Mir’s Reviews > Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation > Status Update

To read with recognition (not just simple understanding) is to realize why writer made the choices he or she made

it is half-baked ideas of this kind which lead many people to dismiss poetry as merely poetry. They know that instinct--the source of blind repetition--is a species of stupidity... Nor does one need another ideology to reject Rilke's view that life and death are in the same continuum as though one were infrared and the other ultraviolet.

The desire to improve the world... is, however compassionate, an impulse born of ignorance and arrogance.

There are two kinds of transformation, then: material...and conceptual

Giving up always goes beyond the given that has been intended.

For a fully fledged elegy we need a mountain at whose peak we shall look down upon the world and try to find our place in it... and a tutelary spirit of feminine gender will also be required to attend us while we philosophize.

Poems don't have to be sincere. They only need to be good.

The temptation to push...into the Platonic poem itself, the poem no one can write without resorting to inevitably distorting language, is sometimes irresistible. One should never go, I think, quote all the way, yet a little flirting, some heavy petting, may sometimes be more than a pleasant indulgence. Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, or the gods may succeed.

Translating Da stieg ein Baum as "A suddenly ascending tree." is a bit odd. Word meaning aside, why translate a complete sentence as an incomplete one?

Angels can't be terrible. Pot-holed roads are terrible. Times are terrible. The roast is terrible. Terrifying, yes...terrible... Um, what are you talking about, Mr. Gass? You even mention Yeats in this book; do you have a problem with "a terrible beauty is born"? "Terrible" is often used in exactly this way.