Reading Rilke Reflections On The Problems Of Translations
"A rich, ambitious, densely interconnected set of musings on the life and work of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke....This book is many things: an idiosyncratic biography of a brilliant if often irritating artist; a critically sophisticated meditation on the sources of inspiration that can itself be movingly lyrical...a guided line-by-line safari in which Gass leads us, 'as into some movie Africa,' into the dark linguistic and interpretive jungles of Rilke's 'obdurate, complex and compacted' lines; a philosophical investigation into the meaning of the Elegies; and, not least, a series of English renderings of several of Rilke's poems culminating in Gass's new translation of the Elegies themselves." --New York Times Book Review"Reading Rilke, a deep celebration of reading and translating, is a kind of antidote for when words become unhinged from meaning, an antidote to the loneliness of reading and of writing. Gass repairs the arteries between the heart and the mind and the mouth and the hand, giving them new flexibility and vigor." --Los Angeles Times