Customer Reviews

The Best of Rilke: 72 Form-True Verse Translations with Facing Originals, Commentary, and Compact Biography (English and German Edition)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Rilke is rapidly becoming one of the most popular poets in America -- no mean feat, considering he wrote in German! But the recognition is well deserved. Few poets can match the easy beauty of Rilke's thought, or the immediate accessibility of his poems. If you are looking to increase your appreciation of poetry (or would like to give a book to someone whom you think should), then Rilke makes a good start as any.

So there are only two questions: what book of Rilke's poetry (he was a rather prolific chap) and what translator?

Arndt's selection answers your first question for you. The selection is a good one, with most of the favourites (including "The Panther", "Pieta", etc.). Unfortunately, the translations leave quite a lot to be desired. Ardnt (who made a name for himself translating Pushkin and is a scholar of Russian - not German) attempts to retain the form of Rilke's poems (Rilke wrote structured, rhymed verse). He thus delivers lines of rhymed iambic pentamenter. Unfortunately, this means that while the poems sound nice and flow nicely, much of the beauty of Rilke's thoughts and words is lost to the necessity of form.

A particularly gruesome example is the way Arndt renders one of my favorites, "Liebes-Lied" (Love Song). Rilke's wonderful ending: "O susses Lied" (O sweet song)

ends up being translated as "O sweet the lilt", in order for it to rhyme with an earlier line ending with "tilt". Several other lines suffer along the way as well.

So, if you really want the form retained and you're willing to sacrifice a bit for it, then go for this book. Otherwise, if you want a translation that does justice to Rilke, I would suggest Edward Snow's translations, which do not retain the form, but are elegant and very true to the original German (they are also bilingual). Go for his translation of "New Poems 1907", which includes most of the good ones from this collection, including Love Song, Pieta, The Panther, and others. Unlike Arndt, Snow is an expert on Rilke, and one quickly learns to appreciate that.

By far and away the best translations of the works of Rilke I have yet seen. I hope that Arndt translates more of Rilke's work, as the other translations I have found are pretty poor. While no translation is exact, Arndt retains the meter and ryhme, thus retaining the poetic form of Rilke's work. Reading "Pieta", and "The Orphan's Song" will bring tears to your eyes and an appreciation of the genius of both Rilke and Arndt.

The Best of Rilke is a wonderfully put together publication of his poetry. The poems are beautiful in German and English. In some of the poems, the book also offers multiple translations that each give a slightly different view on the poem. I am a student in German IB, in junior high, and I found this book very easy to use and well-translated. I would recommend this book for anyone who is interested in Rilke's works.

When you first encounter Rilke (probably in your teenage years), you marvel at the modernity of his language, a hundred years after it was written. Intrigued, you start exploring "like some watcher of the skies/ when a new planet swims into his ken". Gradually, you succumb to the incantatory sound and rhythm, the startling subject-object reversals, the transforming and redemptive effect of single lines. By this time, you probably know a number of Rilke poems by heart. As you get older, you become aware of his affectations, his mannerisms, his power to seduce and ensnare. You resist. You start poking holes in his shining armor. You realize that he is easily parodied. Eventually, you may put him aside like a youthful indulgence and concentrate on sterner stuff.

But every so often - on a train ride, at an airport, in a hotel lobby, in a state of suspension or wary expectation - your memory will toss up a line or two from a Rilke poem. Has there ever been a more haunting evocation of captivity than in "The Panther"? Or of the wretched gift of prophecy than in "The Sibyl"? Or of the cruel intrusion of death on ordinary lives than in "Intimation of Reality" and "Coda"? You re-acquaint yourself with the poetry, you re-evaluate, you re-affirm.

A translator has to go through all these stages in order to arrive at an intimate understanding of the poet and his work. Arndt's commentary indicates that he has completed the cycle and is ready for the much more difficult task of rendering Rilke's poetry into another language. Readers of this volume are confronted not only with Rilke, but also with the deeper problems of interpretation and the inevitable compromise required by translation. There is bound to be some dissatisfaction; but the effort will be richly rewarded.

My favorite translation in the book is from Russian -- Tsvetaeva's "A New Year's." It's really joyful, and practically worth the price of the book.

I can't bring myself to recommend the Rilke translations as heartily as the others do.

First a gripe: why do some translators feel the need to justify their work by beating up on other translators? Arndt devotes a section to nastily tearing down other people's work ("not so much a failure of achievement as a failure to try," "an undersaturated mess," etc.)

In truth, it feels like a backhanded way to privilege his values as the basis for judging all translations.

Even if his translations are, as he is at pains to point out, more accurate than anyone else he can name, as English poems they're full of awkward word choices, word orders backwards going, and lines that are flat out incomprehensible (I find myself turning to turn to Snow to figure out what the heck he's trying to get across).

For a good account of the difficulties of translating Rilke from a translator slightly more sympathetic to what other people are trying to accomplish (though, at times, no less nasty), William Gass's Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation is insightful.

For Rilke that sounds as if it had been written in English, I would look elsewhere.

Looking to learn more about and increase my enjoyment of poetry, I was very happy to find this volume of Rilke's work. In addition to having what appears to be very masterful translations, it has the German and English text of each of his poems on facing pages. This makes this book excellent for those wishing to practice or polish their German.

I was very happy with this purchase, and look forward to reading more of Rilke's work in the future.