Petermann Susanne - When I Go: Selected French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

L ike many students of German literature, I sailed through college with a passing understanding of Rainer Maria Rilkes work. More than a dozen years of post-college adventures and foreign travels followed, until I finally landed in Los Angeles where I encountered these poems in a close, dusty bookstore, by sheer happenstance. I didnt quite believe that Rilke had really written so much in French, so I bought the hefty volume, The Complete French Poems . I read enough of it to learn that, yes, Rilke had written eight or nine series of poems and fragments (about in all) in French shortly before he died. Before I could get very far, life intervened and the book lay half-forgotten among the others on my shelves, all of which tumbled to the floor a few months later, January 1994 , during the Northridge earthquake. Luckily, I was living a few suburbs away from the epicenter, so, for me, results of the shaking were no worse than kitchen cupboards being emptied, a few dishes broken, and a living room floor littered with books.

Exhausted from the shock and its aftermath, I sat down and opened Rilkes French poems quite at random. I was looking for comfort in the musical words of the master I remembered from college; I wanted desperately to nourish myself with words, learn something by heart that would affirm and soften my inner state. Instead, I was dismayed to find that the translation conferred little of Rilkes melancholic charm and depth. Even more surprising was the discovery that I was holding in my hands the only existing English translation of these poems to date. And, it was a book that hadnt even been compiled until 1979 , more than five decades after Rilkes death! My curiosity was stirred. After all, I had just spent four uninterrupted years completely immersed in the French language while living in France and Casablanca.

It was clear to me, when I compared the original to the translation, that these poems had not yet found the fullness of their expression in English. I set the book aside for further study, and over the next weeks and months, tentatively used a light pencil to change a word here and there. Slowly the poems grew on me, and, with the encouragement of friends, I continued to re-translate them. It took years before I joined the American Literary Translators Association and actually considered myself a translator. As a non-academic, I struggled to find my way through the translation process without the anchor or constraint of theory and background knowledge. The process of taking the poems apart and putting them back together in my native English felt unfamiliar and difficult.