I was reading a fascinating book all about the art of translation..it's that one up above. I hope you "get" the reference there. Not surprisingly, the author is a professional translator himself. It's certainly an absorbing read.
Here's a bit of what he wrote about translating poetry ..... with a neat twist at the end ..
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Wer, wenn ich schrie, hörte mich denn
aus der Engel Ordnungen ?
und gesetz selbst es nähme
einer mich plötlich ans Herz:
ich verginge von seinem
stärkeren Dasein.
For me, no English translation can have the same weight or familiarity or perfection or mystery - nor can any paraphrase in German. I cherish these sounds and words of a language I wanted to master and which I learned in part through the unscrambling and memorization of just those lines.The emotion that for me and me alone is wrapped up in the opening of Rilke's Duino Elegies derives from the past....... what can't be shared can't be translated, obviously enough. But that doesn't make the poem untranslatable for anyone else:
Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angel's hierarchies?
And even if one would take me suddenly to his heart
I would die of his stronger existence.
I might have translated the lines that way when I was learning German by learning Rilke. The English says pretty much what the German says. Is it poetry ? ........ This one, in fact, wasn't done by a poet or by a translator. It was done *( with a little help from a friend) by a machine translation service available for free on the Internet.
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That was a surprise ! I tried it myself ... Google Translate did this to it ...
Who, when I cried, heard me
from the orders of angels?
and law itself
one to me heartily:
I will pass away from his
stronger existence.
Hmmm .... not so good.
I hope ... I really do hope ... that he has taken my advice and started with children's books.. tiny tiny children first ... then just tiny ones, then gradually working up the dinkyness scale until he got to The Cat in the Hat and then ... and then .... crikey ... Kleine Nick. You can leave poetry until you've been at it for 315 years. That's my advice. Just saying !
Which reminds me that I haven't put any further installments of that KN story on here like wot I said I would. I'm on it folks.
And now, here's Kraus .. " Sturm" ... emotional stuff !