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David's review

Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke
by Rainer Maria Rilke

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104712.Selected_Poems_of_Rainer_Maria_Rilke?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1171523983m/104712.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104712.Selected_Poems_of_Rainer_Maria_Rilke?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7906.Rainer_Maria_Rilke">Rainer Maria Rilke</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/15107669?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 1 of 5 stars There are times in life when I feel as if I live in a parallel universe. You know the way it goes. The usual precipitating event - everyone else on the planet holds an opinion or belief that seems so outrageous and outlandish to me, we cannot be having the same experience. I've had this feeling all day today.
 
 My current sense of profound alienation was triggered by looking down the list of other people's ratings for this book, the Robert Bly "translation" of selected poems by Rilke. Four-star and five-star ratings abound. OK. Maybe people are responding to the beauty of Rilke's poetry, filtered through the laughable effort at "translation" by Robert Bly. But no - several people single out the translation for particular praise!
 
 Did these people read the same book I did? This is the most abysmal "translation" of Rilke's work, indeed of anyone's work, I have ever had the misfortune to come across. It reads as if it were written by an imbecile, tone-deaf to the natural cadences of both German and English, whose grasp of German matches what one might expect of someone who had seen "The Sound of Music" as a youth. And possibly "Heidi".
 
 To give two concrete examples, compare Bly's butchering of two of Rilke's most famous poems with some other translations:
 
 <a target="_blank" href="http://gaelstat.com/translation.aspx">http://gaelstat.com/translatio...</a>
 
 (click on links to "Autumn Day" and "The Panther", respectively; a direct link to "Autumn Day" is below, but for some reason goodreads doesn't accept my efforts to provide a direct link to "The Panther")
 
 <a target="_blank" href="http://gaelstat.com/Documents/Autumn Day.doc"> Autumn Day </a>
 
 I've given specific examples in the first document of where I think Bly makes inexcusable choices - changing the poem's title, duplicating text in a way that ruins the metre, making avoidable changes in the meaning. 
 
 
 I think just reading the various translations of "The Panther" should make it clear just how clunky Bly's effort is. A specific example is his translation of the line - 
 
 "Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte" 
 as
 "The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride"
 
 - it's awkward, and the metre of the original is completely mucked up. 
 
 The book is filled with other examples of hopelessly clumsy language, brutalization of the metre, and - this seems most unforgivable - the imposition of unnecessary changes. For instance, in the section "The Voices", "Das Lied des Bettlers" is rendered as "The Song the Beggar Sings", and that superfluous "sings" makes its appearance in each title in this section. 
 
 But Bly apparently feels no compunction about adding his own superfluous "improvements" to Rilke's original text. That this sometimes changes the meaning considerably doesn't seem to bother him. Combine this with what appears to be a tin ear for the normal rhythms of English, and you end up with the ghastly results in this sorry apology for a translation.
 
 Seriously. There are many fine translations of Rilke out there. Give this one a miss. 
 
 
 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/166376?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

David's review
rating:
recommended for: nobody

There are times in life when I feel as if I live in a parallel universe. You know the way it goes. The usual precipitating event - everyone else on the planet holds an opinion or belief that seems so outrageous and outlandish to me, we cannot be having the same experience. I've had this feeling all day today.

My current sense of profound alienation was triggered by looking down the list of other people's ratings for this book, the Robert Bly "translation" of selected poems by Rilke. Four-star and five-star ratings abound. OK. Maybe people are responding to the beauty of Rilke's poetry, filtered through the laughable effort at "translation" by Robert Bly. But no - several people single out the translation for particular praise!

Did these people read the same book I did? This is the most abysmal "translation" of Rilke's work, indeed of anyone's work, I have ever had the misfortune to come across. It reads as if it were written by an imbecile, tone-deaf...more

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message 1: by Jessica

03/17/2008 02:51AM

I am not a fan of Bly as a translator. My experience with his work is in Spanish, with Neruda. His translations irk me to no end. I don't know German so cannot comment on the Rilke, but you make the case well.