Published with translator notes in “Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’: Translation and Interpretation,” 1974.¹⁰

Weimar takes the poem’s title (fuge, meaning “fugue”) as a suggestion to focus on its meter in translation. “Coal-black,” like schwarze, is a spondee: two syllables, with stress on the first.¹¹

I have mixed feelings about “coal” here. On one hand, the focus on meter sets this translation apart, and Celan’s reading is distinctively rhythmic. On the other, “coal” is a baggaged noun — especially in a German modern-industrial context, and in the Holocaust more specifically, where Weimar’s “coal-black” prefigures “the smoke to the sky” more than the original German schwartze. Moreover, Weimar weakens Celan’s reference to a Rose Ausländer poem mentioning black milk.

Elsewhere (“golden hair” and “ashen hair”) Weimar focuses on retaining the metric parallel rather than the specific meter: both adjectives lose a syllable. “Aureate” might’ve worked, but he rejects it: it’s too posh and there isn’t a good grey equivalent. Like Hamburger’s selective preservation of word-order, this puzzles me; if you’ll settle for parallels, ditch “coal-black!”

Weimar’s structural and metric analysis does a lot to convince me of a translation I still don’t particularly like reading. Because they focus on the translator’s task and directly critique other translations (especially Rothenberg’s), the notes are a useful companion.