Übersetzen ohne Kenntnis der fremden Sprache
Translating without Knowledge of the Foreign Language

Rainer Maria Rilke and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Portuguese’ Sonnets

Summary/Abstract: Professional practice seems to preclude translating texts from a language over which the translatorhas not achieved mastery. However, 20th century German literature has at least two prominent examples of such cases. Rainer Maria Rilke translated the sonnets of the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Karl Kraus the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Looking to Rilke, it is apparent that sucha project can succeed under the right conditions. Collaborators and friends provided preliminaryand prose versions, making possible a translation process analogous to the act of creation. Rilke illustrates this process with Stendhal’s picture of ‘crystallization’. Meanwhile, the creation of the collection Sonnets from the Portuguese reveals some questions and problems associated with the act oftranslation, also evident in the title and authorship of the publications.

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