A correspondent recently asked why I don't often feature the work of poets who wrote in languages other than English. The main reason is not chauvinism but rather laziness. A poem translated is at least two poems, and twice as hard to write about.

There have been a number of very successful translations, of course. And many of us would know almost nothing about the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Hugo, Li Po and so on without translations into English. But even the most skilled translators leave a piece of their selves like a stamp over the original piece.

Today's poem is a translation of a famous song by Heinrich Heine, Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam. Heine's original is 

 Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
 Im hohen Norden auf kahler Höh'.
 Ihn schläfert, mit wei&estet;er Decke
 Umhüllen ihn Eis und Shnee.

 Er träumt von eine Palme,
 Die, fern im Morgenland,
 Einsam und schweigend trauert
 Auf brennender Felsenwand.

A literal translation (which does no justice at all to this lovely lyric) might be 

 A spruce stands alone
 in the high North on a bare prominence;
 it sleeps with a white covering,
 ice and snow surrounding it.

 It dreams of a palm tree
 which, far away in Morning-land,
 alone and silent, grieves
 on a burning wall of rock.

The poet James Thompson, in his translation, stays close to the sense of the lyric, but see how much of his own sensibility he attaches to it. Gone is the whimsical figure of "Morgenland" (which has the dual sense of "the east" and "tomorrow-land"). Where the original has the word "stand" (steht) only once, Thompson finds three places for it, completetly changing the emphasis. And I think that Thompson found a particularly Scottish translation for "auf brennender Felsenwand."

So the poem as it appears on the right is not really Heine's, but it is not Thompson's either. That makes it hard to appreciate and hard to write about, and it's why I don't like to feature translations. 1