Translation is gratitude to language.13
The difficulty of translating Rilke will cause the heart of any Rilke translator—and there are many, though not of the French poems—to lurch with recognition, affection and dread. To give a specific example, “The Doe” [La Biche], begins, in French:
Ô la biche: quel bel intérieur
d’anciennes forêts dans tes yeux abonde;
combien de confiance ronde
mêlée à combien de peur.
Literally: “Oh, the doe: what a beautiful interior / of ancient forests in your eyes abounds; / how much round confidence / mixed with how much fear.” To begin with, there is the Ô and the quel, followed by two occurrences of combien, all of which lend a tone of breathless drama. I acknowledge the Romantic style of Rilke’s poetic heritage, but there are other ways to convey urgency in this poem. Personally, I am far more interested in the fact that this poet sees a deer and offers us a unique perspective on the mystery inherent in its being.
Gary Miranda, a translator I admire, gave us a marvelous new version of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. In his afterword, he says this, on the pesky subject of Ô: “. . . a modern American reader has far less tolerance for ‘O’ than a European reader of Rilke’s day, and one has to assume that Rilke would have been sensitive to that fact had he been writing for a modern American audience. So, if you’re aiming to approximate the original experience for a modern audience, you’re going to have to jettison some of those Os. This is just one reason that it’s always seemed silly to me to talk about a definitive translation. Definitive for whom?”14
In addition to the issue of overly heightened drama, I spent a long time contemplating the deceptively simple word choices in this poem. The most obvious translations did not offer the best poetry. Case in point: the French word intérieur, “interior” or “inside”: the more I studied this poem, the more I felt that this word stuck out and gave the line a scientific tone that clashed with the simplicity and darkness of a Grimm’s fairy-tale forest, glimpsed by the poet in the black eyes of the doe.
I wrote version after version, and finally tried not using the word “interior” at all while retaining the concept. This required rearranging the lines a bit, and including the idea of “inside” with the quieter preposition “in,” and by adding the adjective ”deep.” As for the drama of the original, my hope is that I have transferred that feeling to the third and fourth lines of the verse, using the short and emphatic “shot through” and “utter fear.”
Doe, the deep, ancient beauty
of forests flows in your eyes,
circles of trust shot through
with utter fear.
My priority in translation is that the poems must be poems in English. I conformed almost without exception to Rilke’s line and stanza breaks, and I gave a good amount of attention to rhythm. For Rilke, rhyme and meter represented pleasurable constraints.
But translating his exact rhymes was never my goal; in my view this tended to distort these short verses beyond poetic tolerance. I am satisfied with (the sometimes accidental) resonances such as those between “doe” and “deep,” and “forests” and “flows.”
In general, I have emphasized flow and content, striking what I perceived to be a balance between the numerous difficulties of translation. I did not want to adhere so strictly to accuracy that I would end up performing, so to speak, an operation that killed the patient.
My goal was to communicate musicality through occasional and oblique rhymes, loose internal rhymes, repeating vowel sounds, and rhythmic patterns. These poems are a vast and intricate house, and rather than guide you on a tour of all its nooks and crannies, I hope I have merely held open its door, offering a fresh journey of discovery aided by language.