Features April 2007
The three Ms of German poetry
On Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Michael Hofmann.
Verse translators come in three varieties: Those who get almost nothing right; those (the majority) who get some things right; and those rare birds who get everything, or at least almost everything, right.
By everything I mean the three Ms: Music, Metaphor, and Meaning. By music I mean meter, rhythm, cadence, and, where it exists, rhyme. By metaphor I really mean imagery, but can’t resist having three Ms. Under meaning I include poetic diction, which must tackle the problem of how to handle the language of past centuries: should it be modernized and, if so, to what degree? Is there perhaps a language that manages to be timeless?
You may gather that verse translation is no easy business. Whoever undertakes it is either a hack, a well-meaning innocent, or, now and then, a truly gifted translator who may or may not be a poet himself.
Poetry...
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