ABSTRACT

We usually think of the “poetic” as that which cannot fully translate, that which is uniquely embedded in its particular language. The poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke is a case in point. The opening line of the Duino Elegies – Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus den Engel Ordnungen? – has been translated into English literally dozens of times, but, as William Gass points out in his recent Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, none of the translations seem satisfactory. Here are a few examples:

J. B. Leishman (1930) Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? A. J. Poulin (1977) And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic orders? Stephen Cohn (1989) Who, if I cried out, would hear me – among the ranked

Angels?