Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

Just put a new article on translation up on my website. Translating the Not Quite is about my efforts to translate a German poem that wasn't quite in German, since it was by the Swiss German poet Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826), who wrote in the Alemannic dialect. I've included the original and translation in an appendix; for a poem written about 200 years ago it contains some strangely contemporary end-of-the-world forebodings. The article was originally written for a university but ironically enough they said it wouldn't do because it wasn't in the dialect they favoured, namely academic-speak.

Been re-reading a little book called Five Essays on Translation (ed Katja Krebs & Christopher Meredith, pub. University of Glamorgan, ISBN 18405411202) which arose from a conference on the politics of literary translation at my uni in 2003. There's an essay in it called "Sleeping with the Enemy" by the writer and translator Grahame Davies, in which he talks both about the ethics of translating from a minority language into a majority one and about the effect bilingualism, and the act of translating, have had on his own writing.
( more behind cut )

I've never been as bilingual as Davies; I have translated mostly out of other languages into English. The influence of translation on me has always been to make me look more closely at my own language and what can be done with it by those who look at it fresh. I have done a little translation from English into German, and once while living there for a while I did actually get the length of writing a published poem in German. It was also a pastiche of the style of a particular German poet, Stefan George, and I've never been sure that this wasn't really the deciding factor that caused it to come to me in German. Never happened again though....

I translated it into English later, but it wasn't really the same poem. What's interesting is that I can still recall the German version but not the English one. Here's the original for anyone who's interested (complete with slightly archaic syntax and uncapitalised nouns because that's George's style). I'll try to hunt up the English version later and put it in, just to see what happened to it on the way.

( Rapunzels Hexe )