![]() ![]() ![]() It was with all of these anxieties and prejudices that I approached Edward Snow’s new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke, the early 20th century poet who wrote in German (though he was born in Prague, at the time under Austro-Hungarian control). It’s a troubling feeling to go to the library or bookstore to pick up a foreign poet, only to find three or four different translations available. This theoretical problem manifests itself pertinently in the anxiety that a translation is not identical to the original, and therefore inauthentic. ![]() Though its semantic meaning can hold, translation risks the utter loss of all emotional register. “Hence the vanity of translation ” Percy Shelley wrote, “it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principles of its color and odor, as to transfuse from one language into another creations of a poet.” What the poet is communicating here is poetry’s fascination with presentation, its syntax, sound, rhythm-aspects that depend on its language of origin-so that there is an almost absurdly destructive quality to any translation. ![]()
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