The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation by William H. Gass
Brooke Horvath

William H. Gass. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. Knopf, 1999. 233 pp. $26.00.

Early in Reading Rilke Gass makes clear his subject’s long-standing grip upon him. Rilke, Gass writes, “has taught me what real art ought to be; how it can matter to a life through its lifetime; how commitment can course like blood through the body of your words until the writing stirs, rises, opens its eyes; and, finally, because his work allows me to measure what we call achievement: how tall his is, how small mine.” Equal parts biography, textual commentary, and reflections on aesthetics, Reading Rilke unfolds the Austrian poet’s thought and sensibility while detailing his apprenticeship to genius.

But the book, which includes Gass’s translation of the complete Duino Elegies and thirty-eight other Rilke poems, is more than a contribution to Rilke studies, as its subtitle indicates. Gass, who has been publishing translations of Rilke since the mid-seventies, also devotes considerable space to discussing the inevitable choices translation entails and its demands for empathetic reading, demonstrating these concerns through meticulous analyses of selected passages from the fourteen translations of the Elegies that preceded his.

Moving between history and psychology, formal considerations and phenomenological identification with his subject, Gass unpacks an aesthetics that is, not coincidentally, both Rilke’s and his own as he forwards a vision of art as the embodiment in enduring forms of “complex bit[s] of human awareness” of the world, whose consciousness it is likewise the poet’s duty to articulate. Art, Gass concludes, is the realest thing we achieve in “this unrealized life” because it is where, once life’s celebration ends, “the celebration goes on.”

Much can be learned about Rilke in these movingly written pages, which offer additionally numerous insights into Gass’s own work and the most eloquent defense of art as technique since the appearance three years ago of Gass’s Finding a Form. [Brooke Horvath]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation by William H. Gass Brooke Horvath William H. Gass. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. Knopf, 1999. 233 pp. $26.00. Early in Reading Rilke Gass makes clear his subject’s long-standing grip upon him. Rilke, Gass writes, “has taught me what real art ought to be; how it can matter to a life through its lifetime; how commitment can course like blood through the body of your words until the writing stirs, rises, opens its eyes; and, finally, because his work allows me to measure what we call achievement: how tall his is, how small mine.” Equal parts biography, textual commentary, and reflections on aesthetics, Reading Rilke unfolds the Austrian poet’s thought and sensibility while detailing his apprenticeship to genius. But the book, which includes Gass’s translation of the complete Duino Elegies and thirty-eight other Rilke poems, is more than a contribution to Rilke studies, as its subtitle indicates. Gass, who has been publishing translations of Rilke since the mid-seventies, also devotes considerable space to discussing the inevitable choices translation entails and its demands for empathetic reading, demonstrating these concerns through meticulous analyses of selected passages from the fourteen translations of the Elegies that preceded his. Moving between history and psychology, formal considerations and phenomenological identification with his subject, Gass unpacks an aesthetics that is, not coincidentally, both Rilke’s and his own as he forwards a vision of art as the embodiment in enduring forms of “complex bit[s] of human awareness” of the world, whose consciousness it is likewise the poet’s duty to articulate. Art, Gass concludes, is the realest thing we achieve in “this unrealized life” because it is where, once life’s celebration ends, “the celebration goes on.” Much can be learned about Rilke in these movingly written pages, which offer additionally numerous insights into Gass’s own work and the most eloquent defense of art as technique since the appearance three years ago of Gass’s Finding a Form. [Brooke Horvath]

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