The small town of Llareggub has to be imagined somewhere on the south coast of Wales. Hardly 500 people live in the three main streets with their few side streets. The shops, the pubs, the residential buildings – everything looks a little run down, on the verge of neglect. In a travel guide, the condition is described as “miserable”, the inhabitants are considered “rough” and “idiosyncratic”. And it goes on: “Although the place offers little that could appeal to the mountaineer, the weekend tripper, the health-conscious or sporty visitor, a thoughtful nature (…) may rediscover something of the picturesque feeling of yesteryear.”
The poet Dylan Thomas was anything but a thoughtful nature. He had little time for “picturesque feelings”. And the little coastal town that he came up with, along with its residents and travel guides, is probably only suitable for mountain climbers and weekend holidaymakers if they can relate to rhythm and language. For all the bits of reality that Thomas has melted down, Llareggub is above all a place of imagination and sound. In Thomas’ imagination, the nocturnal houses are “blind as moles”, the community hall wears “widow’s clothes”, and the eponymous milk forest is a “hunchbacked wooer-and-rabbit forest”.
In 1945 Dylan Thomas received an invitation from BBC London to write a play for radio. An ordinary radio play was intended. But Thomas, as always, went his own way. “A good poem is a contribution to reality,” he noted in a radio essay from the time. “Once you add a good poem to the world, the world is never what it was.”
This conviction did not only apply to poetry. He worked his radio play over many years, mixing together bits and pieces from all the places he had lived, from his native Swansea to New Quai in west Wales to that little town of Laugharne on the south coast, perhaps the Llareggub on the most resembles. Two things in particular attracted him to the little town: the talk of the people and the quiet that spreads through the streets at night.
And so begins “Unterm Milchwald”, with the desire to be quiet and to visualize all the sleeping people around: the farmers, fishermen, traders and pensioners, the shoemakers and teachers, tailors and innkeepers, the preachers and police officers, postmen and undertakers , to the “webbed shellfish collectors” and the screaming infants.
Being still is followed by the request to listen carefully. Because “Unterm Milchwald” is first and foremost a piece of voices that you have to listen to. And who introduce themselves or each other in their own peculiar way and thus, as it were, create them in the first place. Through listening, the moments become visible in the inner eye of the listener.
The morning is “nothing but singing”, midday is almost over
Like James Joyce in his “Ulysses,” Thomas focuses on a single day. A spring day to be exact. It starts at night and ends at night. Alternating between a more general perspective and zooming in on individual stories, Thomas has the residents awakened by the “get up your sleepyheads early in the morning at eight the coffee is made town hall bell”.
Morning is “nothing but singing”, midday almost scurries by while the sunny afternoon slows everything down, almost lulling the residents with its “yawns” and “bums”. It is only in the evening when the lights of the lamps start to set things in motion again for a few moments – and the drinkers toast the night in the Seefahrerkrug.
A wide variety of characters make their appearance. The postman Willy Nilly, for example, whose wife steams the letters over the kitchen kettle. Mog Edwards and Myfanwy Price, who live on the upper and lower ends of the city and write love letters to each other every day. Or Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, who meets her two deceased husbands as shambling ghosts.
Thomas loves playing with idioms, the challenge for the translation couldn’t be greater
Whereby the secret main character and the real expert for the dead is the blind captain Cat. He sits alone behind his open window and not only hears the voices of deceased sailors, but also listens to the sounds of the city. If you follow his powerfully illustrated sentences, after a while you think you can only guess who is turning the corner or who Willy Nilly is handing over a postal item just by looking at the voice and tones.
Dylan Thomas typed most of the characters. This fits with his love of playing with proverbs and idiomatic expressions and generally stretching and twisting the words. These rather rhetorical tricks meet a poetic force that creates completely unique visual worlds. For translation, the challenges could hardly be greater. Shortly after the BBC’s first broadcast of “Under Milk Wood” in 1954, Erich Fried presented a version of the text that translated a large part of Thomas’ linguistic peculiarities into German. It is still considered a classic by many.
The poet Jan Wagner, who has now made a new translation of the radio play, knows that, of course. It is no coincidence that in his afterword he flirts with how “nearly perfect” Fried’s translation is, so that any attempt at a new translation seems “doomed to fail” from the start. Wagner gave careful thought to how the sentence structure and rhythm could look in German and repeatedly found clever solutions. To do this, he recharged many of the everyday phrases that Fried took from the language of his time. This is often reflected in small things, for example when “very small news” becomes a much more sober “hardly any news” instead of Fried’s “not much new today”.
Sometimes a self-imposed compulsion to rhyme seems to be at work
All in all, Jan Wagner’s formulations are usually fresher than Erich Fried. But even his translation does not always sound very contemporary. It’s not clear why “ho ho” has to become an antiquated “jeez” or why “in sudden springshine” turns into “in the sudden spring glow”. Sometimes a self-imposed compulsion to rhyme seems to be at work, for example when Wagner uses a completely different language register for the half-sentence “as we tumble into bed”, which rhymes with “dead” and translates “if the passion is blazing”, just for that rhyme with “dead”.
Wagner’s translation is particularly strong where he transforms into German the countless puns, songs and counting rhymes that Thomas uses in his voices. And in replicating the layer of sound that each movement possesses. Here the milk forest does not simply lead down to the sea, but “limps invisibly down to the sloe-black, tough, black, crow-black, trawler-hopping sea.” A miraculous analogy to Thomas’ “the wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea”.
As phantasmagorical as Dylan Thomas created his play, the naturalness with which crows, the black sea and the dead are present in people’s minds is also an echo of the upheavals of the Second World War. It’s no coincidence that the undertaker bears the name Evans-the-Death. Thomas himself escaped military service. When he died in 1953 at the age of not even 40, suffering from lung disease and addicted to alcohol, he was on a reading tour in the USA. To earn money – and to give his “milk forest” an incomparable voice.
Dylan Thomas: Unterm Milchwald. A piece for voices. Bilingual. Translated from English and with an afterword by Jan Wagner. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2022. 190 pages, 27 euros.