In this essay I will not deal with the theory of translation but I will try to answer the question: What is it like to translate a poem? We’ll look mainly at the difficulties. The difficulties are all one difficulty, something immense, knotted, exasperating, fond of disguises, resistant, confusing, all of a piece. One translates a poem in fits and starts, getting a half line here, weeks later the other half, but one senses a process. I’m going to simplify the process into eight stages. I mean by that the stages one goes through from the first meeting with a poem to its recreation, when one says goodbye to it. As I’ve mentioned above, the stages will often collapse into each other, or a single line will suddenly go through all eight stages in a flash, while the other lines lie about looking even more resistant than before. What I will do then is to pretend that all goes in order; but this is an ancient ploy. When one makes a map, one pretends the earth can be laid out flat. But a map helps us to visualize the territory.
I decided not to choose a poem I had already translated, which I would write about from hindsight, but instead I chose virtually at random a sonnet from Rilke’s first series of the Sonnets to Orpheus, a poem I did not know well. In preparation for this essay, I took the poem to a seminar in German translation and we all worked through the sonnet. The sonnet is this one:
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