two halves of life...

the original german and english translation of friedrich holderlin's poem - halfte des lebens / the half of life, from "some poems by friedrich holderlin, published by new directions in 1943, and translation by frederic prokosch. this copy belonged to a poet who underlined and re-translated or corrected several of the poems, such as this one.

in the german original he circled the word "wo", which i'm guessing from the translation means "where". the strange thing is that the word "und" which means "and" is actually missing from the english, but that word is not circled.

as the english poem begins with the word laden, the english version of this particular poem is also laden, but with corrections rather than pears. in the third line the word "lies" is crossed out, and indeed it seems it does not exist in the german original, but was added by the translator.

in the fourth line the word "beautiful" is crossed out, but in german it says "ihr holden schwane", which google translate tells me means:"sweet her swans". next he moves the word "you" down from line five to six, and the words "in the" down from line six to line seven. in line seven, he also crosses out the words "saintly sobering", and ignores the german "ins heilignuchterne" completely.(which google translates as "into heilignuchterne").

in the bottom half he also makes a number of changes, most interesting is the repairing of the line "the light of the sun" back to the original form in german of "sonnenschein" which i assume means sunlight or sunshine; and lastly the deletion of the word "banners" and replacing it with the words "weather vanes" - which clatter more than banners anyways.

in all of this it's quite wonderful to see the original german, and to be able to compare it to the final printed translation, and then to see the poet reading and thinking and shifting things one more level to bring them closer to the german orginal's intentions - as if things had gotten lost in the first translation and found in the second...