Do not try under the blade of my ploughshare
to break up the grass which sings my affliction
for some despair composed of ashes
and a rotting mouthful
made from the valley of these incomprehensible people
who lack a sea and lack a conscience.
An unmistakable “despair composed of ashes” underlies Berhard’s two most famous novels: The Loser, and the previously mentioned Extinction. In the latter, the narrator, who is the son of an aristocratic Austrian family with an unrepentant Nazi past, decides to give away his entire fortune and estate to a society of Viennese Jews. This act of generosity—or, as the narrator calls it, self-destruction and self-extinction—receives about half a page in a novel with 650. The thought was already there in the above poem, which opens, “Do not try to sing my praise / and laud my poverty.” The young Bernhard was already preparing to remove himself from the equation.
There are a few mistakes in them, some of which go beyond the normal quibbles. In the first line of the first poem from In Hora Mortis, Reidel translates Zorn as “anger.” But the word Zorn is extremely powerful: it’s one of the deadly sins. In the second poem, Reidel renders a line as “Lord my eye sees what afflicts you / and brings my children to tears in your blood.” The German of the second line is “und meinen Kindern Weinen treibt ins Blut,” which is closer to “and forces tears into my children’s blood.” The tears enter their bodies and mix with their blood; grief permeates their being. The formula “to bring to tears” is a cliché that doesn’t exist in the original, and it waters down the line.
Reidel opens a poem from Under the Iron of the Moon this way: “In winter everything is simpler / for you need no world / nor the sea.” This is ungrammatical, which the original is not. I have a similar issue with the line, “Toward midnight snow mounts and ice.” Why not simply, “Toward midnight snow and ice mount”? Reidel seems confused by Bernhard’s word order. German allows more flexibility in these structures than English, and the additional poetic quality of a mixed-up sentence—is that Rilke there, in the shadows?—is certainly difficult to translate. Still, the English solutions in this version are too choppy.
At other moments, Reidel gets the literal meanings correct while missing the greater sense of the poem. In “The Insane The Inmates,” he chooses to stick very close to the original words, which means that the rhyming structure that makes the poem so, well, insane, gets lost. The vulgar slang trips him up as well, leading to lines like “The uniform is the in-law of the law.” It should be a little ugly, but not quite that ugly; the meaning is drowned out by the loud redundancy. Another stanza, listing the people committed to the asylum, is rhythmically brilliant and comedic in the original: