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. Continue reading “How to really figure something out, poetry in translation”