Sometimes the various parts of my life overlap. I have been reading Alix Harrow’s latest book The Everlasting, and enjoying it a lot. The book opens with a poem by Rilke which I liked. I had a “short and sweet, mostly just paperwork” wedding ceremony to perform this week and had an inkling that the person who asked me to do the ceremony would like the poem. I don’t read a lot of poetry, but I think poems are great for weddings.
Because it’s 2026 and I am a librarian, I checked to make sure it actually was a poem by Rilke. Harrow had listed the book and the translator. I found the book (by that translator) and checked the poem. And it was… different. Like mostly the same but a little different. This was odd. I do not speak German so couldn’t really get much deeper into which one was more accurate. Google Translate gave me a third possibility but I wasn’t interested in that. I was all set to ask my friend who is a poetry translator what her take was, but then I noticed that the translator was, himself, a poet and also that he was a working professor at a US university. Sticking to my general “Why suppose when you can just KNOW” motto, I dropped him an email. And I learned.
I wanted to use [this poem] in a wedding ceremony and made sure to check the citation in the original book of translated poetry. In the print version of the book, the last line is “among the flowers, facing opposite the sky.” In the online version, it’s “among the flowers, and look up into the sky.” I went with the latter because it fit the ceremony better, and I speak no German but I was wondering if you know why there’s a discrepancy there? If perhaps you updated a later copy of the book of poetry, or there’s some machine translation hijinx.
Obviously, this is just one librarian’s curiosity so if the answer is “Who knows?” that’s also fine but if there’s a story there, I’d love to hear it.
Thanks for your time.
I heard back within two hours.
Hi Jessamyn–I’m a compulsive reviser, and my editors have always encouraged me. So “facing opposite” may be more accurate, but “and look up into” feels so much better to me–it’s a later revision on my part; please do use it!
Best.
Edward Snow