Poets on Translation: Vemod or, Woe-mood

Poets on Translation is a series of short essays in which poets examine the intersections of poetry and translation in relation to questions of language, identity, authorship, and more.

I remember one summer afternoon several years ago at Hald Hovegård, the old Jutlandic manor-turned-writers-retreat, not far from the city of Viborg. As we labored over what would become our second book together, House Inspections, Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen and I sat a little frustrated at the long table under oil paintings of dead Danish royalty, the room gloomy, and with a gathering darkness outside. We were struggling to identify the English counterpart to “vemod.”

English has two roots in common with vemod. Ve is a distant, Latin relative of “woe.” Mod shares its Germanic origins with “mood.” Even the weather and our surroundings seemed to underscore its distance from English, a curious strangeness. Vemod, Carsten explained to me, was a state you might find yourself in if your 95-year-old great aunt has died. She may have been ill and even welcoming the end. “You grieve her,” he told me, “and you already miss her, though you know this must be.”

We tried several solutions. Is it regret? No. Is it melancholy? Carsten shook his head.

“We have a word for melancholy,” he said. “It’s ... melankoli.”

“Or wistful,” I tried.

Wistfulness. Vemod. He reached for his English dictionary and paged through to the end. And then with a crestfallen, Buster Keaton deadpan, he said, “It’s telling me melankoli.”

In the end, we did land on “wistfulness.” I’m still mulling it over, though, years later. Now I favor an even cleaner option we hadn’t considered then. I would have offered its literal counterpart: “woe-mood.” Of course, on the one hand, that’s still not quite right. The English speaker doesn’t share the long history with “woe-mood” that Danish speakers do with their vemod. But there are gains to this approach. In rendering a likeness, the translator is also, always, poised on the verge discovery. “Woe-mood” may have closed in on a feeling heretofore unnamed in English.

Since 1997, Nielsen and I have collaborated on several books. I do not speak Danish and could not translate him confidently alone. But after 30 years I know Nielsen’s voice as if it were my own. He is our dictionary. I capture the timing of his jokes and connotations. I reimagine his surrealistic backdrop into language that carries a similar strangeness. If the idiom seems dreamlike but familiar in Danish, it should not come off utterly random in translation. I hold the voice lightly, tightening and clarifying, but maintaining Nielsen’s sense of irony, darkness, and delight whenever I can, carrying it to English like last summer’s bee’s nest, or a Fabergé egg.

While working on the title poem of House Inspections, the very opening line presented an obstacle. In a footnote, Nielsen wrote me that “Og hvad foregår der så her” was something you might imagine a police officer in Denmark asking, though with a twinge of a Jutland accent—Danish police are sometimes characterized as Jutlandic, he explained—the way in old American movies the police might speak with Irish accents. The phrase can also mean, “what’s up?” If that weren’t difficult enough, the phrase must include the words “what,” “is,” and “here,” because at the end of the poem these are the only three sounds audible through the dark alleys of the landscape. “What ... is ... here” then drives the inspections of the rest of the collection. Our solution was not completely unsatisfying. “What’s the trouble here,” imperfect but sufficient, holds the three key words and evokes the recognizable “inspector” language, while the poem’s sentences roll and bounce like sped-up policemen in a silent film:

“What’s the trouble here?” ask those of the police officers who walk about on the house roofs or with both their arms stretched out to the sides, balanced precariously up on the cornices. “What’s the trouble here,” ask the officers down on the street, squatting in front of the doors, who look in through the letter flaps. “What’s the trouble here?” is being shouted in through grated doors of gateways with only a faint echo as repartee. “What’s the trouble here?” ask police officers, who are encountering police officers, who themselves, somewhat despairing, ask the same question: “And what is the trouble here?” Even at night, while the running lights on an airplane slowly move across the sky, the questions can be heard as a hardly audible mumbling in the darkness between houses: “What ... is ... here.”

In “Literature and Literalness,” Nobel Poet Laureate Octavio Paz writes that a literary translation is not a replica but a new work altogether. “Translating poetry,” he claims, “... is a process analogous to poetic creation, but one that unfolds in the opposite direction.” He argues that a literary translation should be viewed as a unique work of art:

No text is entirely original because language itself, in essence, is already a translation: of the nonverbal world, first of all, and secondly because each sign, each sentence is the translation of another sign, another sentence. But this line of reasoning can be reversed without losing its validity: all texts are original because each text is different. To a certain degree, each translation is an invention and hence constitutes a unique text.

I find enormous solace in Paz’s words, because he suggests that we can be faithful to original texts in ways that extend beyond their literal meanings. We can be faithful to the effect this verbal object may have had upon its intended audience in the source language. In that light, we might even deem literary adaptation as a radical, connotative translation of an earlier text. In Paz’s framework, a faithful translation is entirely possible when, carefully, responsibly, we widen our view of “how”—as John Ciardi put it— a poem can mean.

All the same, I often experience woe-mood as a literary translator. I feel the weight of small moves that narrow the sense of the poem, even as I transmute it. Nielsen and I have published four collections together, and I have published two volumes with the German poet, Jan Wagner. As I assemble all the literal, formal, and connotative pieces into English, there always seems to be an extra part lying by the wayside—a word like an unused screw or an inside joke like a spare block of wood—that did not make its way into the poem. I know that translation must be. I would never have read the writers who have shaped my life and my craft, were it not for the hidden labor of artist-translators: Seamus Heaney, Stephen Mitchell, William Weaver, Gilbert Adair, Emily Wilson, and Clare Cavanagh, to name a few. But I can’t help feeling that the texts have suffered a loss. I feel vemod, just as I would for the beloved great aunt, whose life is locked behind me in its own time, its own world, distant and inimitable.