[Glenn Wright]

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) is best known for his plays, for his contribution to the theory of drama, and for having written the lyrics to Bobby Darin’s hit song, “Mack the Knife.” His life was tragically marred by two world wars, which caused him to seek refuge in several countries and which claimed the life of his oldest son. His grandparents were pacifists who instilled their values in him at an early age. As a student during World War I, asked to write an essay on Horace’s famous line, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” he was almost expelled from school for writing that it was propaganda and that only fools could be convinced to die for their country. This poem, “Die Bücherverbrennung,” was written in response to the book burnings by Nazis during World War II. Heinrich Heine, whose books were among those burned for being “decadent,” had prophetically said, “Where books are burned, in the end people will also be burned.” (Source: Michael R. Burch, All Poetry)

Although the original German poem was unrhymed and unmetered, I used fourteener couplets in my translation.

The Book Burning
by Bertolt Brecht

When those in power commanded books befouled with harmful thought
to publicly be burned, on all sides teams of oxen brought
the carts piled high with volumes to the bonfires they had lit.
A gifted, banished poet found the list in which was writ
those to be burned. In horror he discovered that his name
had been left off. He hurried to his writing desk to frame
his anger, snatched a fluttering pen, and wrote, “Don’t treat me so!
Burn me! Don’t abandon me! With God as my judge, you know
my books have always told the truth. I’ve written honestly,
and now you’ll treat me like a liar! I order you: Burn me!”

————————
Edits:
L1: When those in power commanded books tainted with harmful thought > When those in power commanded books befouled with harmful thought
L2: publicly to be burned. . . > to publicly be burned. . .
L4: A gifted, banished poet found the list on which was writ > A gifted, banished poet found the list in which was writ
L6: had been left off. Inflamed with rage, he snatched his pen and came > had been left off. He hurried to his writing desk to frame
L7: in anguish to his writing desk and wrote, “Don’t treat me so! > his anger, snatched his flying quill, and wrote, “Don’t treat me so! > his anger, snatched a fluttering pen, and wrote, “Don’t treat me so!
L8: Burn me! Don’t leave me behind! God as my judge, you know > Burn me! Don’t leave me behind! With God as my judge, you know > Burn me! Don’t abandon me! With God as my judge, you know
L9: that I have always told the truth. My books are error-free, > my books have always told the truth. I’ve written honestly,
L10: and now you’ll treat me as a liar! I order you: Burn me! > and now you’ll treat me as a liar! I order you: Burn me!” > and now you’ll treat me like a liar! I order you: Burn me!”

German Original
from Babelmatrix

Die Bücherverbrennung
von Bertolt Brecht

Als das Regime befahl, Bücher mit schädlichem Wissen
Öffentlich zu verbrennen, und allenthalben
Ochsen gezwungen wurden, Karren mit Büchern
Zu den Scheiterhaufen zu ziehen, entdeckte
Ein verjagter Dichter, einer der besten, die Liste der
Verbrannten studierend entsetzt, daß seine
Bücher vergessen waren. Er eilte zum Schreibtisch
Zornbeflügelt, und schrieb er mit fliegender Feder, verbrennt mich!
Tut mir das nicht an! Laßt mich nicht übrig! Habe ich nicht
Immer die Wahrheit berichtet in meinen Büchern? Und jetzt
Werd ich von euch wie ein Lügner behandelt! Ich befehle euch: Verbrennt mich!


Crib:

The Book Burning

When the regime commanded books with harmful knowledge
publicly to burn, and everywhere
oxen were forced to pull carts with books
to the bonfires, a banished poet, one of the best, discovered,
studying the list of those burned, horrified, that his
books were overlooked. He hurried to his desk,
inspired by anger, and wrote with flying quill, “Burn me!
Don’t do this to me! Don’t leave me behind! Have I not
always reported the truth in my books? And now
I will be treated by you as a liar! I command you: Burn me!”

[Carl Copeland]

Hi, Glenn. I like this quite a bit as is, but you’re expecting criticism, so here goes:

L1-2: The first clause is a little stilted grammatically, and I’d prefer something like “When those in power decreed that books … should publicly be burned.”

L4: I’d write something “in” a list, not “on” it. The archaic “writ” adds a solemnity that I think I like here.

L6-7: The implied direction of “came” seems slightly off to me, but I don’t think that’s much of a problem. Your N, unlike Brecht’s, is picking up a pen somewhere and taking it to his writing desk—possible, but less likely. Also, it’s a pity to lose “flying quill.” Here’s an idea you can play around with:

had been left off. He hurried to his desk and, in the flame
of anger, took his flying quill and wrote, “Don’t treat me so!

L8: This is the only line with 13 syllables, and I get hexameter. The easiest fix would be “Do not” instead of “Don’t.” For me, “God as my judge” isn’t idiomatic enough, so it sounds almost like the N is addressing God. How about “God be/is my judge”?

L9: I get two different feelings from “My books are error-free”: 1) the N is a know-it-all; 2) he has a good copyeditor. Could you do something with “honesty” or “honestly”?

L10: You need a closing quotation mark.

I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a language you don’t translate from, Glenn. Would you care to treat us to something from Tocharian B?

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Carl—

I was depending on you to come through with some helpful and perceptive comments, and you did not disappoint me! These suggestions were very welcome and I used almost all of them.

Originally Posted by Carl Copeland

L1-2: The first clause is a little stilted grammatically, and I’d prefer something like “When those in power decreed that books … should publicly be burned.”
I wanted to keep the more peremptory tone of “commanded,” but could not use “should” in that construction. My solution involves splitting an infinitive, but everyone seems to be doing that with impunity these days.

L4: I’d write something “in” a list, not “on” it. Okay. I don’t hear a difference, but I’ll defer to your cultured ear.

L6-7: The implied direction of “came” seems slightly off to me, but I don’t think that’s much of a problem. Your N, unlike Brecht’s, is picking up a pen somewhere and taking it to his writing desk—possible, but less likely. Also, it’s a pity to lose “flying quill.” Here’s an idea you can play around with:

had been left off. He hurried to his desk and, in the flame
of anger, took his flying quill and wrote, “Don’t treat me so!
This is golden! “Came” was obviously only there as a rhyme. I decided to use “frame” instead of “flame,” since it didn’t seem logical for him to ask to be ignited if he was already on fire.

L8: This is the only line with 13 syllables, and I get hexameter. The easiest fix would be “Do not” instead of “Don’t.” For me, “God as my judge” isn’t idiomatic enough, so it sounds almost like the N is addressing God. How about “God be/is my judge”? I found an extra syllable by adding “with” to “God as my judge.”

L9: I get two different feelings from “My books are error-free”: 1) the N is a know-it-all; 2) he has a good copyeditor. Could you do something with “honesty” or “honestly”? Another brilliant suggestion!

L10: You need a closing quotation mark. Done

Thanks so much, Carl!

Glenn

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Glenn Wright

L1-2: The first clause is a little stilted grammatically, and I’d prefer something like “When those in power decreed that books … should publicly be burned.”
I wanted to keep the more peremptory tone of “commanded,” but could not use “should” in that construction. My solution involves splitting an infinitive, but everyone seems to be doing that with impunity these days.

Your revision bypasses my concern, but it wasn’t much of a concern to begin with, so if you want “commanded” and don’t care for the split infinitive, by all means revert. I consider the rule against split infinitives to be a non-rule, but I’m as conditioned by it as anyone, so I follow it when I feel I can.

Originally Posted by Glenn Wright

L8: This is the only line with 13 syllables, and I get hexameter. The easiest fix would be “Do not” instead of “Don’t.” For me, “God as my judge” isn’t idiomatic enough, so it sounds almost like the N is addressing God. How about “God be/is my judge”? I found an extra syllable by adding “with” to “God as my judge.”

By adding the extra syllable where you did, you’ve changed trochee-iamb to iamb-anapest, so I still get hexameter, but it’s ok with me if it’s ok with you.

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Carl—

Thanks for sticking with me on this. Your thoroughness is very reassuring!

Originally Posted by Carl Copeland

Your revision bypasses my concern, but it wasn’t much of a concern to begin with, so if you want “commanded” and don’t care for the split infinitive, by all means revert. I consider the rule against split infinitives to be a non-rule, but I’m as conditioned by it as anyone, so I follow it when I feel I can. I thought that “should” sounded more advisory than mandatory. I can live with the split infinitive because I can’t find a better way to preserve the meter.

By adding the extra syllable where you did, you’ve changed trochee-iamb to iamb-anapest, so I still get hexameter, but it’s ok with me if it’s ok with you. The problem was the phrase “Don’t leave me behind.” I was stressing “me” and you weren’t. I swapped it out for a less metrically ambiguous phrase, albeit a bit less literal.

I think we’re almost there! Thanks again!
Glenn

[Clive Watkins]

Sorry, Gregg, but this doesn’t work for me. My discomfort is on two levels.

First, I am not at all persuaded that turning Brecht’s characteristically – indeed, programmatically – plain poem into such an evidently literary piece succeeds, either as a representation in English of what I believe I am getting from the German, or on its own terms.

Brecht’s poem is, I think, unmetred, though its overall pulse might be loosely described as dactylic. It is also unrhymed. For this reason alone, the rhymed fourteeners you have employed strike me as inappropriate. Moreover, though others may of course disagree, fourteeners have strongly archaic or comic associations. Brecht’s poem is neither archaic nor comic. Pound claimed to like the fourteeners he found Arthur Golding using in his version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (from 1567) though he also warned that Golding’s verse “should be read as natural spoken language” and admitted that the metre was “susceptible to bad reading”: “A bad reader of fourteeners is almost certain to tub-thump”. Robert Lowell’s response to this was as follows (in The Kenyon Review in 1955): “Even if one is careful not to tub-thump, and reads Golding’s huge, looping ‘fourteeners’ for “sense and syntax”, as Pound advises, even then one trips; often the form seems like some arbitrary and wayward hurdle, rather than the very backbone of what is being said.” I agree with this judgement. (I am aware that elsewhere on the Sphere there is a thread on Chapman’s fourteeners.)

My difficulty in hearing Brecht in your version is not just a consequence of the metre. Some of your word-choices lead in the same direction. In register, the following expressions strike my ear as either “poetic” or in some other way elevated by comparison with the original: “befouled”, “piled high”, “volumes”, “gifted”, “writ”, “frame / his anger”, “fluttering pen”, “With God as my judge”. To this I would add the fact that you have chosen to rhyme.

The combined effect of these three things – unsuitable metre, rhyme, and words of a inappropriate register – is to miss the direct plainness and power of the original.

Within this wider point about the mode of your version, other things bother me, too. At certain points in your version, I wonder if you have misunderstood and thus misrepresented the German or have overlooked something in the original.

In line 1, “those in power” is intended to cover “Regime”, but in German the noun carries something of the specifically negative and authoritarian force that “regime” has in English: “those in power” seems to me blander and more generalizing.

In your line 4, “gifted” misses the conversational informality of “einer der Besten”, its throw-away quality. It also makes an absolute of what Brecht offers as a relative.

Your rhymed version splits the long opening sentence (from “als das Regime” to “vergessen waren”) in three, occasionally a wise move in translating German. In this case, however, your rhymed version (the crib has the structure right) treats Brecht’s syntax somewhat freely. You have the poet discover the list of books to be burned; but “Liste” is the object of “studierend”; the object of the main verb (“entdeckt”) is the noun clause “dass seine / Bücher vergessen waren”. My point may seem minor, but the effect of the change you have made is to take syntactical air and energy out of the crucial discovery by the poet that his books have been omitted.

Another expressive consequence of breaking the first sentence in three is to remove the contrast Brecht has created between the long, periodic opening and the urgent and rapid movement of the rest, both in what is said and in its grammatical brevity and immediacy.

Finally, as to detail, there seems to me a good deal of padding and some clumsiness here, places where you have expanded on the original and thereby lost much of its crispness. Some of this appears to stem from the need to fill out the metre and to find a rhyme. In the first line, “befouled” seems an instance: it implicitly repeats (and amplifies) the work done in German by a simple preposition – and which could be done by a simple preposition in English. In line 2, “to publicly be burned” has to be put in this clumsy way because the metre requires it. More natural would be “to be burned in public”. In the next line, “carts piled high with volumes” stands for the plain “Karren mit Büchern” but conveniently fills out the line. The rhyme in this line is achieved by the inserted and logically redundant relative clause “they had lit”. Likewise, “to frame / his anger” is demanded by the rhyme, though it in no way catches either the sense or the effect of the German, where, for once, Brecht heightens his language in the invented compound “Zornbeflügelt”. In the next line, “snatched a fluttering pen” gets, in “snatched”, some of the urgency of the German, which “fluttering” immediately weakens. Brecht at this point makes explicit that the poet’s letter – and the rest of the poem – is addressed to the “Machthaber”, the ruler, the wielder of power, but both your crib and your metrical version omit this. Of course, “With God as my judge” is pure invention though, again, it helpfully fills out the fourteener. Finally, “I’ve written honestly” embroiders and in my view weakens what in the German is straightforward.

Finally, in the original of the text as I have it, the last two words – “Verbrennt mich!” – are set on a new line, not tagged on after “Ich befehle euch”. I think this formatting is significant in marking an unfolding rhetorical pattern. As Heine’s famous remark asserts (which you mention in your head-note), the burning of books leads to the burning of people. The poem’s last two words repeat these already twice-repeated words from the letter – your version has dropped one of the iterations – by which point “mich” has lost its metonymic force (the author as standing for his books) and instead become horrifyingly literal.

I apologize for being so negative, Gregg. I read this when you first posted it and have, in a sense, been fretting about it ever since. Still, make of these observations what you will: they are just things you might want to ponder – and reject.

Good luck with this!

Clive

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Clive—

Thank you for your considered, thorough, and well-articulated response to my translation. I do not usually work in German, so I appreciate the comments of readers who have a more confident grasp of its nuances. Let me share my thoughts on the two points you brought up: form and diction.

The fourteener, like many older forms, including the sonnet or villanelle, began with very narrow restrictions on the tones and subject matter for which it was appropriate. While its older associations are comic or Falstaffian, I thought rhymed fourteener couplets were well suited to capturing the dark irony and intense emotionalism of Brecht’s piece. In spite of its deadly serious subject matter, Brecht’s poem depends for its effect on very darkly humorous irony. Fourteeners have been used in some very unlikely places. A. E. Stallings used rhymed fourteener couplets for her translation of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, showing, I think, that this venerable form is more versatile than one might expect. Fourteeners are really just ballad stanzas in cut time. They carry the same rhythm as a ballad, but move more quickly because half of the line ends disappear.

On the issue of diction, I feel much less confidence in my full understanding of the German original. I assumed that references to “Ochsen,” “Karren,” and a “Feder” added an antiquated feeling to the piece that justified the choice of older-sounding English expressions like “befouled” and “writ.” I confess that I was at a complete loss about what to do with “fliegender Feder.” How does one communicate in English the exact emotion of the poet carried in German by this striking metonymy? I also admit that filler (like “With God as my judge”) is to be avoided if at all possible. The requirements of rhyme and meter often make this difficult.

Thanks again for weighing in. You have offered some helpful and perceptive comments.

Glenn