Entschlafen
Entschlafen, ent-
away-slept away-
träumt
dreamt
nicht einmal
not even
ein Halm.
a straw
Denk es,
think it
und zur Kugel
and to-a ball
nimm dich
pull you
zusammen.
together
Die meisten
the most
Sterne
stars
sind leblos.
are lifeless
(Meister 1979:102)
The word "entschlafen" is striking because it is both lexicalized with a particular meaning and also inherently ambiguous. As a lexicalized participle it has the meaning 'died'. The rich derivational morphology of German makes it possible to coin new words fairly freely: ent- means to free from (as in entlasten, to unburden, from Last, burden) but also to move away (as in entkommen, to escape, from kommen, to come). Schlafen means to sleep; the past participle "entschlafen" could therefore either mean 'died' or be a new coinage meaning to have gone away into sleep or to have escaped out of sleep. The second word in the poem, which does not have a lexicalized meaning at all, could mean either to be lost in dream or to have escaped out of dreams. In an article which looks at how Relevance Theory might affect the translation of this poem (Boase-Beier 2004а), I argue that this initial ambiguity sets off a train of further ambiguities throughout the poem. However, what I want to focus on here is the way the final stanza of the poem, which contains a near anagram of the poet's name, gives a clue to the particular state of mind of someone thinking about death. The poem in translation reads as follows:
Out of sleep, out
of dream,
not even
a straw.
Think this
and pull
yourself into
a ball.
Most of
my stars
are lifeless.
(Boase-Beier 2003c:113)
There is a complex cognitive state embodied in this poem. Death is envisaged as freedom, as loss, and as inevitable, in stanza 1. Ent- suggests both freedom and loss, the image of a straw, something which one might clutch at,though it does not exist. The idiom in the second stanza "pull yourself together" is begun but then changed half-way through to suggest a protective drawing in. Death is thus both not to be feared - so one should pull oneself together - and to be feared -so one should draw oneself in. The final stanza changes from imperatives and the "you" of stanza 2 to the speaker himself, who is identified by "meisten Sterne" as the poet. Stars are bright but dead which is both positive (they are still there, they still shine, though they consist of dead material) and negative (they might seem bright but they are dead). In this translation it is the contradictory nature of thoughts about death which has driven my reading of the poem, and the clues are in particular three stylistic features:
i) the double meaning of ent-
ii) the mix of an idiom suggesting resignation and control with an image suggesting fear and hiding
iii) the near-anagram of Ernst Meister in stanza 3
This in turn has led me to translate ent- the first time with "lost" and the second time with "free", both words which in themselves can suggest either a positive escape oг a removal. It has further led to combining the idiom "pull yourself together" with "into a ball", which is what a hedgehog does to hide. And it has prompted the insertion of "my" in stanza 3 to suggest both the poet's name Meister ("my stars") and to draw attention to the change from the externalizing, second-person address of the second stanza to the internalized, first-person description of the final one. It links the poet's name
with the word “lifeless”, suggesting a preoccupation with death. I would argue that it is the importance of this mental state, this preoccupation with the approach of death, and the combination of fear and acceptance which goes with it, that has determined the apparent deviation in the final stanza from the source text, which could simply have been translated as most stars are lifeless.
But it is not only in literary texts that style can be seen as indicative of mental attitude or belief. As we saw in 4.1, this especially applies to journalism. A German magazine text about a condition which supposedly affects half a percent of the German population (Focus, 14 May 2005) clearly shows the attitude of its author, Juliane Lutz, that this a serious illness. Words and phrases such a "geradezu besessen" (completely obsessed), "groteske Schicksale" (grotesque fates), "leiden" (suffer), "tragisch" (tragic), "schwere, mitunter sogar lebensbedrohliche Mangelerscheinungen" (serious and sometimes even fatal deficiencies), "katastrophal" (catastrophic), indicate the serious nature of the perceived threat. The 'illness' is given a name: "Orthorexie" (orthorexia) and the people who suffer from it are "Orthorektiker" (orthorectics). The text has many references to important authorities, such as "Detlev Nutzinger, Professor für Psychosomatik und Psychotherapie an der Universität Lübeck", which lend it gravity. The attitude this text conveys is one of fear and the need to issue warning. A documentary translation into English which kept close to the German would sound pompous and would risk seeming to be a parody of other articles warning of mysterious diseases and afflictions. Yet it is important that the mind style is not lost, because the article does not have any information value; it merely expresses opinion. An instrumental translation would therefore have to tone down "catastrophic", perhaps, to serious, "completely obsessed" to obsessed, and would not need to give us a designation for people suffering from the supposed condition, nor would it need to explain the etymology of the name of the illness, as the German text does. What, in fact, translation would need to do, would be to imagine an attitude more likely in an author of a short article in a similarly popular English magazine.
What this discussion would appear to suggest is that the writing of an instrumental translation demands that we see the style as indicating the attitude of the original writer; this may in fact be a major component of the meaning of the text.
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