Original Poetry by Ernst Jandl

Here, I present English translations of three German-language concrete sound poems by the Austrian poet Ernst Jandl. A concrete and sound poet associated with the Viennese avant-garde “Wiener Gruppe,” Jandl was regarded by many as “a master of inspired nonsense mixed with social criticism” infusing immense unwritten meaning into his spoken poetry during readings. After graduating high school amidst World War II, Jandl was drafted into the German army, an experience which left a deep trace in all of his works, contributing to his anti-war, anti-fascist radicalism. 

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When I was translating Jandl, matching and reflecting Jandl’s clever wordplay and grammatical manipulations proved to be a difficult yet creative process. For instance, the poem schtzngrmm contains only consonants, yet it lends itself to many different German words: Schützengraben (trenches), Gram (grief), Graben (graves), and tot (dead) in the final line. These, mixed with dramatic performances of this poem by Jandl informed by the realities of war, form a visceral criticism of conflict. 

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To encapsulate a similar vocal register, I chose to build my translation around the word “shellshocked,” which also happens to allow the word “killed,” or “k-tt” to match Jandl’s “tot.” While a heavy reliance on the “shh” sound in my translation loses the grumbling rolled “rr” sound from the original, I believe it opens a performative opportunity: The “shh” sound is much easier to filter and inflect when reading and can still contain onomatopoeic information like the sound of rockets, grenade fuses, and trains. While translating this poem, I matched the inflection of the words to those given in a performance by Jandl to preserve the expressiveness of the original. 

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When translating auf dem land, I wanted to stay as true as possible to the original animals and sounds described by Jandl, which proved to be a very difficult task. The poem is composed of 12 couplets, each consisting of a two-syllable animal’s name and sound with the second syllable of each word repeated eight times. To me, the most difficult part of translating this poem was finding two-syllable animal equivalents in English, particularly for animals that don’t necessarily have the same differentiation in English. For example, both gendered forms of the word “cat” are repeated in auf dem land, which I translated as “kitties” and “tomcats.” Unfortunately, this phenomenon meant I had to break the two-syllable pattern on one occasion in service of meaning: I translated “Hummeln” directly to “bumblebees” due to a lack of a two-syllable word for bees that was not “drone bees,” which I had used earlier. I also made smaller decisions on how to translate a few of the animal noises – for instance by using “lowing” for cattle instead of “mooing” to make the inner syllable repeatable. 

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In translating ottos mops, it was a challenge to maintain the meaning and wordplay of the original. The poem itself contains only the phonetic “o” sound, which I break from only with the name “Otto” to retain consistency with the original poem. Sadly, many words in the poem don’t have monosyllabic, isophonetic equivalents in English, so my translation loses a bit of meaning: “mops” couldn’t be translated directly to “pug,” so I changed it to “spot” as an equivalent dog name in English. “koks” and “obst” (coke and fruit) were changed to “pot” and “slaw” and “hofft” (hopes) to “plots.” I unfortunately had to diverge from the bluntness and shock value of “kotzt” (vomit) in the last stanza due to the lack of an equivalent word that maintains the phonetic pattern. Instead, I chose to supplement the gross humor of the situation using alliterating words, replacing “kotzt” with “hocks slop.” Although these substitutions change the meaning of the original text, I found it to be an immensely creative process to try and devise words to fit into the grammatical scheme while maintaining as much of the original story as possible.