Amazon.com Review
This stunning version of Rainer Maria Rilke's New Poems disproves Robert Frost's dictum that poetry is "what gets lost in translation." On the contrary, Stephen Cohn's keen ear and flair for the iambic line keep the poet's virtues very much intact. And unlike most previous translators, Cohn seldom allows meaning to triumph over music. In "The Panther," for instance, he deploys assonance, alliteration, and surprising rhythms to convey the pain of an animal's entrapment:
The bars which pass and strike across his gazeIn the second quatrain, his meter effectively mimics the motion of the beast "pacing out that mean, constricted ground." And in the final strophe, the translator evokes the look of the caged beast whose eye "slides open to admit some thing outside; / an image runs through each expectant limb / and penetrates his heart, and dies." Cohn's straightforward use of dies seems particularly on the mark: out of its element, an animal somehow ceases to exist--at least in Rilke's poetic menagerie.
have stunned his sight: the eyes have lost their hold.
To him it seems there are a thousand bars,
a thousand bars and nothing else. No world.
In "The Parrot House," Rilke paints a memorable picture of displacement, describing those birds who balance "on perches that silently rock with their yearning." Cohn's translations, too, have taken leave of their origins. Remaining Rilke's at their core, these poems nonetheless sing in their reincarnated forms. --Martha Silano
Language Notes
Text: German (translation)
Original Language: English
Original Language: English
