ANDREW DUNCAN


MISSING BANDWIDTHS

Widths of bands; or, on failures of translation and language that refers
to its own code

It may be useful to think of someone trying to translate experimental English poetry into German. As soon as you start, all the detail is erased - and would have to be reconstructed, bit by bit. I have just finished work (I hope) on an anthology of recent German-language poetry (which will appear in Chicago Review). The poets selected represent the personal taste of the editors (Messrs. Frazer and Duncan); the ideal we chose was to go against the long-standing tendency of translators to pick poetry which is easy to translate and which sounds natural and idiomatic in English. There is a realm of poetic language which is exotic, non-idiomatic, and defamiliarised, and this is what we gave preference to. Does it read as if the translators haven't got the point? Well, maybe that's so, or maybe an adjustment of optic is part of the message.

I met a German recently out of school who told me that the degree of intimate referentiality of the language used at his school was unique to the German language and unattainable anywhere else. When I told him that everyone in the world probably thought this about their own in-group at the same age, in Brazil, England, or wherever, he looked startled and pained. But isn't that just it - we can't possibly understand the shared recollection and allusion embedded in the speech of people intimate with each other, and we dismiss what we can't understand as not the heart of the matter. This could lead the least intelligent of professors - the worst minds of my generation, to coin a phrase - into the assumption that poetry has stopped in the rest of the world, and that it is only "progressing" in a few campuses such as Stanford or Buffalo. There is, to be sure, a whole stratum of poetry which fails to include this rich and microscopically detailed layer of allusiveness. This could be a result of low literacy - a weak grasp of the written medium, such that it turns out impoverished compared to speech. Unfortunately, this denuded state is also common in poetry translations - the literary equivalent of institutional food. A related condition is literary propaganda - where the richness is supplied by the ideological implications (one version), or else the lack of contact with lived reality produces a bleak and sterile language (too familiar because of the literary models on which it is rigidly based). Another related condition is literature "spun out" of a theory of literature, frequently resembling Party propaganda in its monotony and predictability. I have the impression sometimes that the Right dismiss German-language literature because it is foreign, and the Left dismiss it because it isn't the Third World. Not exotic enough! Not a tourist destination!

I translated "Breiten der Wellen" as "widths of bands", and it was suggested to me that this should be changed to "bandwidths". This sounds more natural. But the German phrase is deliberately unnatural - and corresponds exactly to "widths of bands". You have to do a bit of work to get to the stored concept from the form of words. While the translator always wants to sound "natural" (to radiate confidence), the core of poetry itself has a lot to do with that "bit of work". But let's take another example. In a poem there was a phrase 'schifferklaviere' which I translated as "ships' pianos". I let this stand for a year before looking up the word (fusing the two separated parts together) and discovering that "Schifferklaviere" are actually concertinas. So here the more original phrase was due to a misidentification. Translators wants their versions to sound super-natural because the suspicion of having "missed the point" is so nerve-racking. My impression is that there is a sector of German-language poetry (a "bandwidth" actually) which is systematically under-represented by translation. That is, difficult poets are left out; difficult poems are de-selected in preference to easy poems by any author; difficult passages of poems are hammered flat in translation (whereas easy passages slip over effortlessly). This is a terrible triangle.

I want to praise past translators, because they put the 'missing bandwidths' back into audibility as far as they could. Stephen Bann's presentation of concrete poetry springs to mind. The translations (by Michael Hamburger) of Texts by Helmut Heissenbuttel were a major achievement. Rosmarie Waldrop has produced a whole series of key translations (often for Burning Deck). I don't think these penetrated the awareness of the small press readership. All the same, they are achievements hard to equal.

This bandwidth is worth dwelling on - because I think it also points to the defining qualities of a sector of British poetry which has no name. This sector would include Chide's Alphabet, certainly. It is separate by default - because the most accessible poetry outlets simply ban that kind of poetry. This means that outlets which don't ban it tend to become specialised - they collect so much of the "extreme" poetry that they reject the "centrist" poetry. If I read only such poetry, it may be because of an emotional polarisation, a kind of group identification. You can identify with a football team while recognizing that the other team is playing aesthetically better football. This identification is buried a long way back in my life, 20 years, 25 years - so it's hard for me to be sure that it exists. If you followan aesthetic pattern for 20 years, it carves itself so deeply into your brain that it becomes like a building - like an institution. The set of these institutions constitutes the city we live in, the aesthetic landscape into which poetry is published. They are simultaneously "the landscape" and "purely internal"; rigid, and the product of arbitrary choice. Explaining the "layout" of poetry in a given country tends to drift over into describing the history of poetry - because these formations are tenacious. However, the existence of reflexive poetry in, so far as I know, all European countries, tells us that its motivation is not historical but structural. The brain's constant move from being free to being programmed is central to poetry - because in modern times poetry is associated with the experience of freedom. (This may not have been so in the historic past.) The reflexive style is a challenging task for readers who are super-skilled at reading - hyperliterate. So it is prestigious but not likely to sell in big quantities. The lack of commercial penetration also means that this more specialised poetry is less easy to find for the foreign observer. You have to wade through a lot of conventional poetry before discovering the experimental stuff. There is another effect - which is that you need a very deep command of a language to understand the more ambitious poetry; and in fact that up till that point the more formal poetry will seem bewildering, undermotivated, and slight.

These problems in translation can quite easily give the impression that experimental poetry is only happening in English. (This statement is usually simplified to: experimental poetry is only happening in the USA.) This line is sometimes aware that the avant garde was invented in Europe and was copied in the USA - but spontaneously decides that the avant-garde in Europe stopped - so that the USA now owns it. If the USA owns it, then any avant garde activity in Europe is an imitation of the USA - obviously. There is a significant factor to bring in, namely that the majority of cultured Europeans rejected formalist art (in favour of socially committed art or even political action) after about 1930 - in response to the Great Depression, the lure of communism, and political crises closely related to the Depression. The infrastructural basis for experimental art - in terms of galleries, reader, publishers, etc. - really did crash in the Thirties. The Forties were equally unreceptive, dedicated to warfare, dictatorship, mourning, and reconstruction. The Fifties saw a large-scale revival of formalist techniques across the continent - a process which, significantly, has not had any proper study devoted to it. It doesn't even have a name. The European democracies have experienced peace, prosperity, and a constant growth of education and leisure in the intervening decades - basic processes which made the prosperity of formalist art structurally inevitable. The increase in personal disposable wealth in Western Europe, since 1945 of course but especially since 1960, made the collapse of American hegemony in the art market inevitable, and produced great opportunities for European dealers and artists. The market has to be satisfied somehow. There is no threat to the prospects of the avant-garde. Even in eastern Europe, placed under a long-term political crisis, the avant-garde flourished, practised by large numbers of people - social commitment was not everyone's choice.

A large proportion of all the great art in Europe changed hands between 1939 and 45. 1933-45 was the era of smuggling and looting. As the supreme nouveau riche group, the Nazi elite replaced the europhile American rich in the western art market. There is a lot of information about this in The Spoils of War (edited by Elizabeth Simpson), a collection of papers about the looting of art treasures during the second World War and their recovery since the war. The war put the squeeze on most of the rich people of Europe. They also happened to own most of the art - which behaved as inanimate property belonging to families and directed by their fortunes. Where their goal was to flee from their country of residence, their need was ready cash - this meant selling their pictures. Alternatively, criminals distrusting unstable currencies and the document trail inherent in using banks chose works of art, often, as safe investments - and as portable wealth. The period of Nazi and Communist takeovers therefore saw art dealers in a position stronger than ever before. To be sure, the deals could only be realised by handling stolen goods, and by becoming intimate with criminals and fascists.

Is it true that an avant-garde stopped in 1930-34? There are grave doubts about this. Individuals went on practising their art, if often derived of exhibition space, studio space, free time, or access to publication. There is a problem with simply reproducing the mythic narratives of museums - if a given museum has a gap in its showings for this period, it may be because dealers in Central Europe had been shut down (by the Nazis), or because the museum had no access to foreign currency at the time (due to the depression). If the focus of attention of the metropolitan elite shifted in those years (towards politics), we may still be suffering from that decision: museums and historians tend to focus on "what was thought important", the implied subject is precisely "the metropolitan elite", and rewriting the story is something that rarely happens. Events during the dead time include the prehistory of Concrete poetry. This story involves Max Bill, his lectures in Brazil, his concept of the 'concrete' as the negation of 'abstract' art, and his influence on the Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer - who published his 'constellations' in 1953. Bill is a telltale - Concrete poetry came out of the Bauhaus (of which Bill's Hochschule für Gestaltung was a direct copy, or renewal).

When ewes are given access to a stage of very rich fodder before tupping, this is called a flush - and often leads to twin lambs. There was a 'nutritional flush' of people exposed to avant garde art suddenly after the collapse of the Third Reich. This was a big explosion - and something quite similar happened in the Soviet Union, a few years later. If we haven't made it part of our modern mythology, this is partly because of anti-German feelings lurking around at the time - and partly because the early results were naive, hyperbolic. The rather slow build-up to self-sustained development (symbolized by the anthology movens, 1960), has been described by Jorg Drews. The act of post-war enfranchisement in visual art was the Documenta exhibition in Kassel - for the first time, in 1955. Funding bodies and media made Documenta a success because this art had, rather recently, been redefined as a symbol of Western individualism. In the new European art which arrived in the 1950s, elements of derivative copying of the avant garde of 1914, and radically new, self-sustaining, elements, were confusingly intertwined.

I have just got hold of the mail order catalogue of Counter Productions. This is an extremely serious catalogue of the fringe - UFOs, conspiracy theory, marxism, anarchism, decadence, antinomianism, the avant-garde. In between blowing my wages, I had time to reflect on the long-term weakness of take-up of the European avant-garde in the United Kingdom. The take-up which affected me had a lot to do with the firm of Calder and Boyars. Indeed, there is a list of books from Marion Boyars in the CP catalogue. The CB strategy did not really include poetry - although they were strong on drama, and in fact published most of the classic "dramas of the absurd" in English. It will surprise few that the British avant garde does not feature in this list - cut off by a wall of silence as always. However, we do find some valuable titles - an anthology of writings by the Viennese Actionists, a book of translations from the Vienna School, a play by one of its members (Konrad Bayer). Firms like Exact Change, Creation, Zone Books and Atlas (the catalogue is sorted by publisher) are also of interest. I think we could define CP as a broadcaster of missing bandwidths - no doubt you would find some of these books in a large High Street bookshop, but only a few. CP don't do Inspector Morse, gardening books, celebrity autobiographies, student textbooks. address is: Counter Productions, PO Box 556, London SE5 0RL.

Perhaps we could draw a line and say that the reception of the European avant-garde in Britain stopped here. Because the CP catalogue is quite happy about Dada, surrealism, etc. - things which are on the university syllabus and which everyone seems to know about. I think this line would run in about 1960; and that the monopolistic attention to things American has something to do with the blocking of the tunnel that led to Europe. Existentialism may be the last literary movement that has actually lodged in the collective memory. The blocking has to do with the rise of pop culture - although this was something dominated by the USA, American high culture didn't have the same monopoly of attention (and was much closer to what Europeans could do on their own). I don't see much history after the 1950s - prosperity and official tolerance have produced a beneficent atmosphere, a kind of broad flat alluvial plain. Continuity is the most obvious feature -manuskripte continuing for 40 years with the same editor is a good example. I don't think there ever was much of an avant garde in East Germany. (This means there was a much-publicised one in the 80s but their work gives me a pain.)

Translating poetry is subject to political pressures. It's not just left up to the translator, unfortunately. You do get outsiders intervening - frequently in the sense of "let's remove anything unusual in case it might be wrong". This helps to give an anxiety-free product. Did you ever try rewriting a famous poem, replacing every original phrase by a banal one? The results are interesting. When you're talking about grants, you're talking about committees. I thought I would write about this issue in Chide's Alphabet - because I know it's not going to get cut up in the interests of a non-specialist audience. I am talking about the feelings of several poetry translators - because projects in the past haven't always come out with the full tonal range that the translator intended. It's not wholly the translator's fault that this bandwidth is missing. Looking at a truly difficult avant-garde poem arouses depression, but also the tantalizing vision of going into a brain state so powerful that one could find English equivalents for all the German constructions. This primal and higher consciousness is actually what an exciting poem delivers. This does help to define why I am so bored by the catastrophic blitherings of something likeThe New Poetry (Bloodaxe), or most of The Democratic Voice. Those poems are just so comfortable, so dutiful, so uninspired. I have this terrible feeling that the difference between a poem written by a committee and one written by an individual is also the difference between a poem written "rationally and accountably" and an avant-garde poem. I am afraid that we have a profession of laborious, patient, civic-minded poets whose work is convulsively boring.

Some of the poets who offer problems are Stolterfoht, Priessnitz, Egger, and Franz Czernin:

swimming away from there to all the hide,
that the bright apples get constantly
sunk in their white being,
to gradually raise myself
out of the dark caves,
while all stones still
begin to drip:
unsheared also over this ridge
not only from high waves or deep mountains
this swivels the whole close-by picture that we project,
drawn out of itself, already abiding,
in such a first, a last line?

(Czernin)

This is some of the most difficult poetry I have ever translated - although not as hard as Egger. The problem here is partly one of a referential system. The permanent present. Absence of synthetic space. Czernin goes in for large-scale systematic works - not only the Natur-Gedichte, which come out of an encyclopaedic work on the cosmos, but also the preceding 8-volume work of aphorisms on the nature of things. There is a problem with untranslatable phrases. There is a problem of non-standard prepositions.

Reinhard Priessnitz is generally felt to be unstranslatable because of his lavish phonic decoration, reminiscent of the Russian Futurists.

That when from senses wholly as if certain pierces,
turned again and burns and as focus or fan
speech has effect and self-in-self do you think covers again.
Sensed peace-light one and the same facial feature guill-
oched to a point own as a sounding hearth. Say
("announce'), at what side by side is-but thaw-thousands
each other, from handily threaded grace of living
stimuli or half-light liquidated, called waking into the universal:
For the sake of this, I ask? which steps up to what is shining.

(Egger)

This is quite like Czernin - and based on phenomenology.

The Austrian Ernst Jandl, who died recently, occupies a central place in the German-language avant-garde. Even physically - his collected works came out in ten volumes. Difficult to translate or quote. The conduct of the text is apparently quite banal and repetitive. It has a disconcerting emphasis on the close-in at the expense of what is further away. Once your brain clicks to the right way of reading it, it is absolutely compulsive. It violates expectations even of the avant-garde. I am dubious about translating it - pointless to translate a few pieces to be examined closely, it works in large quantities read as a block. Ulf Stolterfoht is writing a serial work called fachsprachen (specialised languages), built in groups of 9 24-line poems. I-IX have appeared as a volume, XVI is now appearing in magazines. (We failed to get him into the anthology, because this book arrived after we'd finished.) Stolterfoht starts from the middle of incommunicability - the zone where silent context is maximised. This gives him resources to play with. It also makes life difficult for the translator. These poems are remakes of prose contexts which the average German would find baffling. I find these poems exhilarating, although they are also quite difficult. We have to ask, why do I draw a line anywhere and say, this is the limit of the precision I am willing to take on. Do I draw these limits myself? Since the operating method of much poetry is to draw more subtle distinctions, fachsprachen at its exhilarating best seems to be plugged into the mainline of the aesthetic faculty. Here is a poem from group XV, which is about language:

(1) this text is specially aimed at the crafty
specialist as well as at the rather "working" poet. the lay person
seems at least to be co-intended. the relevant tolerance
"precision" was self-certified at the outset, so much for
the conditions. and already it's in swing: the phrase "the
length of the filter amounts according to the slave-girl to a hundred"
frankly tells us: that someone (being the slave or slave-girl)
producing a relation or that this relation
objectively exists. if lit-experts are called on the
speed of circulation with small variations could foster recycling

it always sticks close to the price in the shops. for
a brief moment axial standstill takes over.
while the text undergoes rapid augments. something
broody surrounds it. steamy parts discreetly blow
it out. emission profile comes precisely. opening out self for more

radical designs should happen at latest by
the dead point in the cycle. let be directed at this juncture at
promised rib-cages or sweat-boxes. already to mention them
turns whispers to mutters. real astonishment: that
even with inadequate motivation promising

semes arise. lowest common denominator. piercing
buzzers. for the sake of cover with one leg in a trap. the
other too more or less numb. it was decided: a song is only
as good as its shabbiest section. deleted the "we" in
line four. "slave girl" though stays in until further notice.

I don't think this is too difficult. It's a commentary on a poem-text (of which we only get one line) - about its intended audience and its internal reference system, in the guise of a meeting of the factory planning committee. 'Literary experts' isn't really 'experts', 'krafte' just means staff or employees - and the comment about recycling is a mischievous one about 'renewing' styles. Or even a recycling of the writer as raw material? The oscillations could be up or down. (I should have said 'lit-manhours'?) 'Seme' has 2 syllables and means 'sign' (Greek semeion). All poets want a long filter, and I bet mine is longer than yours. 'Rib-cages' are the subjectively 'real' subject of a poem about emotions - connected with a 'sweat-box' because it's closed on all sides (self-referential?). Actually we're talking about the reference system of something that doesn't exist - thus setting up a closed box. Or, is the poem a discussion about itself? in which it is open - only in the form of a box. 'Axial standstill' (axialer stillstand) is clearer in German - a phrase from mechanics, it means 'not moving ahead on any axis'. Actually 'standstill' might be a better translation. (except that the mention of 'axes' does draw our attention to the reference system within the text). 'Stump' is a pun, could also mean 'numb'. Where I say 'dead point' the text includes the word for 'piston' - something probably running on air (like a text?), and which moves, mostly, only to return to its position - it cycles within a reference frame, within which its sequence is wholly predictable. Thermodynamics? didn't that branch out into a theory of information? The bit about puffing out gas may refer to an energy based theory of the psyche - in which reactions are equal to impacts - and lyric poetry relieves pressure. The 'boxes' (Kaesten) could perfectly well be the frame inside which the piston moves - 'promised' suggests they're the next model, not delivered yet. The piston could be the heart - production equipment for lyric poetry. Kennung ('emission profile') is really the distinctive signature of anything detected by instruments - a factor of unique identification which refers, ironically, to the lyric poet's need for uniqueness. Or, does this 'recognition' (the root kennen means that) bring us back to reference systems - relating a trace to a catalogue of objects - where uniqueness needs a system of distinctions and associations in order to be recognized. I get to use the word 'cycle' twice - which Stolterfoht doesn't; I lose a point here. S. likes to have words overrunning linebreaks, something I haven't reproduced because I don't like it so much. Where I say 'element' the word also means 'a member of the body' and rather often 'penis' - a song is only as good as its most primitive penis. Something 'broody' could be a reference to the basis of lyric poetry in sexual-hormonal urges - not unconnected to the steam that starts to appear. In fact the whole text seems to be undergoing a growth spurt. The 'buzzers' are reflex responses. There is of course an alternative motivation for poetry - the systematic one underlyingfachsprachen.
This is a poem by Thomas Kling:

dermagraphic (canaanite)

gazelles. gazelle-,
skin, as if well-worn. on it
image writing, and on goat vellum
and on sheepskin; of thumbnail format
ten thousand preserved pieces. how they kneel
over it! like flying blind into the palimpsest
tangle. creature fell inscriptions, breath fogged. what
a fluid. "southern fruit", breathing,
"southern fruits!", eye-catching,
recto verso, passages. BREATH INSTITUTE
(recovered). there

it was longing for us.

I have translated a lot of poems by Kling, and I don't think they resist translation in the way that some poems do. The scene is an archaeological (or philological) workshop, where people are working on recovered manuscripts written on the vellum (skin!) of gazelles, goats, and sheep; 'derma' is skin, so 'dermagraphic'. The language is Canaanite, the old language of Palestine. The scholars kneel over the texts, which are fragmented (thumbnail size). They are written on both sides (recto verso). The written surface is overwritten ('palimpsest tangle'). The 'southern fruits' are mentioned in the texts, I think - commodities. The 'breath institute' is writing - it was breath, but now it's instituted. Kling's poems often seem to come in storms of flakes - maybe of thumbnail size? Note. The Chicago Review New Writing in German issue appeared in June 2002.<