Das Nibelungenlied: Song of the Nibelungs (review)

The task of translating into modern English a work such as the monumental Middle High German Nibelungenlied is forbidding, especially after the ubiquitous and persistent prose rendering by A. T. Hatto (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), now well over forty years old. When a new translation emerges, particularly in verse by a poet as prominent as Burton Raffel, it is cause for great interest among medievalists, both specialists, who may not read medieval German, and students or lay readers, who require a good, compelling text to sustain their interest. For both audiences, the new Yale paperback volume pleases and disappoints, but overall it provides a beautiful poetic rendering of the medieval classic.

Raffel's Nibelungenlied introduces the material to the reader with three brief sections prefacing the poem, then presents the body of the translation itself, and finally concludes with twenty pages of "Translator's Notes," explaining some of the principles used to govern the translator's choices. Indeed, because of the attention paid to purposes and intentions, this book strikes one as a very self-consciously executed endeavor, much in the shadow of its prose predecessor. In the first preface, the "Foreword," Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic Michael Dirda provides a helpful bridge for the lay reader to the medieval work. Dirda parallels the action of the Nibelungenlied to Tolkien's trilogy and to tales from various Northern mythologies, and supplies a brief outline of the plot. Next, the scholarly "Introduction" by Edward Haymes focuses on the sources, manuscripts, and subsequent, Nibelungenlied-inspired works. Especially interesting are the points he makes on Wagner's music and manipulations of the original text. His discussion is highly informative, especially for the reader who wishes to understand the epic's place in the historical tradition and its relationship to nineteenth-century Romantic music. However, the introduction could have been profitably expanded, and one misses, for example, some scholarly discussion of the place of die Klage in the tradition, the heroic epic in Germany including the Kudrun, and the differences between this type of narrative and the courtly epic, although Dirda does scantly allude to it in the Foreword (p. ix). These aspects of the background are interesting, and would doubtlessly have edified and enhanced the reading pleasure of both a scholarly and a lay audience, had they received mention here. In the final, very brief prefatory section, addressed "To the Reader," Raffel reminds his audience of some of the complexities involved in translating such a work, which must traverse great distances of space and time to reach its modern audience.

The translation proper commences with a very handy list of the most prominent characters to appear in the text. The poem itself then follows: 2379 stanzas, each printed as an apparent Nibelungenstrophe, with four lines each divided into half lines of three verse feet, save for the last half-line of four feet, and copious rhyming. When read aloud, any stanza of the original Middle High German work captures the epic rhythm, cadence, and acoustic effects of such a strophe, one of the identifying characteristics of this epic and also, for example, of the poetry of Der von Kürenberg. The poetic form immediately conjures an unmistakably medieval atmosphere and typifies the text as heroic-epic. Can all this be translated into modern English, both form and content? Certainly, if anyone could succeed in this attempt, it would be Burton Raffel, whose credentials as a translator are most impressive—including a plethora of works from Old English and medieval French.

I have chosen strophe 826 as an example of Raffel's technique. The translation of this section seems most challenging, for it expresses an emotionally charged moment, packed with powerful language and rich in medieval cultural-linguistic features. The original text, in the Reclam edition by Bartsch and de Boor (2002), reads as follows:

"Du ziuhest dich ze hôhe,""nu will ich sehen gerne,"habe...