The poems:

 
Below, in the left column, the titles of the poems are listed in the order of the poems' creation. A poem's bilingual page is opened by clicking on the poem's title. The right column contains short descriptions of the poems. To read them you can either scroll this column up and down manually or move the cursor over the title of a poem (left column) to make the description of this poem appear in the visible window (right column).

* His values are reflected in the words of his Jewish friend

, to whom he was connected in friendship all his life long. After his death, she exchanged several letters with his son and described what their friendship had been like and how it was maintained even under Nazi rule and its dangerous conditions for such a connection:

"He maintained his friendship, in spite of the horrible times & he as well as his mother did not refrain from staying in connection with us, so close were the two families to each other...... She & your father remained faithful to us in spite of Hitler. ....that was real friendship which you scarcely find here

. For better or for worse we hung together.

* His values are reflected in the words of his Jewish friend

, to whom he was connected in friendship all his life long. After his death, she exchanged several letters with his son and described what their friendship had been like and how it was maintained even under Nazi rule and its dangerous conditions for such a connection:

"He maintained his friendship, in spite of the horrible times & he as well as his mother did not refrain from staying in connection with us, so close were the two families to each other...... She & your father remained faithful to us in spite of Hitler. ....that was real friendship which you scarcely find here

. For better or for worse we hung together."

In German, their original language, Kurt Müller's war poems have been on display for several years here on this site. But since  this is a bilingual site, the challenge proved ever more tempting to provide some access to them for our English - non-German - speaking visitors as well. Now the work is done and the translations are on display. Each of them has its own page where it can be beheld side by side with its German language counterpart or also with the facsimile of the handwritten, truely original version.

 
It was, though, not only a tempting, but an ambitious challenge, of course. Translating poetry, compared to translating prose, is a very different task, maybe more demanding, certainly more time-consuming. The meaning of a poem is transported, yes, even defined differently, compared to prose. It is generated simultaneously by a multitude of factors. Its carriers are not only denotation and a bit of connotation (like of prose, often), but also many other text features contributing to the reader's, or - better - the hearer's impression of the content and his feelings about it. Such additonal parameters are, in particular, meter, rhythm, rhyme and other structural features of the text (alliterations, for instance); it is their interaction, more than the single parameters as such, which modifies the meaning. Meter, for instance, as such does not usually carry an abundance of meaning (though some, nonetheless), but how and where it is interrupted, for instance, can as strongly contribute to the total of a stanza's meaning as the way the grammatical structure of a sentence overlaps with the metrical structure and other factors which, for instance, work together to make the rhythm of speech.
 
Taking all these components into account, it becomes clear that a complete one-to-one transfer of the entirety of a poem's components and structures is impossible; a perfect translation is utopian. It would require a repetition of virtually all these elements coinciding in the same way in the other language as they do in the original one. Even the richest language cannot supply enough variations of construction elements to be able to emulate what was predetermined by another language and its different structures and elements.
 
So if we might easily accept the unattainability of perfection when translating prose, with the translation of poetry it means an unavoidable incompleteness which is hard to accept and can cast doubt on the sensibility of the whole intention. We can't but just approach a complete transfer of the poem's meaning, never reach it, and sometimes the quality of the result may justify the attempt, sometimes it won't. With so narrow the path  to an acceptable result translators won't easily agree about which elements contribute more to the overall meaning, in the single poem as well as in principle. It will depend on personal preferences whether, for instance, a literal translation of the text will be chosen at the cost of structural elements. Arbitrary decisions*, like this one, are similarly unavoidable as incompleteness, indeed.
 
When translating Kurt Müller's  war poems, as on display here, we have tried to incorporate all major contributors of meaning to as great an extent as possible, but when decisions between different carriers of meaning become unavoidable, we gave strict priority to the preservation of the major formal poetical structures at the expense of the preservation of a literal denotative translation, for instance of the exact metaphor which then was replaced by a different metaphor, with the same basic contribution or tertium comparationis, though. So preserving the complete, sometimes complicated rhyme structure in the target language, English, was given almost absolute priority, be it regular like in the first poem, be it irregular, complicated, covered by the contrarious sentence and meter, and then surprising like in the second, "

". The strength of a rhyme, though, sometimes was a field of compromises; strong rhymes were not always preserved in the target language but sometimes translated by weak rhymes, as the price for thus staying closer to the original in other respects.  If to a lesser extent than the rhyme structure, also the metric structure including its irregularities was the object of prioritised preservation, and, similarly, the rhythm of speech. But also other factors, closer to a poem's content, were given a weight as high as possible: the "colour" of a sentence, for instance, the way of speaking, the basic feeling of the speaker as well as the basic, deeper meaning of a sentence even if the single metaphor may have to be replaced by a similar one if the target language does not offer a rhyming equivalent.
 
A specific difficulty when translating from German to English concerns the personal pronoun. The German language makes a distinction between the second person singular and the second person plural, it has different words for the two numbers: "du" (singular) and "ihr" (plural) whereas the English language nowadays uses what once was the plural, "you", for both numbers, plural and singular. What used to be the singular, "thou", is restricted to certain areas of use now (biblical context, certain dialects, but also poetic context). For the translation of Kurt Müller's poems this situation causes the difficulty that, if the singular "du" as well as the plural "ihr" is translated by the ambiguous "you", then in many cases, indeed, the reader cannot tell the difference, i.e. it is not possible to tell which number is meant though in the original there is no doubt which number, ie. which person(s) is/are meant. Within small units of speech like poems this deficit of translation cannot be compensated as easily as in prose text.. This is one of the reasons why for the translation of the personal pronoun we** make use of our "poetic license" (maybe not only the poets themselves, but also the translators of poetry are granted this license, as well), take the liberty and, for the sake of unambiguity of translation as one of the reasons, use the poetic "thou" for the most cases of "du": when the author addresses his wife ("

", "

", "

") or when he addresses God ("

", "

"); it is not used, though, when a fictive person addresses another fictive person (like in "

" and "

").
 
Last but not least, the key task of any translation, in the case of poetry an extremely sensitive task, must be looked at, as well: selecting the words or expressions able to resurrect the originals content in the target language. A perfect transfer may not work in many cases but aiming for the best version and at least for a sufficiently fitting one is the core task of translation. As trivial this may sound in principle, as tricky it is in practice, particularly in those exceedingly difficult cases when additional advice is required from a native speaker of the other language (if, as usual, the translator is a native speaker of one of the two). Normally this proves a great help as we could experience.
 
In certain cases, though, which often are not easily recognized as such, this effort stays insufficient. In such a case, superficially all requirements seem fulfilled, in particular the accordance with translations offered by dictionaries. But originals with a very special mixture of unusual denotative and connotative meanings, not covered by a dictionary's offers, but only defined by the context in a poem, can produce the dodgy situation of a principle gap of understanding on both sides of the language barrier opening widely. How can in such a case the content of the original validly and reliably be communicated to the advising speaker of the target language, without an existing valid translation so far? There are ways, in general, but in difficult cases they may fail and wrong-positive answers (unfitting suggestions) or wrong-negative ones (false rejections of fitting suggestions) appear. The same mistakes can vice versa occur to the speaker of the original language, of course, in both cases because of a natural, unavoidable bigger or smaller lack of experience in the other language.
 
An example for this kind of difficulty is the translation of the German word "Höhlen" (as part of a description of a face) in the poem: "

" which for some reason was the most controversial single translation problem. For part of the translators, of all possible translations the English word "hollows", though in general its range of   meanings as a noun is not centered around the equivalent of "Höhlen", nevertheless seemed to come closest to the meaning of "Höhlen" in this case. In the following thorough discussion three - eventually associated -  questions dominated which initially were differently answered by different native speakers of English:
 
1. Is this a correct translation, at all, or does "hollows" not cover the required meaning at all?   2. If it is correct as such is it valid without any additional specification (like, in the examples below, "in the cheeks" etc.), and with the further context as the only help to select the intended meaning from the rather wide choice of possible meanings?
3. Should, if a perfect translation is impossible, an approach be chosen which, compared to the original, is more explicit and interpreting (i.e. "gaunt face" instead of "hollows", for instance) rather than more vague?
 
To answer these questions looking at examples by English authors of fiction and non- fiction as well as examples quoted in English dictionaries proved a useful method. As far as the first question is concerned examples show that the use of "hollows" in the specific sense meant in the poem is common, if with the explicit addition of  explaining expressions. Examples for "hollows" with the additions "in the cheeks", "in the face" and "under the eyes" are frequent, and not only in a technical, for instance medical sense ("

the hollows in the face help to amplify the sound of the voice

"), but also in other contexts which come very close to the context in the poem: "

".

One such example is by Ben Shepard from "A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century": "Their pallor, the hollows in their cheeks and beneath their eyes, and the utter fatigue … are eloquent of the exhaustion and frustration which they feel".

So, even if the connotative profile may not always perfectly fit the context of the poem, this seems to be a basically correct translation.
 
But would it still be correct without an explicit explaining addition? The decisive point in this respect is that also in the German original a gap exists between the main or average use of the word "Höhlen" ruling the first associations released by its perception on the one hand and the meaning - or, since its poetry, a complex of meanings - valid in this specific case on the other hand. The transformation of perception, leading from the first, at least incomplete associations to the shaping of a case-specific meaning, is achieved not by explicit specifications like in Shepards sentence but, much more indirectly, through the demands set up by the wider context. This given, it would be wrong or at least unfair to expect anything different from the English translation. The possibly misleading character of the first assciations released by the word "hollows" is a correspondent of what equally happens during the perception of the German original.
 
The third question, to which extent interpreting elements should be added by the translation, is in a way the most difficult one because there is no method to determine a true or correct answer. It is, though, also the easiest one because it is a matter of the translator's personal approach and of his decision which choice might just be the lesser evil.

All this was considered and kept contributing to the new creation of a poem's English version - because it can't be anything other than that: a piece of living language of its own, working independently to let an impression emerge in the English reader's - or hearer's - mind which eventually should be as close as possible to the impression created in the German reader's mind before. We hope not to have failed this target by too wide a margin, but we know that there is still a lot of room for improvement .

* An example is shown here of two very different translations of one and the same poem, Heinrich Heine's "Enfant perdu" (with the German original being reproduced as written as well as audible text, in the latter case recited by Kurt Müller). The translations which both have their strong and their less strong passages were done by Lord Houghton and Louis Untermeyer.