Karin Boye: The Child

The child

To the rock lay Prometheus shackled.
A child came forth in the early dawn.
"Halt, child, and see here
the friend of man shackled in irons
because of all the good he has done!"
But the child, scared
by the bigness of the words and the defiant eyes 
crept past with a prayer to Zeus
and ran off to the loveliest games. - -
I wanted to follow you silently, where you go.
Wise folk and children, through play they touch

what in the heavens lies hidden.

Barnet

Vid klippan låg Prometheus smidd.
Ett barn gick fram i tidiga morgonstunden.
"Stanna, barn, och se här
människors vän i järn smidd
för allt vad gott han gjorde!"
Men barnet, skrämt
av ordens storhet, ögonens trots,
smög förbi med en bön till Zeus
bort till vänaste lekar.  -- --
Jag ville följa dig tyst, där du går.
De visa och barnen, de leka sig till
vad i himlen är gömt.

Karin Boye, from Gömda land (Hidden Lands, 1924)

I thought it was time to translate some more Karin Boye poems, and I chose this one to start with, because of its brevity and lack of rhyme. 

But it didn't prove quite as simple as I expected. It begins with the problem that Boye uses a verb "smida" (lines 1,4) that has no exact parallel in English. It's related to the word "smith" and it means, more or less, what a smith does: forging and hammering. The expression smidd vid (line 1) means, if you can imagine it, "smithed to": Prometheus was smithed to the rock. "Vitter stil" (high or poetic style) remarks the SAOB, who also pointed me to C.F. Dahlgren's line about "den klippa, / Vid hvilken Prometheus smeds" (though Dahlgren's poem of 1841 is anti-heroic in a quite different way from Boye's). I went for "shackled to", which at least has a metallic connotation, but it doesn't so vividly evoke the actual work of shackling someone. A subsidiary issue in this line is "låg", which literally means "lay" but in Swedish often just means "was" (indicating location rather than body position). I decided to keep "lay", because paintings of the captive Prometheus do tend to show him lying down, and also to retain the Swedish word-order, hoping to suggest high style. 

The second issue is "vänaste" (line 9), another poeticism meaning "fairest" or possibly "gentlest". I can't say that I've so far managed to come up with a word that really works well with "games". 

The third issue is "de leka sig till" (lit. they play themselves to). I couldn't make the lines work with "play" as the verb, which is fine, but this meant I needed to choose some other verb that "through play" could qualify, and I couldn't really settle on one more than another: I considered "approach", "find", "discover", "glimpse" and several others. At the moment of first posting I've gone for "touch", but I don't promise not to change it again. 

David McDuff has translated all of Karin Boye's poems (Karin Boye: Complete Poems, Bloodaxe, 1994). I realized I had not checked out his translation of "The Child": when I did, I had to confess that I liked it more than mine. So here it is:  https://www.karinboye.se/verk/dikter/dikter-mcduff/the-child.shtml .

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My translations of poems by Karin Boye:

From Clouds (1922)

From Hidden Lands (1924)

From Hearths (1927)

From For the Tree's Sake (1935)

From The Seven Deadly Sins (published posthumously in 1942)