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- 01/07/2019
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Translation Trashbin - 20. Warum ziehst du mich unwiderstehlich
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Lyssa turned me on to a book examining the same-sex loves of Goethe. It's called The Tiger's Tender Touch, and many of the cited poems are spurning me to translate them openly and honestly. His work deserves renewed effort in English-language LGBT belle-lettres.
I think the scenario unfolded in this poem will be familiar to any and almost every Gay person.
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Translation of:
Warum ziehst du mich unwiderstehlich
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Warum ziehst du mich unwiderstehlich
Ach in jene Pracht?
War ich guter Junge nicht so selig
In der öden Nacht!
Heimlich in mein Zimmerchen verschlossen,
Lag im Mondenschein
Ganz von seinem Schauerlicht umflossen,
Und ich dämmert' ein;
Träumte da von vollen goldnen Stunden
Ungemischter Lust,
Hatte schon dein liebes Bild empfunden
Tief in meiner Brust.
Bin ich's noch, den du bei so viel Lichtern
An dem Spieltisch hältst,
Oft so unerträglichen Gesichtern
Gegen über stellst?
Reizender ist mir des Frühlings Blüte
Nun nicht auf der Flur;
Wo du, Engel, bist, ist Lieb' und Güte,
Wo du bist, Natur.
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Tell me how you pull me so ardently,
Ah, with such sumptuous lures –
When dull, I embraced it fervently,
But now, this night you've made yours.
Secretly locked behind my chamber door,
Lying in dark moonlight haze,
Enveloped, I doze as never before
Watched under his gentle gaze.
Dreamlike, presaging these dear golden hours,
A far too passionless rest
Had fixed you already within its powers
Buried deep beneath my chest.
Yet, it's still me you saw within the light,
Sitting at the games table,
Surrounded by strangers who glimpsed our sight
And felt it enviable.
For more grateful than blossoms of springtime
In the mind's lea pastoral,
Where you are, angel, is kind love sublime;
Where you are, is natural.
This unflinchingly modern poem was written when the poet was twenty-four or twenty-five years old. According to Goethes Gedichttitel – an exhaustive scholarly work citing and documenting each and every one of Goethe’s poems, their publishing history and contextual details – the manuscript bears the name Warum ziehst du mich unwiderstehlich. Later, when it appeared in the March 1775 edition of Iris magazine, it had gained the spurious title “An Belinden” (To Belinda), which was chosen by the editor without Goethe’s knowledge or consent. The open and erotic nature of the poem, and the fact that only male pronouns appear in it, made the attachment of a female name desirable to the myth of a hetero-dominative society. That’s not to say flaws in the poet’s character kept him in later life from adding his own mythologizing of this poem, because he did to bolster his carefully cultured reputation as a ladies’ man (as opposed to a lady-man, lol).
A second aspect to this poem is the trashy, obfuscating way in which it has been rendered in English. In my recent contact with this poet’s work, I can see the impression of him as a backward-look quaker of thee's and thou's is 100% wrong. This impression is implanted in the English-speaking world by terrible translations from the 19th century hellbent on converting Goethe’s modern, clean, passionate language (rather in the manner of Walt Whitman) into 4th or 5th rate English Victorian drivel to match living-room tastes of the time. It’s not only these renditions’ willfully covering up the same-sex thrust of a poem like this, but burying it in trite clichés of the 1850s that makes them so bad. Sadly for our times, this pitiful schlock means we think of Goethe as monolithic and inapproachable, when the exact opposite is true.
Here is Edgar Alfred Browning’s 1853 translation of the fourth stanza:
Now to the card-table hast thou bound me,
‘Midst the torches glare?
Whilst unhappy faces are around me,
Dost thou hold me there?
Which compare to J. W. Morrison’s even worse version:
Is it I, she at the table places,
'Mid so many lights?
Yes, to meet intolerable faces,
She her slave invites.
Neither can be called accurate or interested in Goethe’s crisp, clean language. Both show an agenda to make the poet appear a contemporary of Milton’s. But I cite them, one, because according to the internet, there are the ‘official’ versions you will find today, and because, two, both translations are willfully anti-gay, supplying “she”s and “her”s where they do not exist in the original. These poems are like forgeries meant to deceive. When will Goethe get his day in the English language?
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