About

First Things First

I decided to launch this blog when I noticed that many translations of German poems into English are, for lack of a better word… lacking. Now, I’m not claiming that my translations are perfect either but I wanted to offer them up as yet another option, to be used or discarded at leisure by anyone trying to find a translation of a particular poem. An entirely personal side project.

Objectives and Such

The German language has produced some great poetry and literature throughout the centuries. I’m not even going to argue about it. If you dislike German, this is not the place for you (but it might be time to re-examine those prejudices!).

Since there is so much more that should be translated than I ever could translate, I will just focus on some of my favourite pieces and hope to provide an adequate impression. Quality over quantity. That’s the idea, at least.

Some Thoughts on Translation

Since I’m not a professional translator, I want to stress that my translations don’t follow any strict guidelines or handbooks. A good translation of a poem should, in my opinion, be literal enough to retain most of the wording and metaphors of the original while being poetic in itself. What I have found, in looking for translations of German poems, is that they are often one or the other; rarely both. Finding the middle ground might prove elusive for me as well but it’s worth a try.

It’s all about the effect, isn’t it? A translation should have the same – or very similar – effect on the reader as the original. You can get literal translations from Google and DeepL these days, even if they are still extremely error-prone, especially when it comes to poetry. But they can’t replicate the effect of a poem because the effect lies in the relation of the words to each other, not in the words themselves; it lies in what the poem evokes, in what it wants to transport, in the thoughts and feelings it inspires. Meter, rhymes, those are all important. No translation will ever be completely faithful, it will always be something different from the original because it will always be an interpretation already but that’s also beautiful because it means that we can have so many different translations and all of them can be good in their own way. That’s what culture is, ultimately: Ambiguity and yet – meaning.

Those are my two cents. Happy reading!