Melancholy: a Translation

Before continuing to the rest of the article, read the following translation and form an unadulterated opinion of it:

Melancholy

Weak blue shadows.  Oh her dark eyes,
That linger long as they pass me.
Guitar sounds take the Fall gently
In the garden, gone in brown lye.
Nymphish hands make ready the heavy
Gloom of Death, on rosy breasts pry
Expired lips, and in black lye
Sodden locks of the Sun-child float.

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I decided to translate a German poem called "Melancholie" by the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. Because I'm not an academic or a professional translator, and this is my first time translating poetry, I won't claim that this is a very good rendition — but I decided to publish it here with some commentary in case anyone is interested.

The original poem can be found on wikisource. It has a rhyme structure of "A B B A B A A B", and each line contains the same number of syllables (namely, 11). In my translation I decided to preserve the rhyme structure with the exception of the last line, for which I couldn't find a good rhyme. I also made every line consist of 8 syllables, because I felt that terseness and equality of length mattered more than keeping the length at exactly 11 syllables. Equal length of lines means that all the rhymed syllables occur at a regular interval when spoken. However, the rhymes don't all fall on the same "beat" because, as far as I could tell, the original poem was not in meter. Also, the rhymes in my translation are a bit weaker, since the German version actually rhymes disyllables: "-augen" and "-eiten".

A more romantic way to translate the second line is "That linger long in passing me". Note, however, that it's in iambic tetrameter, while all the other lines don't have a strong sense of meter. Some would say that such a meter throws the rest of the poem off, or stands out too much, so in the end I decided to weaken the meter down to what you see above.

Something you occasionally hear English writers boast about is the fact that our language has an evocative assortment of Anglo-Saxon (Germanic) and Romance words, and we can choose which ones to use depending on the register or effect we wish to achieve. It helped with this poem to restrict myself to mostly Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, since that gets closer to the original sound of the poem and also has many of the same rhyming pairs as in German. For example, "eye" and "lye" rhyme just as "Augen" and "Laugen" do.

Some impressions and ideas are inevitably lost in translation, and new things also get introduced which aren't present in the original. Ignoring the fact that this translation was just an exercise, we can question whether it was necessary to translate "Melancholie" from German to English. Some poems are extremely long and written in a difficult language like ancient Greek or classical Chinese. This poem is short and was written in a comparatively accessible language, so I encourage you to learn German if you want to gain a better understanding of it.