As Nature Never Intended by Hilde Domin

Wesleyan University The Honors College As Nature Never Intended by Hilde Domin Translated by Marianna Foos Class of 2008 A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in German Studies Middletown, Connecticut April, 2008 2 Translator’s Note A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step, and the first and most crucial step in doing a translation thesis is choosing the book. As a biology major, I first considered finding a book about biology. It didn’t seem as if it would be difficult, as there are plenty of German and German-speaking biologists of note. As I began to research, however, I realized that even if I found a biological text, it would likely be rather dry, and I would be risking an ugly burnout if I lost interest. Beyond that, the most important texts were already in English. Even if I couldn’t do a biology text, I was still hoping for a non-fiction work. The idea to do a biography came to me because my favorite book is Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, also a biography. The results were twofold: first, I started looking for biographies in particular, and second, influenced by the quality of Levi’s book, I set my standards extremely high. At the time I was in Germany, stopping at every used bookstore I could find and buying up books that seemed interesting, because I didn’t know when I would see them again. I spent an hour crouched on the floor of a foul-smelling bookshop in Switzerland, only to leave with a book I soon discovered had already been translated. Asking German students about their favorite books only turned up books that had already been translated, or books that had been translated into German. I was constantly on the lookout for that elusive hint that would send me down the rabbit hole. Though I didn’t know it yet, the moment came when I wrote down the name “Hilde Domin” in my travel journal as I toured “Heimat im Exil” at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. 3 Upon returning to Regensburg, I checked out all of Domin’s books from the library. And lo and behold, she had written an autobiography. A biography in vignettes, tableaux—just like The Periodic Table, in fact. But it was something else that reeled me in completely: when I saw that there was a chapter called “On the difficulties of being a professional woman,” and that it was an honest-to-God bulleted list on the topic, I was on board. Von der Natur nicht vorgesehen is a collection of Hilde Domin’s short works written between 1964 and 1974 for anthologies and periodicals, which, presumably, she felt amounted to something of a memoir. There are eighteen “chapters,” plus a theoretical piece on exile in the appendix. I chose the book because it was feminist, because it was sprinkled with poetry, because the writing was childlike as well as severe, and because it was a different story of being a German Jew. Instead of concentration camps, deportation, and “broken glass,” the story Domin presents here is an almost enviable (as she herself concedes) journey through the stunning landscapes of Rome, the Andalusian coast, and the Dominican Republic. One might argue that it could be categorized as one of the few tales of happy endings that came out of this period of German history. Domin read the writing on the wall and left Germany in 1932. Hers is not the story of death in the camps, but of life in the world. The thing that gripped me most forcefully is this: she came back. Her father, a lawyer, was shunned and her whole family forced out. They were pursued across the globe and met with suspicion wherever they landed. Domin’s whole “German-Jewish milieu” (as she called it) was destroyed. And then she learned 4 about the concentration camps. But she came back. The idea both fascinates me and brings me to tears, because although it seems unimaginable that anyone in her position would want to go back, I understand it on some level. She was homesick, but not just in the classical sense. She wanted a home that she would never have to leave if she didn’t want to. Where she could have a mailbox and a garden and to which she could come home at the end of the day or the journey. There is also the suggestion that her homecoming is at least partially due to the perception that the “true” Germany was most faithfully represented by those whom Hitler had chased out. Thus, as Domin herself says in the appendix, the theme of ‘returning’ is more prevalent than that of exile. A significant admission from a poet who identifies herself as an exile poet. Mine was a loaded decision to translate prose written by a poet. A multilingual poet without formal training. Though it’s hard to say which idiosyncrasies are due to the author’s being a poet and which to her being Hilde Domin. Anyone who has translated from German to English will tell you that the long sentences and the liberal use of the extended modifier (non-existent in English) can make difficult the act of translating between these seemingly similar languages. To this mix, Domin adds plenty of parenthetical asides and long dashes. There were moments while I was translating paragraph-long sentences when I felt as if I were swimming through molasses. Also problematic, if endearing, were Domin’s tangents. Perhaps this feature is part of what makes her writing seem childlike at times; there are several instances in her chapter on “her homes” (and elsewhere) when the author gets carried away by the 5 details of one element of the story she is intending to tell. A few pages later she will stop abruptly and scold herself, restating the original topic at hand (though not always returning to it immediately!). With a lot of ambiguous pronouns, one could become lost between the two stories. But then again, sometimes there was absolutely no transition, and although the objects of the pronouns were clear, I found myself confused. In addition, it was easy to get lost in the author’s plentiful metaphors. Over and over, I found myself taking metaphors at face value or doing the opposite, interpreting descriptive elements as elaborate symbols. Specifically, trying to turn the death of a flesh-and-blood snake on a bookshelf into the symbolic slaughter of censorship. One of the risks of reading a poet writing in the second person in Santo Domingo. Without a doubt the most challenging aspect of the book was Domin’s inclination to sometimes forego fully expressing an idea. That is, leaving too much information out of a sentence. In light of her own assertion that she needs to train herself to “do more with less,” it’s unfortunate that at some points she does less with less. In her minimalist poetry, she succeeds in evoking an image in the reader’s mind that fills in the blanks she leaves. A memorable example is the last line of the heftiest chapter in the book; a line the reader might expect to be of particular interest. In these situations, the five or ten minutes it took the thesis-writer and her advisor to figure out what the author meant was the easy part: if translating were as easy as comprehending, a project of this nature would hardly qualify as thesis-level work. 6 One of my favorite parts of translating this book was discovering the rule- breaking sentences. The book is full of incomplete sentences used for emphasis. For instance, as a Jew, Domin’s mother wasn’t allowed to perform in the opera: “Only one time did she sneak out and appear as Mignon when her family still lived in Frankfurt. Then never again.” Then never again. No reader could ignore that. Hilde Domin has a remarkable ability to see her own experiences objectively. At one point she describes being unable to judge her own poems, “at least not in the beginning,” but she had clearly gotten over that problem by the time she wrote the pieces in Von der Natur nicht vorgesehen (i.e., between 1964 and 1974). In describing her run-in with Hitler’s brother-in-law, she writes that “Chaplin himself couldn’t have staged it more effectively.” Even in what must have been an overwhelming experience, she is able to see what any onlooker might have. After her return to Heidelberg, where she had met her husband at the university almost twenty- five years earlier, she can see the cosmic element about the whole situation: it’s as if the intervening years were just cut out. Part of that ability to see objectively is an ability to call things as she sees them. This of course includes her going to a Nazi party meeting, realizing where things were headed, and deciding to flee the country. But it also includes the amused, awed acknowledgement of some far-off island where “Not one cat . has a tail.” And what one might call a literal metaphor. While visiting a hospital, she comes upon the amputated leg of a black Dominican and sees that it is red on the inside, “Just as all legs, including yours, are red inside.” She sees how people are literally all the 7 same on the inside, and works it into a reflection on the kinship and equality of all people.

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