Notes on Falconry

Form and substance

Yeah, we’re basically falconers

Read our translation here.

Sarah:

In “Rilke in English” (1939), W.H. Auden said, “It is presumptuous to pretend that one can ever really judge poetry written in a foreign language: one can only define the impression it makes upon oneself.” The article is a discussion of JB Leishman and Stephen Spender's then-recently published translation of the “Duino Elegies,” which Auden sums up with: “What a scholar’s opinion of these translations may be I do not know and do not very much care. There is no such thing as a perfect translation; it is a job that has to be redone for every generation.”

(Auden also said at one point that “Rilke is the finest lesbian poet since Sappho,” which later critics have interpreted as derogatory¹ but which I’m reclaiming now on behalf of lesbiankind. Rilke, welcome to the fold.)

In 1250, the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II von Hohenstaufen published De arte venandi cum avibus, a treatise on the art of falcon-hunting that was also an early zoological and ornithological text, informed by Friedrich’s own extensive experiments. Friedrich was a genius and a polymath, called stupor mundi, the wonder of the world, in his own time. He meticulously studied his birds, their eggs, their behavior, their responses to environmental stimuli. He sent men as far as Greenland to bring back hawks to add to his mews. His court was the center of the intellectual world—new schools of philosophy, art, science, theology, and literature sprang up around him like flowers. And he didn’t merely bask in it but drove it with a wide-ranging, ruthless curiosity.²

Rilke’s poem doesn’t name him. Therefore anyone not independently aware that Kaiser Friedrich II von Hohenstaufen wrote a treatise on falconry in the 13^th century, which I would venture to say is pretty much everyone, would not recognize him as the figure dictating by night in the tower in the first stanza. There’s that cinematic opening image, following the advisor up the stairs to the tower, pushing open the door, and seeing him framed there before the scribes, scribbling with their heads bent: One feels like one has sat down to watch the sequel to a movie one never saw in the first place.

Other translations have chosen to speak of the King of Sicily in those opening lines rather than simply Caesar, cracking open a door that Rilke’s intended audience may already have had a key to. Whether and when to crack open that door was something Emily and I spent many days discussing as we worked on this. Can a poem be too oblique? Is it permissible to try to explain how a word should be understood, when the poem turns on the word and the word is incomprehensible? Is a poem with a thicket that dense in it a bad poem?  

There are sounds here English doesn’t have and can’t imitate. The line “kühnen fürstlichen Traktat,” ending the first stanza – it’s not just that English doesn’t contain the vowel ü, it’s that English has neither of the two sounds ü makes in that line. The ü in kühn is a long vowel, the ü in fürstlichen is short, referring to the amount of time you spend with each vowel in your mouth. Likewise Traktat: Same a, but short in the first syllable and long in the second.

Then there’s sentence structure. The third stanza, starting with the new sentence on the second line, is a run-on sentence of gentle, round, chiming sounds—sprung, Erinnerung, tieftiefinneres—that rolls downhill until it crashes into verachten, a verb fully interrupted by a glottal stop, the kind of word that inspires those jokes about how all German speakers sound angry. It’s not as easy to erect this kind of wall at the end of an English sentence—that much buildup to the verb tends to sound stilted and contrived.³ 

When English is sufficient to the wordplay, though, it feels like winning the lottery. Begreifen, in the second line of the final stanza, means “to grasp” in the same mental sense as in English – it encompasses to comprehend, to understand, to seize upon, to grok. I believe that Rilke chose that word because of its closeness to ergreifen, which means “to grasp” in the physical sense, as with a hand or a talon. It’s a reminder of the physical and mental connection between bird and man in the instant before they’re borne aloft. The double meaning stands in English. Thank God.

I first read Falken-beize in 2012, in a book of Rilke’s complete works I bought in a cathedral bookshop during my study abroad year. About three weeks ago, I finally found a German paper in the digital archive explaining that aufgebräut is an archaic term referring to the medieval practice of sewing a young falcon’s eyelids shut.⁴ Birds with their eyes closed lose enough of their fear of humans that they can be trained. The practice was fully replaced with hooding not long after Friedrich’s time.

I’ve seen others translate the word as turbulent, or frightened. I found no translation that conveyed the word’s actual meaning. I don’t know if the previous translators simply suffered from a lack of high-quality PDFs, if this word was not available to them without impossible effort, or if they, too, were afraid of too much obscurity. Emily and I spent days looking for a more intelligible way to communicate everything aufgebräut does: The imposition of blindness, the animal instinct of fear, the cruelty inflicted by humans seeking to control the living, feeling things around them. To understand this word requires one to find a path back to Friedrich’s time, to enter his world, where this kind of cruelty was normal, even necessary, in pursuit of the highest art. With aufgebräut Rilke offers not a path but a map to find the path, intentionally obscure.

What is the translator’s obligation to lay out the path, rather than just translate the map? Should we make Friedrich’s world more immediately intelligible? We spent long evenings arguing this through, one line at a time. We sent each other emails and breakup-length texts laying out our positions. We would drop the discussion for three or four days at a time in the hope that, returning to it, the right word would catch us by surprise.  

In the end, we always deferred to Friedrich the expert. The poem is called Falconry—it could equally well be translated The Art of Falconry. The poem’s not about what I or any other amateur knows about falconry. It’s about the what the high king of all falconers knows. It’s not about the treatise, but about why Friedrich was the only one who could write the treatise.  

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Emily:

I have about five months of Duolingo-grade German. Back in college I wrote favorite quotes from Stephen Mitchell’s Rilke translations on printer paper in Sharpie and taped them to my dorm room walls. At the shadowed crossing of heart-roads / there is no temple for Apollo. I’d never read Falken-beize.

My undergraduate studies involved a lot of dedicated time translating Latin and ancient Greek, but that was twelve years ago. Both languages have since gone to the same void as my high school French. It’s strange to have retained only the knack of carrying-across, and only a little of that: standing on a rickety bridge in the fog, unable to see either side.

Neither my lack of Rilke scholarship nor my rusty translation skills turned out to be as big a problem as not knowing anything about falcons or this Frederick guy. It took weeks of emails and living-room chats over wine for me to start to grasp the poem myself—enough for me to end up with feelings about it! I don’t have strong emotions about discipline, usually. One of the better ways to get me there is to remind me how thrilling it is to re-write the same nine-syllable sentence dozens of times until the right one shows up shining atop the heap.

Anyway. Looking back at a translation once it’s “done” is like going back to where you had a first date. You’re never going to know what the place looks like to anybody else. Maybe the food’s good, maybe the atmosphere’s nice, but if you walk back in one, two, five years later it’s still going to be covered in little historical plaques only two people can read. Where you were when she said that, when you said this, when you wondered if you’d said the wrong thing, when you held hands, when she laughed, when she said where you were going next.

Here are some notes from our translation, that in mind:

• To be Caesar is to seem unmoved / Withstanding and withholding many things.

The word order sure is something here. ‘Kaiser to be means unchanged much to withstand through secret acts.’ The first change we made was to swap out Kaiser for Caesar, since an English audience understands that more as a reference to the burdens of leadership—it also helpfully sounds more like be, making ‘To be Caesar’ a better sound-match for the long Is in Kaiser sein.

‘Seem unmoved’ strays a little further from the text, but felt more honest given the rest of the poem than ‘be unmoved,’ and gave us another nice long E. I was pleased with ‘withstanding and withholding’ in the second line, which was my attempt to keep the spirit of preposition-laden German efficiency (and look forward to the absent, untranslatable word mitgefühlten—more on that later). ‘Withholding’ is, along with ‘seem unmoved’, standing in for Frederick’s unchanging endurance being achieved bei geheimer Tat. If he has to put in effort in secret to unverwandelt vieles überstehen than he’s not exactly unverwandelt so much as appearing so.

• Strange and savage, with her eyes sewn shut.

This was a crossroads, later in the project, where Sarah made a great call – arguing for leaving in the literal translation of aufgebräut. I initially thought this might be too distractingly morbid or specific for an audience unfamiliar with falconry, but Sarah pointed out that a German speaker reading the original text would have the same jarring experience. The strong imagery of blinding a creature to external stimuli, forcing it to calm its emotions, was too important to leave out—the rest of the stanza more or less describes Frederick imposing the same restriction on himself, albeit by choice rather than by force. To be Caesar is, etc.

• Any tender strain of memory…

I took a lot of liberties with these two lines. Sarah’s literal translation is “Tender remembrances’ / deep-deep-within chiming” – the repeated sounds of Erinnerungen to tieftiefinneres have that lovely echo effect, but bringing the repetition of tieftief into English sounded corny any way we tried it. It’s possible that it even sounds corny in the original? I’ve rolled my eyes at Rilke in translation before for being a bit precious.  

My solution was to try to get as many nice, wide, bell-like vowels into that section as I could, and instead repeat in him as the echo. Plans, sprang, then, tender, memory, strain, sang, sound, still. I hoped the chiming sounds would contrast against the harsher sounds of cast aside without a thought, sort of like the relentless rhythm of the last line of that stanza brings you up short in German.

• Her blood and her sorrow / All he would allow himself to grasp.

I pushed for something less literal than ‘blood’ here—Sarah’s original translation was ‘hot blood,’ which I thought could be abstracted out to something like ‘passion,’ or ‘ferocity,’ or even ‘hunger’: a feelings-word to contrast more neatly against ‘sorrow’, so ‘[something-like-blood’] and sorrow could mirror Frederick’s plans and remembrances. Begreifen, to grasp, was a very physical word and I tripped over trying to say ‘grasping blood’ in English.

Sarah persuaded me that it was more like aufgebräut: the use of the German word Blut is strange and abrupt in the original, too. We went back and forth on whether to exchange ‘grasp’ for ‘know,’ both for the way it sounded and how it would feel a little smoother, but ultimately went with the more physical choice in both cases. To be Caesar requires mental restraint; to train (or be) a bird of prey requires physical restraint, even to the point of cruelty. Falconry, like kingship, is visceral when faithfully depicted.

• Up into their clear spring morning

Back to mitgefühlten. Mitgefühlten Frühlingsmorgen was one of the first phrases I could hear in my head without having to go back and read it, I think because Sarah had told me about it before. Lovely! But it was one of the earliest hurdles we had to clear, since in English you can withhold and withstand stuff but not withfeel it.

We couldn’t eliminate mitgefühlten without badly weakening the poem—the image in the last few lines is the climax, and mitgefühlten is kind of a climax-within-the-climax: the single word that pulls both Frederick and the falcon out of solitude, into perfect sync. Out of the darkness of empty halls, of blind terror, into the open sky with prey in sight. If a previous translation had had any good suggestions, we’d have gladly poached one, but nobody’d managed better than (for instance) ‘heartfelt spring morning,’ which sounded like a greeting card written by ChatGPT.

I went for one of my old translation tactics, which was to try to explain the sentence to myself in way too many small, stupid words in hopes that I could shake something loose. The with-felt spring morning. The spring morning they felt together. The spring morning they both felt. The spring morning that was an experience they were sharing. The spring morning Frederick felt and the falcon felt too.

That turned into my first bold pitch to Sarah: the most important element of with-feeling was with. Fühlten sounded great with Frühling but we already knew this was a feelings moment: Caesar unleashed, the soaring momentum of the final stanza. When the ruler and the hunter align, it’s not just in experience but in control—in ownership of experience. In knowing what belongs to them. Before: his arm, her eyes sewn shut; plans, memories in him; her blood, her sorrow. And now: their clear spring morning.

1. No one seems to know exactly what Auden meant by this. I suspect how later critics interpret it says more about later critics than about Auden, who married a lesbian to get her a passport out of Nazi Germany and, I would be willing to guess, meant more with the joke than that Rilke was too “passionate, overrefined, and feminine,” to quote one interpretation, or “yearning… to be penetrated by the impenetrable,” to quote another.

2. Once, it is said, he fed two slaves the same rich meal, induced one to exercise after eating and the other to lie sedentary, then disemboweled both of them to see which had digested the food better. This use of a control subject and attempt to account for dependent variables was an early example of modern scientific thinking.

3. I was always pushing for closer adherence to the German grammar and punctuation. Emily’s position was that we shouldn’t do that when it sounded bad. Generally speaking, if a line made you go, “Wow, that sounds really graceful and lovely,” the credit goes to Emily, and if a line made you go, “Wow, that sounds translated” I was probably responsible.

4. The English term is seeling.