Heinrich Boell No. 2

The second (and last) of my two amazingly lame English translations of German masterpieces by Heinrich Boell:
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Confession of a Dogcatcher

[1953]

It is only with hesitation that I admit to a profession which, though it feeds me, forces me into activities that I cannot always undertake with a clear conscience:  I am an employee of the Dog Tax Office and wander the fields of our city in order to track down unregistered pooches.  Disguised as an amicable walker, chubby and short, a cigar of medium price range in my mouth, I walk through parks and quiet streets, venture conversations with people who walk dogs, make mental notes of their names, their address, scratch the dog’s neck pretending to be friendly, knowing that it will soon yield fifty marks.

I know the registered dogs, smell it almost, feel it when a mutt with a clear conscience stands at a tree and relieves itself.  I am particularly interested in bitches that are heavy with young, that are looking forward to the auspicious birth of future taxpayers: I keep tabs on them, make precise mental notes of the date of the litter and monitor where the puppies are taken, let them grow unsuspectingly up to that stage where no one dares drown them any longer—and then hand them over to the law.  Maybe I should have elected a different profession, because I like dogs, and therefore I live in a constant state of heartache: duty and love battle in my breast, and I confess openly that sometimes the love wins.  There are dogs that I simply cannot report, to whom I—how do you put it—turn two blind eyes.  A particular meekness fills my soul now, especially because my own dog is not registered either: a mongrel whom my wife lovingly feeds, the favorite plaything of my children, who do not suspect to what an illegal thing they are giving their love.

Life is really hazardous.  Maybe I should have been more careful; but the fact that I am a keeper of the law to a certain extent strengthens my belief that I am free to continue breaking it.  My work is difficult: I crouch hours on end in thorny bushes of the suburbs, wait for barking to surge from a halfway house or barbarous yapping from a barrack where I conjecture a suspicious dog.  Or I duck behind fallen walls and ambush a fox terrier about which I know that it does not have an index card, does not have an account number.  Then I return home tired and filthy, smoke my cigar at the furnace and scratch the coat of our Pluto, who wags his tail and reminds me of the paradox of my livelihood.

Therefore it is understandable that I cherish a long walk with my wife, my children, and Pluto on Sundays, a walk on which I may, so to speak, only have platonic interest in dogs, because on Sundays even unregistered dogs are not monitored.

It is just that I must choose a different route for us to walk in future, because I have met my supervisor two Sundays in a row already, and he stops every time, greets my wife and my children, and scratches our Pluto’s coat.  But curiously:  Pluto does not like him, growls, prepares to leap, which alarms me in the highest degree, causes me to leave hastily every time, and is beginning to arouse the suspicion of my supervisor, who, with a knotted brow, watches the drops of sweat that collect on my brow.

Maybe I should have registered Pluto, but my income is small—maybe I should have taken up a different profession, but I am fifty, and at my age one no longer wants to change the line of work: in any case the hazard of my life is becoming too permanent, and I would have registered Pluto, had it still been possible.  But it is not possible any longer:  My wife has reported to my supervisor in a light conversational tone that we have already owned the animal for three years, that it has grown up with the family, inseparable from the children—and similar banter, which makes it impossible for me to register Pluto now.

In vain do I try to subdue my inner heartache by doubling my diligence at work: it does not help: I have fallen into a situation from where, it appears to me, there is no possible way out.  Although one should not muzzle the ox while he is threshing, I do not know whether my supervisor has a sufficiently flexible spirit that he would let the Bible prevail.  I am doomed, and some will consider me a cynic, but how could I have not become one, where I deal with dogs all the time …

Heinrich Boell No. 1

For my Translation Theory class, I have to translate two short pieces by Heinrich Boell into English.  Due tomorrow---which is why I'm still up, and which is why the translations are pretty lame (I may have done better if I had more time, etc.).  At any rate, I just finished the first one, so I'm posting it as my blog tonight:
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AT THE BRIDGE

They have patched my leg and given me a job where I can sit:  I count the people who cross the new bridge on foot.  It amuses them to prove their efficiency to themselves with numbers, they intoxicate themselves with this senseless nothing made of a couple of digits, and my mute mouth moves all day, all day like clockwork in piling number upon number in order to present them with the triumph of a figure in the evenings.  Their faces shine when I share the result of my shift with them, the higher the figure, the more they shine, and they have good reason to go satisfied to bed, because many thousands cross their new bridge on foot every day …

But their statistics do not add up.  I am sorry, but they do not add up.  I am an unreliable man, though I know how to give the impression that I am honest.

It is my secret pleasure to sometimes hold back one and then again, when I feel sorry for them, give them a couple as gifts.  Their happiness is in my hands.  When I am angry, when I have nothing to smoke, I post only the average, sometimes below the average, and when my heart is full, when I am merry, I let my generosity flow into a five-digit figure.  They are so happy!  They tear the results every time out of my hand, and their eyes light up, and they pat me on the back.  They do not suspect a thing!  And then they start multiplying, dividing, calculating percentages of I do not know what.  They calculate how many cross the bridge on foot each minute today and how many will have crossed the bridge on foot in ten years.  They love the future perfect, the future perfect is their specialty—and yet, I’m sorry that none of it adds up …

When my love comes walking across the bridge—and she comes twice a day—my heart simply stands still.  The tireless ticking of my heart simply stops until she has turned into the alley and disappeared.  And I keep everyone who passes during this time secret from them.  These two minutes belong to me, only to me, and I do not let them be taken from me.  And also when she comes back from her ice-cream parlor in the evenings—when she, on the other sidewalk, passes my mute mouth that must count, count, my heart stops again, and I only start counting again when she cannot be seen any longer.  And anyone who has the good luck of marching in front of my unseeing eyes during these minutes does not go into the eternity of the statistics: shadow men and shadow women, void beings who will not march along into the future perfect of the statistics …

It is clear that I love her.  But she does not know anything about it, and I also do not want her to find out.  She should not suspect to what monstrous extent she messes up all calculations, and she should march unsuspecting and innocent with her long brown hair and her delicate feet into her ice-cream parlor, and she should get a lot of tips.  I love her.  It is completely clear that I love her.

Recently, they monitored me.  My buddy who sits on the other side and has to count cars warned me early enough, and I watched out like hell.  I counted like a madman, not even an odometer can count better.  The chief statistician himself took up position over there on the other side and later compared the result of an hour with my hourly records.  I had only one fewer than him.  My love had walked by, and not on my life will I let this handsome kid be transposed into the future perfect, this love of mine shall not be be multiplied and divided and converted into a percentage of nothing.  My heart bled that I had to count instead of watching her, and I was very grateful to my buddy over there who has to count the cars.  It was about my livelihood.

The chief statistician patted me on the back and said that I am good, reliable, and trustworthy.  “One miscounted in an hour,” he said, “does not matter much.  We add a certain percentage of error anyway.  I will move that you be transferred to the horse-drawn carriages.”

Horse-drawn carriages is, of course, the scam.  Horse-drawn carriages is a springtime like never before.  There are at most twenty-five horse-drawn carriages a day, and to let the next number fall into the brain every half hour, that is a springtime!

Horse-drawn carriages would be splendid.   Between four and eight, horse-drawn carriages are not allowed on the bridge at all, and I could go for a stroll or to the ice-cream parlor, could look at her for a long time or maybe walk her part of the way home, my uncounted love …

Poems by Jim, no. 6

Sunday.  The sixth of Jim's poems that I was going to post:
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A Poem from the Edge of America

By JamesGalvin

There are ways of finding things, like stumbling on them.

Or knowing what you’re looking for.

A miss is as good as a mile.

There are ways to put the mind at ease, like dying,

But first you have to find a place to lie down.

Once, in another life, I was a boy in Wyoming.

I called freedom home.

I had walked a long time into a high valley.

A river ran through it. It was late,

And I was looking for a place to lie down,

Which didn’t keep me from stumbling

On something, believe me, I never wanted to find.

It was only the skeleton of someone’s horse,

Saddled and bridled and tied to a tree.

When I woke in the morning it was next to me.

The rider must have wandered off, got turned around

And lost. It must have been winter.

The horse starved by the tree.

When we say, what a shame, whose shame do we mean?

In earnest of stability water often rages,

But rivers find their banks again, in earnest of the sea.

This ocean I live on can’t hold still.

I want to go home to Wyoming and lie down

Like that river I remember with a valley to flow in,

The ocean half a continent away.

The horse I spoke of isn’t a reason,

Although it might be why.

Poems by Jim, No. 5

Saturday afternoon:  This is what I'm reading.  I'll spend three weeks taking a class from Jim this summer again  :)
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Fragments Written While Traveling Through a Midwestern Heat Wave

By JamesGalvin

1.

However lonely we were before

Becomes unclear

In our next loneliness.

All summer long the rain

Stayed west of the mountains.

2.

Underneath this landscape of sighs,

Is a landscape of feathers,

One of blood, and yes,

A landscape of earth and trees and sky.

The soil of Oklahoma

Is leaving again.

Heaven is west of where it falls.

3.

Down here in the level world

Oil rigs make love

To the earth beneath the wheat.

All afternoon the wind blows hot.

The river is a piece of dirty string.

Like huge somnambulating farmers,

Dust-devils work the fallow ground.

4.

The real farmers

Disk their fields on tractors

With hopeful yellow umbrellas

And raise white flags of surrender

Which keep the flying ants

From swarming near their faces.

5.

I’ll tell you what the soul is made of:

More dust.

Behind each harrow

In each field

A plume takes to the wind.

The farmers,

At last,

Are freeing themselves

By setting free the soil.

Poems by Jim, No. 4

Before getting on the highway to get my daughter for the weekend:
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Practice

By JamesGalvin

The world arrived

so carefully packed

in time,

in time to open,

it could have been

God's parachute.

We booby-trapped it.

God, you will remember

from the Old Testament,

was a terrorist.

Now He's a generalization.

We've taken to scaring ourselves.

We scare the ozone layer.

But today, still spinning

around the world's axis,

which is imaginary,

I was permitted to walk home

again through writhing spring.

Leafy things and flowers

in earnest everywhere,

ignoring fear.

If it was anything

it was a garden.

Then, by the gymnasium

I saw a girl

in a green leotard with long sleeves.

She wasn't just any girl,

she was a dancer,

which is to say only

she didn't regret her body.

She moved in it

and it moved.

She spun herself around.

She wasn't dancing, exactly,

more like she was practicing a dance,

getting the moves right,

which moved me

even more.

Sure I wanted her,

but I stood quietly

as she practiced dancing

alone, without music,

and then I continued on.

It wouldn't have been a good thing

to interrupt that solitude,

identical with her body,

or risk frightening her

with speech.

Poems by Jim No. 3

A third poem by Jim.  See what I'm excited about?  :)
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I Looked for Life and Did a Shadow See

By James Galvin

Some little splinter

Of shadow purls

And weals down

The slewed stone

Chapel steps,

Slinks along

The riverrock wall

and disappears

Into the light.

Now ropy, riffled,

Now owlish, sere,

It smolders back

To sight beneath

A dwarfish, brindled tree

That chimes and sifts

And resurrects

In something’s sweet

And lethal breath.

This little shadow

Seems to know

(How can it know?

How can it not?)

Just when to flinch

Just where to loop and sag

And skitter down,

Just what to squirrel

And what to squander till

The light it lacks

Bleeds it back

And finds

My sleeping dark-haired girl—

O personal,

Impersonal,

Continual thrall—

And hammocks blue

In the hollows of her eyes.

Another poem by Jim

Here.  I'm looking forward to this so much  :)
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Testimony

By JamesGalvin

You can't step into the same

River even once,

And why would you want to? You can't

Lie down without turning your back

On someone. The sun slips

Like butter in a pan.

The eastern sky arrives

On the back stoop in its dark

Suit. It draws itself up

Full height to present its double

Rainbow like an armful of flowers.

Thank you, they're lovely.

I step outside where the wind

Lifts my hair and it's just

Beginning to rain in the sun,

And the earth silvers like a river

We're in, I swear to God,

And you can't step out of a river

Either. Not once.