ABSTRACT
There are, roughly speaking, three ways in which one work can be considered a good translation of another. The first is what we might call the minimalist way, and it consists of the greatest possible fidelity to the original text, to the point of pedantry; high priest of this method is Vladimir Nabokov and its holy writ Nabokov’s delightful, and unreadable, Eugene Onegin. A good translation should be a “trot,” Nabokov roundly affirms, and it is a principle not without its merits, particularly where poetry is concerned. In other words, let those who want to read Rilke in German learn German; otherwise let them stay at home and continue to paddle in their own shallow pools.
