Re: Rilke

Right...that's exactly how I felt. Someone posted to this list some years
ago a number of translations of The Panther, I think. Egad. Stephen
Mitchell is a good Rilke translator, but some of these other guys...

The thing is, the first line, it seems to me, really only says, "the summer
is very large," -- which I could see as meaning either "hot" or "long" (I'd
go with long), but not what other translators had in there -- unless it was
an idiomatic expression of some sort. In this case, anyway, the most
accurate is the least poetic.

What a trade off :)

Jim

Scottie Bowman wrote:

> I could never cathect Rilke but I wonder now
> was maybe the fault of all those leaden translations.
>
> Edward Snow's version is fairly acceptable but,
> boy, are those others a bunch of clinkers, or what?
>
> 'Command'? 'COMMAND'?
>
> Why not: 'Bid the last fruits fill' ?
>
> Scottie B.
>
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Received on Fri Sep 13 16:27:12 2002