#this situation is just like. i don't trust ANY of you now. rilke included.

[aeide-thea]

my german isn't even a fraction as good as it would need to be to make any kind of job of rilke but i fell down a minor rabbit hole & have been flipping thru edward snow's version of his uncollected poems as a result & it's just like. it's a hard thing to describe but you know the kind of translation where it just feels like. you aren't getting a sense of the actual arc & flow of meaning and it's not clear that the translator had one either. very these-sure-are-some-nouns-on-a-page.

like, okay, random example i just hit:

Imagining you my being burns more brightly, my veins turn the night red. About my heart the armed guardian rattles with suspicion. Has your feeling caught sight of me down through the liberated stars? Are you coming from unopposable space Paris, May 1913

and yes those italics are snow's own and no they are not in rilke's german text anywhere—

Dich aufdenkend wird mein Wesen erglühter, meine Adern röten die Nacht. An meinem Herzen der gerüstete Hüter klirrt vor Verdacht. Wacht dein Gefühl durch die mündigen Sterne herüber? Gehst du aus unaufhaltsamem Raum

like i always have a vague suspicion that stephen mitchell is to rilke what keeley and sherrard are to cavafy, in the sense of producing very beautiful english versions whose allegiance is perhaps ultimately more to themselves than to their point of origin

and like, disclaimer that this is all a very uninformed discussion, i'm sure there are rilke and/or translation aficionados out there who have very well-founded, well-established opinions on these various translators but i really don't, i'm just poking at pomes like a dilettante*

but oof snow is not successfully selling me on his prefatory assertion that these were in fact remarkable poems that deserved better than to go uncollected!! are you coming from unopposable space, edward. can you perhaps go back there and workshop this jumble a little

⸻ * or possibly a dilet-oncle