rachelsakashita

I’m so excited to see this article here! As someone who received six American Girl dolls in my childhood, I can understand why you’re so passionate about this subject. I especially appreciate your tracing of the impact and meaning of the earliest dolls all the way to the most recent offerings.

h0mer, I really appreciate this comment. I can understand your skepticism because I, too, would wrestle with committing wholeheartedly with something that is, as you described, “pure conjecture.” As a person of faith myself, I read works of Rilke, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, etc. and see how they believed what they believed because they had experiences and insights that led them (and me) to believe that faith is not entirely conjecture. Something that fascinates me about Rilke, and that I have found myself emulating, is that he sees divine qualities in ordinary things, and vice versa. In my eyes, he isn’t deifying life and nature so much as teasing out the sacred that already exists within them.

A unique poet, for sure.

I haven’t studied “Letters to a Young Poet” in isolation yet–I’ve only focused in depth upon the particular works I’ve pulled out here. Thank you for your thoughts on his other work.

Thank you for taking the time to read it.

Thank you so much for reading it.

It truly depends on what you’re looking for in a translation. The translation I chose, in the work edited by Anita Barrows, attempts to capture the original feeling and meaning of the poetry and therefore takes some (limited) liberties with Rilke’s poems, such as lineating the poems differently than he did or choosing a word that’s less literally accurate to the original than another. However, because the translator seemed to understand Rilke’s journeys and intentions so well, I trusted the heart of her translation, liberties and all.

If you’re looking for a translation that pays more attention to exact line-by-line translation of Rilke, many scholars recommend Stephen Mitchell. I’ve also heard people praise Edward Snow. Of course, no translation is perfectly exact, and even Mitchell and Snow make artistic choices that change the sound and the verbiage of the original syntax. That’s one of the unavoidable consequences of translating a poem from its heart language.

And this is all coming from a non-German speaker. I’d love to hear what a native German speaker thinks of the English translations of Rilke.

Thanks for your comment!

That’s a fantastic reason to learn German! I’d love to hear your thoughts sometime on how the original Rilke compares with the translated Rilke.