Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
death-of-poetry styles, September 29, 2000
I couldn't even begin to speak of the value of Bachmann's poetry, personal and phenomenological as it is; can only be silent on the subject of its beauty. The two stars in this review are all hers, and the three missing are because Peter Filkins has made a tremendous effort to misconstrue and mutilate every line she wrote, leaving a horrible, pedantic, confused and leaden mess of English doggerel to stand in for her richly efficient Austrian-German poetic. If you can read German, all the German is here, so by all means buy the book and treasure it; if you can't, consider her poems as yet untranslated. May not be the worst abuse to good poetry I've seen (neither is the Hamburger Celan, although that's also pretty strange), considering that I don't for instance read Chinese -- but it's the one that has caused me the most genuine anger and frustration.I don't think Filkins' translation was in poor faith; he appears to be a poet himself, which is surprising, and he does take pains to retain word order from the German and, most jarringly, preserve rhyme schemes. (Remember high school "translations" of Chaucer? Oh, the grief...) But there are just as many flat-out semantic errors in translation as ingenious attempts at preservation, and it's clear he has no intuition for Bachmann's thought patterns and her ear for sound. Here's hoping someone who does eventually replaces this "standard" text with a more sensitive rendering. For the record, this reviewer has disagreed strongly with everything Susan Sontag has said about Central European literature, notably Peter Nadas' "A Book of Memories."
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Uplifting, June 1, 2004
By A Customer
Wht distinguishes Ingeborg Bachman's work is its humaneness. She was not simply against war or against a single, anecdotal issue; she was against inhumanity in general. From my point of view--that of a very rudimentary reader in German--the poetry was no less beautiful, though I read in English translation. I even feel that I was able to experience from within Bachmann's interest in the intersection of language and culture. In fact, after reading each poem in English, I was better able to move on to the German text, read it aloud to myself, and feel that I had a much better sense of the sound of it, which surely has enriched my experience of Bachmann.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Death by Translation, September 16, 2003
To echo the senitments of the only other reviewer, the original versions of Ingeborg Bachmann's poems contain some of the most beautiful phrases I have ever encountered. Also a wonderful window into a modern German culture that continues to bear the impossible weight of destruction, sorrow, and betrayal. The translations, however, are not simply pedantic and lacking in all the subtle, lyric musicality of Bachmann's style, they are often downright inaccurate. I have only been leafing through the book for a few minutes, and have already encountered two type-os. This is irresponsible, and quite astounding considering this work was done by someone who considers himself a poet. A good translation could be a work of art in its own right. What a shame.
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