We usually think of the “poetic” as that which cannot fully translate, that
which is uniquely embedded in its particular language. The poetry of Rainer
Marie Rilke is a case in point. The opening line of the Duino Elegies—Wer,
wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus den Engel Ordnungen?—has been trans-
lated into English literally dozens of times, but as William Gass points out
in his recent Reading Rilke: Re®ections on the Problems of Translation, none
of the translations seem satisfactory. Here are a few examples:J. B. Leishman (1930) Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic
orders?A. J. Poulin (1977) And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic
orders?Stephen Cohn (1989) Who, if I cried out, would hear me—among the
ranked angels?In the spring of 2001 I was invited to the Centre international de poésie in
Marseille for a conference on Wittgenstein vis-à-vis contemporary poets. In
pondering the relationship, the question of poetry and translatability loomed
large. The paper was well received by the attending French poets, but when I
gave it again at a Wittgenstein conference at the University of London a few
weeks later, this time to a group of philosophers, there was much contro-
versy. It has since been recast a few more times for its publication in the
Routledge collection Literature after Wittgenstein.
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“But isn’t the same at least the same?”
Wittgenstein on Translation
Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics.
Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance