304
PARTISAN REVIEW
or liquid or massed consonants...." All this would he very well if
(1)
it were possible to imitate and to translate so accurately at the same
time and if
(2)
Morwitz and Valhope had any feeling for the affective
values of English words. The sounds and the dictionary meanings they
know; hut they have disastrously little sense of connotation and associa·
tion. The result is a mixture of mechanical precision and emotional
ineptitude.
When M. and V. come, for example, to
Trauer,
a magnificent poem
of pure statement, they reproduce the rhyme·scheme exactly. Each line
rhymes with one another, and in every case the translators write one
sincere line and one just for the rhyme. In this way the word
reave
is dragged in to rhyme with
weave
where the original is the plain word
brechen
(break). In the same poem
zutern
(tremble) is translated
languish
to rhyme with
anguish.
The need for a rhyme with cracking produces
the unthinkable phrase
frosty winds are cklcking
for
frostige Winde klchen
(laugh). Add to this that everywhere George's rare and hieratic diction
is rendered into the vulgar language of the late Victorians so that (for
instance) the recurring rhyme cliches (anguish, languish; lavish, ravish,
etc.) recall songbook translations of Lieder.
Nevertheless, Morwitz knows his George, and the translations often
help us to interpret obscure passages in the original. This
is
probably
their only use, and indeed the justification of the bqok
is
not primarily
that it contains translations but that it contains George's original at a
time when his work is otherwise unavailable. And, when all is done,
George is an excellent poet. Of the
99
poems in the new volume, about
a third are among the best written in the twentieth century. Only the
best of Rilke and Yeats can match them. George, moreover, is great in
a peculiar way. In that he bases his work not upon an accepted system.
of values but upon a subjective myth, in that he inclines more to nuance
than to irony,
in
that he has more virtuosity than imagination, in that,
like Richard Strauss, he prefers splendid orchestration to Mozartian in·
tegration, George is the greatest of all decadents. In his mastery and
presentation of one small tract of experience, in his superb control over
the dialectic of the short poem, he is the greatest of minor poets.
If
he
is also one of the most meretricious of minor prophets, he nonetheless
achieves through his prophetic pose the quality which of all moral and
aesthetic qualities is most remote from the present age: grandeur. Like
the Commandatore in
Don Giovanni
he seems a rather tiresome old man
until, transformed into a monument, he becomes master of the situation.
Eruc
RussELL BENTLEY
