★★★★☆ Subtle and often difficult ideas

The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephen Mitchell (Translator)

I have to admit that often, as I made my way through The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, I said to myself, "Rilke is too deep for me." I enjoyed it, but I frequently felt I didn't really get it, or I got it only partially. I suspect this is par for the course with Rilke. Still, there were those flashes of insight when I felt I understood exactly what he was talking about. For instance, I particularly liked "Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes.".

This book contains not just Rilke's original poems in German, but also English translations by Stephen Mitchell. In the paperback, German and English are on facing pages, German on the left and English on the right, a useful format for comparing the translation with the original. Mitchell's translations are excellent. It is particularly difficult to translate poetry well, even when the translator is himself a talented poet. It is almost impossible to preserve meter, rhyme, sense, and emotion. The translator must usually sacrifice one or another of these. While most of Rilke's poem are in rhymed metrical verse, Mitchell's translations are free verse. I felt he made the right choice. There were one or two instances where I might have quibbled with Mitchell's choices, but I could usually see why he did it the way he did -- they were judgment calls.

I liked the translations because they gave me a second bite at the apple of understanding. To translate the poems Mitchell of course had to come up with an idea of what they meant. One presumes he was better at this than I am. By reading the original in German and Mitchell's translation I had two shots at figuring out what Rilke meant.

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