After a gap of many years, and having immersed myself recently in Stewart’s two full collections – A Net of Fireflies (1960) and A Chime of Windbells (1969) – though I retain more than a shadow of my above-mentioned bias, I have come to respect his purposes and his achievements in this field a great deal more.

Recently in London, Peter Porter told me, quite forcefully, that he considered translating a form of death for a poet. I found his assertion very surprising, not only because of his own very engaging versions of Martial. Leaving aside past masters such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Pope, so many modern writers such as Seamus Heaney, Christopher Logue, and A.J. Arberry – to name only three – have not only given us masterpieces of translation but have honed their own skills very considerably in making them. In Stewart’s case, he was genuinely moved and delighted by much that he discovered in Japanese poetry, and he wanted to share it with anyone who cared to listen. As his two essays in these collections show, his work in this field was an askesis, a spiritual journey, and he was, as I know from our long conversations, very glad to have companions on the way. He was also sharply aware of how, in the main, Japanese poetry had been inadequately rendered into English and he wanted to produce something better. Whatever else one might think, he has certainly done that.

Altogether, he has given us some seven hundred poems. Of these, there are very few duds – which is a great deal more than can be said for many modern translators, including Robert Lowell, Robert Graves, Stephen Mitchell (to whom I shall return later) and others. If sometimes the writing is a little pat, one often has a suspicion that either the original was also at fault or that the Japanese was utterly untranslatable, forcing stewart to make a strategic compromise. Be that as it may, the gratifying thing is that there are so many poems in these two collections that are absolutely brilliant.

A good deal of nonsense has been talked about haiku. I think it needs to be emphasised as firmly as possible that, for an English-speaking reader, the fact that a Japanese poem contains seventeen syllables means almost nothing. As far as I can tell, the really significant thing about a haiku is its capacity to evoke a sudden recognition: two separate things are brought together in such a way that the poem goes on reverberating in the imagination long after the words have stopped. Stewart’s translations often capture this element of the Japanese very successfully. Consider this one, which has been my companion for many years:

The host said not a word. The guest was dumb,
And silent, too, the white chrysanthemum.

                                                       Buson

Such a poem, in giving us a glimpse of something we know well, yet only half-know, contains a whole world. It’s as if a short story, or even a novel, has been compressed into two lines.

Reading more carefully through Stewart’s two books (my first reading, years ago, was somewhat cursory), I discovered many more fine poems than I had expected. The variety is amazing. Haiku in the hands of a great Japanese poet can encompass everything from what, in the Greek sense, can be called the tragic emotion, as in this one by Issa:

The yearly sweep of our parental tomb.
The youngest child comes carrying the broom.

 to a sense of the self that can only be called good-humoured and droll:

The monk Ryokan, whose tonsured stubble greys,
Feels sorry for himself on rainy days.

                                                       Ryokan

Stewart has met this challenge within the confines of the rhyming couplet with great deftness. Chiefly, what we find in his two collections, time and again, is the art of capturing a characteristic and sometimes ordinary event in our experience, so that we see it anew. Here are a few, taken almost at random:

Through evening mists, preceded by its moo,
The lowing cow looms slowly into view.

                                                       Issa

Since there’s no rice for poets on the dole
Let’s do a flower arrangement in the bowl.

                                                       Bashô

Eleven horsemen riding through a night
Of swirling snow – none looks to left or right.

                                                       Shiki

And this one, which I’ve always considered a masterly example of Stewart’s control of sound and tempo:

All day, with gently undulating swell,
The spring sea rose and fell, and rose and fell.

                                                       Buson

Students of writing are often surprised to learn that, strictly speaking, poets have only two elements to work with: consonants and vowels. Finding the right negotiations between these two elements is what the music of poetry is all about. This little poem of Stewart’s, among other things, is a primer on the use of liquid ‘l’s and open vowels. He has made it sound so graceful and unselfconscious that it seems to write itself. We should emphasise ‘seems’. Such effortlessness can only come from hours of hard work. Luck, too. But the luck and the hard work go together. In this case, the result is a kind of magic: the poem seems to keep saying itself over and over.

The examples I have given so far are enough, I hope, to point to Harold Stewart’s skills as a translator. In many of these poems, he has found a way of conveying the spirit of the original Japanese so that it sounds fresh and contemporary. It is an achievement that has been, for a variety of reasons, considerably underestimated. Rather than dwell on that, let me share a few more of the many poems I found compelling in Stewart’s two collections:

You kindle up a blaze; and then I’ll show
You something wonderful: a ball of snow.

                                                       Bashô

The rice-fields spread their flooded terracing
Of mirrors: segments from a beetle’s wing.

                                                          Hô-ô

The long spring day: where reeds are tall and rank
A boat is talking with the river-bank.

                                                       Shiki

Still with my one remaining tooth I bite
My frozen painting-brush that will not write.

                                                       Buson

Poetry of this order – and I would claim that it is poetry as well as translation – is exceedingly rare, in Australia or anywhere else.

In his work on the German poets I mentioned earlier, James McAuley was driven by the same passion for exactness and music as his friend Harold Stewart, but it took a somewhat different form. I want to concentrate on his version of Rilke’s ‘Herbsttag’, as it was first published in his collection Under Aldebaran (1946), when McAuley was only twenty-one. The best way to illustrate McAuley’s skill is to quote the German text in full, with an English prose ‘equivalent’ alongside. Below those, I will give Mc Auley’s version:

‘Herbsttag’

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gieb ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Suße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetst kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetst allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her and
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

‘Autumn Day’

Lord/Sir. It is time. Ths summer was so full/large
Lay your shadows on the sundial,
And in the fields let loose the wind.

Command the last fruits to swell on the vine;
Give them now two southerly days,
Press them to ripeness and chase/press
The last (of) sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house, will no more build.
Whoever is alone, will remain alone,
will wake, read, write long letters
and along the alleys here and there
wander restless, as the leaves are blowing.

‘Autumn’ (McAuley’s version)

Heart, it is time. The fruitful summer yields.
The shadows fall across the figured dial,
The winds are loosed upon the harvest fields.
See that these last fruits swell upon the vine,
Grant them as yet a southern day or two
Then press them to fulfilment and pursue
The last of sweetness in the heavy wine.

You shall be homeless, shall not build this year.
You shall be solitary and long alone.
Shall wake, and read, and right long letters home,
And on deserted pavements, here and there
Shall wander restless, as the leaves are blown.

What McAuley does here brings home, once and for all, the point made so forcibly in the superb essay on translation by D.S. Carne-Ross whose title, ‘The Mistaken Ambition of Exactness’ (1968), implies his argument. For the major part of his essay, Carne-Ross focuses on the then new translation by Richmond Lattimore of The Iliad. Time and again he shows, in great particularity, the imaginative impoverishment inherent in the words ‘literal translation’, which, he claims, Lattimore has foisted on us in his version of Homer. Carne-Ross’s main argument can be paraphrased like this: the only true literal translation of a poem, or anything else, is an exact replica of the original, in the original language! In other words, as soon as you try to win something over from one tongue to another, you are inescapably involved in an act of interpretation. That raises an important question: by what authority does a translator make his ‘interpretation’? One possible answer is that there is no satisfactory answer to that question, so leave well alone. Another is that translation is what’s left when the poetry has disappeared. These oft-repeated assertions both contain a lot of truth.

However, what McAuley twigged at the age of twenty-one, was something so simple and so profound that it makes us reconsider. What he found was this: if a translation is a kind of ‘equivalent’ or mirror, the crucial fact is that behind the mirror, as well as in it, there is a geist. I have used the German word because I want to imply two things: a ghost, and a spirit. It is invisible, and it is everywhere. What McAuley realised was that when we encounter Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’ or Stevens’s ‘Sunday Morning’, or any great and enduring poem, we are aware of an unmistakable presence. It’s somewhat analogous to our first meeting with an interesting and powerful person. We hear a tone of being, as it were, a voice; we have an immediate sense of a unique stance and style. In a poem, as with a person, this presence cannot be separated out; it hovers over and comprehends every particular.

McAuley knew that unless a translator grasps that presence in its fullness, any attempt to win a poem over into your own tongue will result in an externalised and lifeless ‘equivalent’. This is exactly what we get in the much-praised recent version of Rilke’s poem by Stephen Mitchell:

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
And on the meadows let the winds go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
Grant them a few more warm transparent days,
Urge them on to fulfilment then, and press
The final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever lives alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

(From Stephen Mitchell, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (1989)

The incompetence of this version is striking. At almost no point does it sound like a poem in English. Moreover, even by Mitchell’s own apparent criterion of ‘literalness’, the poem falls short. The second line is not only inexact; it sounds unnatural. Shadows don’t overlap sundials. They fall across them, as in McAuley’s version. And, in the sixth line, what is the word ‘then’ doing? If Mitchell means, ‘Then urge them on to fulfilment’ (implying a sequence in time), why not say so, instead of making ‘then’ into a kind of ‘therefore’. These faults are serious enough to throw doubt on Mitchell’s credentials. But they are nothing compared to the inadequacies of his version in its overall feeling, tempo and rhythm. The original poem is mainly slow; its geist is grave and reflective with a sad grandeur, as in Keats’s famous poem. None of that is captured here, particularly in Mitchell’s last lines:

And wander the boulevards up and down,
Restlessly while the leaves are blowing.

Here, Mitchell’s meaning goes in one direction, the tempo and the diction in another. It’s as if he’s not really listening to the original at all. It is quite possible to use the vowels and consonants of the English language to create a tone and mood that, in their own way, mime the mood of the German. McAuley does that very skilfully. Why write as if the possibility of something like Rilke’s autumnal music never even existed in English?

These are surface markings. It’s necessary to look more closely. The initial difficulty that McAuley noticed when he tried his own version of the poem was the very first word. He realised that ‘Herr’ in this context, for several reasons, was quite impossible to translate directly, that is to say ‘literally’. For one thing, Rilke, like Stevens, was, in a special sense, a sceptic. There is a remarkable passage in Stevens’s ‘Sunday Morning’ that points up the problem. In that poem, Stevens gives an emblem of an imagined world in some conjectured future where formal religion, as we know it, will have disappeared, and where mankind will rejoice in its own condition, including that of its own mortality:

Supple and turbulent a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy to the summer morn …
Not as a god but as a god might be [my italics]

For Stevens, who was an agnostic or, perhaps more accurately, a post-Christian, the spirit of poetry comes closest to our traditional notions of deity and, I would argue, it is the same for Rilke. There is something about the majesty of autumn and of poetry that has him speak as if he were addressing a god figure. This, after all, is the only language we have for a humanism that is also reverential before the fullness of nature. In any case, I think it was for this reason that McAuley found the rhetorical figure in Rilke’s opening lines untranslatable in any manner that aimed at ‘equivalence’. In order to capture Rilke’s intentions, he radically changed the structure of those lines to make them sound more natural in English. So, not:

Lord, it is time. The summer was so full, but

Heart, it is time: the fruitful summer yields.

I am aware that in his Collected Poems, first published in 1971 and in a revised version in 1994, the text of this poem, which was presumably authorised by McAuley himself, has the first word changed to ‘Lord’. I am making the assumption that McAuley also meant what he first wrote as a young man and despite the ‘authority’ of the revised version, with its several changes, am taking that earlier version as my text. I am quite obstinate about this as I believe that the earlier version is, in this and a number of other instances, far superior to the revised one. Some will regard this procedure as indefensible. But textual scholars of McAuley (as well as of Auden and many others) have to face the fact that the early texts are extant, they are printed in books that we have in our libraries and at one stage their authors did authorise them for publication.

Still addressing the ‘Lord’, the spirit of autumn, the German then says:

Lay your shadows across the sundial …

Knowing that if he finds the right music for it, the image itself it will create the feeling that informs Rilke’s line, McAuley renders it with a beautiful leisurely gravitas:

The shadows fall across the figured dial …

Obviously, in proceeding this way, McAuley has strayed far from the invocatory address of the original, and he has done so for good reason. But now he wants to find a way back to Rilke’s intellectual grammar. So he needs a bridge. By means of a very simple strategy, he succeeds brilliantly. In the next line, the German word ‘Befiehl’ means ‘Command’. For this, McAuley finds a common English word and turns it into a very rich double entendre:

See that these last fruit swell upon the vine [my italics]

The first word can mean, See (to it) that … (a command). Or it can mean, See – (the fact) that these last fruits etc. This extraordinary stroke allows McAuley to continue in a way that more closely follows the form of Rilke’s ‘argument’, and at the same time sounds ‘normal’ in his own diction:

Grant them as yet a southern day or two
Then press them to fulfilment and pursue
The last of sweetness in the heavy wine.

This high order of imaginative craftsmanship continues in the last stanza. I shall point to only one more line to illustrate that claim. Rilke’s line ten reads:

Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben

Mitchell renders this as:

Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening

Which is not only unmusical but, by Mitchell’s own criterion, incorrect. The English ‘equivalent’ of the German, as given earlier, reads:

Will wake, read, write long letters

Neither ‘sit’ nor ‘through the evening’ occurs in the German, and nothing is gained by adding them. When he also eliminates the powerful word ‘wake’ from the line, his whole ‘literal’ approach becomes even more suspect. For an original of great rhythmic power and charm, he has given us an ‘equivalent’ that’s merely flaccid and banal. McAuley, on the contrary, finds a way of emphasising the ‘allargando’ movement of the original by being ‘exact’, and then adding another simple word at the end of the line:

Will wake, and read, and write long letters home. (my italics)

As can be clearly seen in the ‘equivalent’ above, a ‘faithful’ rendering of the line in English cannot capture the feeling implicit in the German. The three verbs – wachen, lessen, schreiben – each have one more syllable than wake, read, write, and this simple fact slows the German line considerably. McAuley, who has really listened to the original, achieves this slowing down by the use of two ands, as well as by adding the word home at the end. It will be argued that I have therefore contradicted myself as the extra word is not literally in the original. I would argue (and this is central to McAuley’s art and that of any translator), it is firmly contained in the feeling and music of the original and in the English version it makes all the difference. This is the geist speaking through the mirror, and doing so in the knowledge that the added word, with its slow, open vowel, acts as a fine half-rhyme with the line that ends the poem:

Shall wander restless as the leaves are blown.

McAuley has found a way of echoing Rilke’s rhyme words schreiben and treiben on the same two lines as the original. In both poems, we have a sense of completion – the same warm and rounding music. This is not mere mimicry; it’s the genuine thing.

I have drawn close attention to the ‘differences’ between McAuley’s poem and the original because, as with all good writing, the angel is in the detail. Stephen Mitchell – as well as William Gass, John Logan, and (very surprisingly) Galway Kinnell, in their various versions of the poem – composes as if he’s deaf to most of the nuances I’ve mentioned. They have all given us poems that seem not to rise out of any real language. What we get, in each case, is some words and images that remind us of Rilke’s poem but that do not sound the least convincing as poems in their own right. McAuley wants much more than that: he has heard the geist in Rilke’s Herbsttag and he wants to find a way to let him sing in English, and be completely at home there. The difference between these two approaches to the art of translation are as day and night.

I have carried McAuley’s Autumn with me for more than fifty years now. The original German I learned somewhat more recently. Singly, and together, they never cease to satisfy the inner ear. They are both remarkable and memorable poems in their own right, and they speak to each other with the intimate idiolect, and silences, of twins. I consider myself very lucky to have them as everyday walking companions.

McAuley and his friend Harold Stewart, in their dedication to the craft of poetry and their intuitive understanding of the spirit of their chosen texts, have given us translations that are also poems in their own right; they are accurate in the sense that I’ve been implying throughout, but they are never slavishly ‘literal’. With these gifts, they have made, in their very different ways, a singular contribution to Australian letters, a contribution that, I believe, deserves to be more widely and more gratefully received.