A German metaphysical
A German metaphysical
A new translation of sonnets by Catherina Regina von Greiffenberg
A little while ago a poet and editor in Canada sent me a copy of Wonder-Work: Selected Sonnets of Catherina Regina von Greiffenberg, translated by Joanne Epp, Sally Ito and Sarah Klassen.1 Von Greiffenberg (1633-1694) was a seventeenth century Austrian poet of whom (I have to confess) I had never heard. I did not study German at school, and though I’ve been interested in German poetry since I was a teenager, and have read a fair amount of 19th and 20th century verse, the only formal class I took as a student was one of those ‘German for reading knowledge’ seminars designed to enable you to struggle through essential scholarship on Pindar or Reformation theology. For a few years in my 20s I had several friends in Germany, visited often and even spent most of one summer in Berlin: at my peak, I had passable lower-intermediate conversational German but have forgotten pretty much everything. My husband and I sometimes attempt to resort to German in order to convey something of the pas devant les enfants type — since clearly French, the traditional language for these purposes in England, is not much use in our case. Without fail, though, we are distracted within a sentence by a heated argument about half-forgotten grammar rules, and in any case the older children find my tactic of putting approximate German endings onto English words in lieu of any actual vocabulary unsurprisingly transparent.
All the same, a lot of German poetry is quite accessible to English speakers even with only a little German, because the rhythms, patterns of emphasis and metrical conventions of German are much more like English than French is — I think in general a native English speaker needs quite a lot “more” French before they can really start to hear or appreciate most French poetry compared to German.
This is a meandering way of saying that I don’t have much useful German these days, but I hugely enjoyed reading these early modern German sonnets, which are described by the press — not inaccurately — as in a ‘metaphysical’ style. This is a sensible marketing ploy, since the style is indeed quite a lot like, say, Herbert or Crashaw (although fans of Gerard Manley Hopkins will also be interested). Greiffenberg is not, of course, imitating the so-called ‘metaphysical’ English poets themselves — it’s just that those poets were part of a European-wide stylistic phenomenon better known as ‘baroque’. This term was consciously avoided by English literary critics some generations ago for religio-political reasons (essentially, it sounded too Catholic), and as a result books about English poetry still tend to talk about the ‘metaphysical’ poets as if they were a home-grown phenomenon and not, as in fact they were, the Anglicisation of a huge European-wide vogue.
But gosh Greiffenberg’s poems, call them what you will, are just awfully, unmissably good — immediate, but dense with metaphor, strung tight with rhyme and parataxis but essentially easy to read. Here’s ‘New Year’s Thoughts: When, on Holy New Year’s Day, the Moon was in Sagittarius’. I’ve put the German followed by the parallel English translation by three Canadian poets, Joanne Epp, Sally Ito and Sarah Klassen:2
Neuen Jahrs Wunsch-Gedanken: als am H. Neuen Jahrstag/ der Mond in Schützen gegangen
Ach triff/ ach triff das Ziel/ du Himmlisches Absehen/du Lieb-erhitzter Schütz’/ in meiner Glückes Scheib’!ich meyn dein’ Ehr’ und Lob/ daß ich es Herrlich treib:laß es von meinem Mund/ wie Pfeil vom Bogen gehen!laß keinen Vnglücks-Wind es von dem Zielflug wehen.Gib/ daß es Sonnen-stät in seiner Kreiß-Reiß bleib.Vnd wan der Bogen schon zerspringt/ mein schwacher Leib/acht’ ich es nicht: bleibt nur mein guter Vorsatz stehen.Ach heb’ an/ auf das Neu’ im Neuen Jahr zusegnen/weil tausend neue Pfeil der Teuffel ihm bereit.Dräh’ ihm sie selbst ins Herz. Laß mir dafür begegnender Gnad’ und Hülffe Heer/ das es mich stets geleit.Laß/ wie auf Gedeons Fell/ auf mich dein Segnen regnen.Mit neuer Hülff erschein/ in Neuer Jahres Zeit.
Here’s the English:
Strike, oh strike the target in my Fortune’s Wheel,
you heavenly inspiration, love-inflaméd archer!
My mouth shoots out your praise and honour
like arrows from a bow.
Let no misfortune’s wind deflect their flight.
Grant sun-like steadiness to stay on course,
and when my body’s weakened bow will break,
I won’t care as long as I’m resolved in my intent.
O bless now what is new in this New Year.
The devil has prepared a thousand arrows—
screw them into his heart! Instead,
lets hosts of grace and help always attend me.
As rain on Gideon’s fleece, let blessings fall on me.
Appear with your new help in this New Year.
The parallel translations are helpful: if, like me, you have some German, can “hear” German and are reading the poems aloud in the German, the translations are close enough to help you out with vocabulary and grammar. One of the most distinctive features of these poems is their use of compounds. As the editors themselves put it in the succinct and helpful introduction: ‘German is a language noted for its abundance of compound words, but even so, Greiffenberg is remarkable for her liberal use of unusual word combinations. Her metaphors are startling, extravagant, and sometimes difficult to fathom; her poetry is rich in contrast and paradox’.
The translations quite often render Greiffenberg’s compounds literally: ‘Die Wunder-Kunst’ becomes ‘your wonder-art’, ‘Jesus-Sonne’ is ‘Jesus-Sun’ and so on. At other times, especially with the more strange and complex compounds, they expand or rephrase a little to make the meaning clear. ‘O Lieb’-Angst-heisser Schweiß’ (literally, ‘O love-anguish-hot Sweat’) becomes ‘Sweat, hot with anguished love’.3 In the poem quoted above, the dense line ‘Gib/ daß es Sonnen-stät in seiner Kreiß-Reiß bleib’ becomes ‘Grant sun-like steadiness to stay on course’. The challenge of translating some of these compounds reminded me of remarks I made last year about translating Sanskrit.
The poems are all, broadly speaking, devotional, but fall otherwise largely into two groups: those occasioned by specific moments in the scriptural narrative of the life and death of Christ (such as the scourging, the crowning with thorns, the resurrection and so on) and those keyed to moments in the calendar year (such as New Year, spring and harvest). A series of devotional poems tracking the stages of the crucifixion is perhaps not a very common form today, but it’s very typical of the seventeenth century, both by Catholic and Protestant poets. (George Herbert’s Latin epigram sequence Passio Discerpta is a good example.)
Unsurprisingly, von Greiffenberg’s style is soaked in scripture, and especially the most vivid and poetic parts of the Hebrew Bible. The beginning of ‘Spring Delight in Praise of God (I)’, for instance, strongly recalls Psalm 96.12:
Jauchzet/ Bäume/ Vögel singet! danzet/ Blumen/ Felder lacht!
springt/ ihr Brünnlein! Bächlein rauscht! spielet ihr gelinden Winde!
Rejoice, all trees! Birds burst into singing! Flowers dance
in laughing fields! Fountains leap up! Brooklets murmur, breezes play!
In the Geneva translations, the scriptural verse runs: “Let the field be joyful, and all that is in it: let all the trees of the wood then rejoice.”
That she’s perhaps thinking of the psalmist here may be confirmed by the second half of the sonnet, which turns from the celebration of nature to that of man, encouraging all to return the hymn of praise in ‘poetry and play’:
Du vor alles/ Menschen Volck/ seiner Güte Einfluß Ziele!
aller Lieblichkeit Genießer; Abgrund/ wo der Wunderfluß
endet und zu gut verwendet seinen Lieb-vergulten Guß.
Gott mit Herz/ Hand/ Sinn und Stimm/ lobe/ preiße/ dicht’ und spiele.
Laß/ vor Lieb’ und Lobes-Gier/ Muht und Blut zu Kohlen werden/
lege Lob und Dank darauff: Gott zum süssen Rauch auf Erden.
For this passage the translation runs:
And you, all people, are the aim and purpose of that goodness,
recipient of loveliness. You are the depth and destination where
love-gilded wonder-flow becomes and over-flow of grace.
Therefore let heart, hand, mind, and voice praise God with poetry and play.
Let lavish love and praise turn your very selves to burning coals.
Upon them lay your offerings of gratitude: let sweet aromas fill the earth.
In a modest and moving afterword, the three poets who collaborated on the edition — two from the German-speaking Mennonite community — explain straightforwardly that they have not attempted to convey the musicality of the poetry or its strict adherence to form, focusing instead on the devotional quality and content of the verse. As a result, the English versions are much less tight than the originals: there’s a lot lost as a result, of course, but on the whole this makes sense for a bilingual edition. This is especially so because the selection of Greiffenberg’s verse included here consists entirely of sonnets, a form still so familiar in English that I think anyone with enough literary interests to look at this book will be able to imagine at least the approximate shape and pace of these poems, even if they have no German at all. Overall, the editors steer, I think, a fair mid-course among the many difficult decisions faced by any such project, even if the parallel versions do finally (for me, at least) read like good translations rather than poems themselves.
The book does not seem to be on Amazon anywhere (do correct me in comments if I’m wrong), but you can buy the book from the press here. If anyone knows of other interesting translations or bilingual editions of Catharina von Greiffenberg, or can shed any further light on her arresting style, do be in touch.
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A quick bit of housekeeping now — we’re away next week (it’s the school holidays in Paris), so there’ll be no newsletter next Thursday. Here are a couple of recommendations to keep you going instead:
— Those of you not on Twitter (X) may have missed a revival of the “is Mary Oliver any good?” debate over the last week. Most of this has been pretty unedifying, but here is a genuinely excellent contribution to the discussion, by far the best thing I’ve read on it so far:
— I was touched and honoured at the start of this week to see that Tina Beattie had written a fascinating essay which takes as its starting point my piece from last week on some links between Tamil poetry, Yeats and Simone Weil. As a graduate student, I ran a student society for a couple of years which involved regularly inviting speakers. Of all those I hosted, Tina’s talk was the one that has stayed with me the most so it was really a treat, twenty years later, to read such a thoughtful response from her to my own piece:
This great little edition is published by CMU Press — the publishing house of the Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg. I would certainly never have come across it if I hadn’t been sent it.
The editors have chosen to reproduce in the German text the virgules ( / ) which Greiffenberg used as form of punctuation or perhaps sometimes something more like a ‘breathing mark’.
This example is from the poem ‘Uber meines Jesu blutigen Lieb- und Schmerzen-Schweiß’ (‘My Jesus, Sweating Blood in Love and Pain’).
Thanks! I had never heard of her, or this broader context for the English poets. This was a great pleasure to read, including the discussion of compounds. And heavens, I had forgotten about ”German For Reading Knowledge.” I took a course with that name too, for similar reasons. One had to pass tests in both German and French — basically, translate a page or two of an academic article in one's field — as part of the general exams. Above all, it was practically necessary, since so much of the scholarship in the field was in German or French. I imagine that those requirements no longer exist in English-speaking countries…
Lots to look at here. The rhymes in “Neuen Jahrs Wunsch-Gedanken” are basically the same two vowel sounds throughout. You could almost say the rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA ABABAB. Wouldn’t that be unusual in an English sonnet?
I wasn’t sure who this poem prayer is addressed to. My first thought was Cupid. But I guess it’s the moon, as hinted at in the title.
I wonder if the slashes function like Dickinson’s hyphens, although I don’t know if there’s consensus on how those hyphens should be read. Interesting that von Greiffenberg even included a slash in the title, which in the English becomes a comma.
https://poets.org/poem/im-nobody-who-are-you-260