With the unveiling of my website, devoted to the music-dramas of Wagner and bearing new English translations of the poems, I owe the reader a few words on my approach to translating the German, as one who does not speak it, an incapacity which now appears to me, with perfect lucidity, as the very necessity by which this calling found me.
The fundamental error of the modern translator lies in his assumption that language is to be translated by means of language. That assumption may serve well enough for railway timetables, but it becomes altogether ruinous when applied to the supreme manifestation of the poetic-musical impulse, the Wort-Ton-Drama.
For what is the Word? It is the outwardly articulated residue of that primordial emotional necessity which, before its degradation into the conventional signs of conceptual speech, dwelt in the human breast as pure, undivided Gefühl. And what is Music, if not the restoration, through the immediate sensuous presence of Tone, of all that the Word forfeited when it submitted to the abstracting tyranny of the Understanding (Verstand)?
It follows that the translator who understands German labours under a peculiar disadvantage. No sooner has the German Word reached his ear than its conceptual significance — that significance which the Word, severed from the feeling that first gave it birth, carries about with it like a passport, stamped and countersigned by the grammarians of every university from Göttingen to Leipzig, and which it presents at every frontier as though meaning were a matter of customs and excise, and as though the officials of the Understanding, those indefatigable inspectors of declension and mood, had ever once been moved to tears by a dominant seventh — no sooner, I say, has this significance thrust itself between his innermost feeling and the musical organism than he finds himself compelled to reproduce, in the foreign tongue, precisely that which the Music had already transcended.
The German language must therefore be understood, but not known.
The true act of translation does not pass directly from one national language into another. It passes through that universal language which precedes, encompasses, and transcends them all: Music. The German Word must first be translated into Tone, where its national and grammatical particularities dissolve into the immediate expression of the purely human. Only then may it be translated out again, into the particular forms of English speech.
The translator must therefore withdraw from the tyranny of grammatical correspondence and surrender himself to what I shall provisionally designate the musical-grammatical indentation of the poetic impulse. This is not, let it be said at once, to be confused with mere metrical accentuation, that favourite instrument of the Italian librettist. He, having counted his syllables as the grocer counts his figs, imagines he has thereby done something for Poetry, when in truth he has merely furnished the soprano with a sufficient number of vowels upon which to display her throat. The public of our opera-houses, having long since ceased to expect anything of the Drama, receives that display with an applause which is itself the surest proof of how far the whole edifice of modern opera has fallen from — but of this I have spoken elsewhere, and shall speak again. The indentation of which I speak is rather the manner in which the musical phrase impresses upon the receptive consciousness the inward necessity of its own articulation. Melodic ascent, harmonic suspension, rhythmic propulsion, and final resolution together disclose the true position, weight, and necessity of every verbal element.
The English Word, then, is not translated from the German Word. The original poetic intention, having first been absorbed into the musical matrix, is brought forth anew in an act of sympathetic recreation.
The German Word must die, and it dies in Music, so that out of it the English Word may be born.
The philologist, in his customary bewilderment before every manifestation of genuine artistic necessity, will denounce this as licence. It is nothing of the kind. The translator remains bound to the original meaning. He is released only from the external arrangement of signs in which that meaning first appeared.
Indeed, it is precisely his unfamiliarity with German that allows the translator to approach the work with something like the innocence of pre-verbal consciousness. Where the German scholar hears substantives, declensions, subordinate clauses, and all the accumulated debris of grammatical civilization, the musically receptive translator hears the primal speech-melody (Sprachmelodie) rising from the still undivided unity of human feeling.
He does not ask: What English words correspond to these German words?
He asks: What English utterance does this musical manifestation of the poetic idea necessitate?
And so we arrive at the conclusion, paradoxical in appearance but artistically inescapable, that the first qualification for translating Wagner into English may be an inability to understand German.
Naturally, this incapacity must be accompanied by the most exhaustive investigation of every German word: its etymological ancestry, grammatical function, philosophical significance, and possible metaphysical implications. And when everything in a given line has been understood, let it all be forgotten before the next is begun.
For only when everything has been understood can everything be forgotten.
And only when everything has been forgotten can the Music at last begin to speak.