Indstilling til Aristerion-prisen 1996

- om Udsat på hjertets bjerge

Af : Erik A. Nielsen

I 1996 fik Bjørnvig den store Europæiske litteraturpris Aristeion-prisen for sin oversættelse af Rainer Maria Rilkes digte. Nedenstående artikel er fra indstillingsmaterialet.

Thorkild Bjørnvig´s Udsat på hjertets bjerge (Exposed on the Heart´s Mountains) contains over 200 pages of translations of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. In addition, it is furnished with a four-page introduction plus about 40 pages of concluding notes and commentaries. Altogether 168 poems have been translated into Danish, the collection including selected poems from Das Stundenbuck, Buch der Bilder and Neue Gedichte, complete translations of the two requiems, of the ten Duineser Elegien and all 55 Sonnette an Orpheus. In addition there is a selection of 45 of the Late Poems.
   The publication of this major work of translation provides Danish readers for the first time with the possibility of gaining a comprehensive view of Rilke´s poetical works. Ever since winning Aarhus University´s gold medal in 1949 for his dissertation Rainer Maria Rilke og tysk tradition (Rainer Maria Rilke and German Tradition) Thorkild Bjørnvig has had a constant passion for Rilke. Since then he has worked on translating Rilke´s poetry, and Rilke has constantly figured in the substantial number of essays Bjørnvig has written, while his poetry has exerted a flmclamental influence on Bjørnvig´s own oeuvre, which is one of the most important in 20th-century Danish poetry.
   To translate Rilke is exceptionally difficult, as any reader of him will know. His entirely personal tone, his taut and profoundly original syntax, his distinctive rhythmical character, his "incorporeal music" demands a supremely well-developed ear and immense linguistic and metrical mastery on the part of the translator.

Bjørnvig has had all this, and thanks to his lifelong enthusiasm he has ensured that Rilke´s poetry has become a lasting influence on several younger generations of Danish colleagues and on large numbers of Danish poetry readers in general. Bjørnvig´s painstaking introductions to and commentaries on the often complex texts have played and continue to play a crucial role in opening up Rilke´s work to Danish readers.
   There is great precision in these translations, a philological accuracy that is admirable in itself, but which does not prevent the force of Rilke´s passion, the strength of his thought and the power of his expression from asserting themselves in the Danish texts. In this respect there is a notable natural community between the poet and his translator: they are fervently intellectual and at the same time musically sophisticated and rhythmically assured, unique blends of sensing and thinking.
   A vast range of tonalities and means of expression must be at the disposal of anyone seeking to produce an adequate translation of Rilke. The translator must be able to paint with delicate watercolours, to cut clearly defined figures and construct immense landscapes, indeed to create realms both under and over the earth. From the young man´s abundance of dream and mood through the determined manner in which he disciplines his observations of reality in Das Buch der Bilder and the great new interpretations of religious and mythical motifs in Neue Gedichte to the profound elegiac sounds of the two requiems and the Duineser Elegien. And finally, the condensed summing up of a long, modern artist´s experience in the Sonnetten an Orpheus. The elegies´ yearning to recreate what has been lost, their drastic invocations and moving conjurations, their trembling longing for and fear of the sacred, the angel´s superhuman distillation - all this a Rilke translator must be able to experience and recreate in his native tongue.
   To recreate the lofty hymn-like concentration that resounds in Rilke´s most sublime poems is perhaps difficult in the modern world´s confusion of voices. There can scarcely be any Dane living today who could have attained such tonal levels with greater precision and force than Bjørnvig. No one who more clearly than he could reproduce the mythical artistic fate of the modernistic poet, his terrifying willingness to sacrifice himself to his work.
   This volume of translations is the result of an enormous effort that with interruptions has lasted for many years. This applies not least to the complete recreation Orpheus sonnets with their great demands on metre and rhyme. As a skilled prosodist, Bjørnvig has everywhere respected the formal character of the originals as a result of his understanding that rigour of form, thought and passion is indissoluble in the work of a great poet.
   With Thorkild Bjørnvig as his mediator, Rilke has also become one of the mythical figures in Danish modernism. If translation does not only mean rendering a work from one language to another, but establishing an essential communality between the two lyrical universes and bringing a foreign work to life in the mind of his own nation, then Bjørnvig´s work with Rilke is a translation in the most exhaustive and fundamental meaning of the word.

Erik A. Nielsen er lektor ved Københavns Universitet