Word: snowã
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While the weather in Cambridge took a turn for the warmer this weekend, members of the Harvard nordic ski team headed north to Rangeley, Maine for one last race in the snow??a 50k-freestyle race at TD Bank Rangeley Lake Loppet...
...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). Before I evaluate the translation, I must admit that I do not speak a single word of German. Accordingly, I will address the book as a reader for whom it was intended: one who does not know the language and therefore needs another to present Rilke’s poetical universe...
...first thing to notice about Snow??s volume is how thick it is. Though this is technically another “selected” Rilke, it is far more thorough than Mitchell’s or Bly’s. The sheer amount of translation here is both admirable and convenient; it is the most complete recent collection of Rilke’s works in English. This is the culmination of Snow??s several previously-published translations of Rilke’s individual volumes, revised and collected in this larger book...
While Mitchell’s translations are looser and more creatively liberal, Snow??s have an interest in direct syntactical facsimile; with a more direct approach to the formulation of Rilke’s images. In “Going Blind,” a poem from “New Poems,” Rilke describes observing a woman who is ostensibly doing just that. The poem ends with a paradigmatic Rilke image—in observing her impediments, he suddenly perceives a flash of transcendent elegance. Mitchell writes, “and yet: as though, once...
...Rilke’s poems. In the third poem of Rilke’s sonnet sequence, “Sonnets to Orpheus,” he addresses a youth, a “Jüngling,” who presumably has been writing bad love poems. Here is Snow??s translation: “It’s [i]not[/i], youth, when you’re in love, even / if then your voice forces open your mouth; — // learn to forget those songs. They elapse.” Though Snow preserves much...