Michaela Kotziers
on translating Rainer Maria Rilke
My translation does not mirror Rilke’s formal verse, but it does stay true to the original’s simple vocabulary to describe the everyday scene of evening. What I found most interesting and did preserve was Rilke’s syntax — long sentences that spill from one line and stanza to the next, imitating the way in which Abend (“evening”) is both the day and night, two Länder (“worlds”) blending into one another, rather than two independent beings. “Evening” would be a literal translation of Abend, but I felt that the original’s title of Abend encompasses the feeling of the poem rather than simply designating the time of day in which the poem takes place. In trying to find an English word that was more nuanced than what I find to be our understanding of “evening,” “twilight” came to mind, with its blurred borders of night and day, but the sound of the word wasn’t right. So, as an instance of untranslatability, Abend remains in German for my title.
about the author
Rainer Maria Rilke was a modern German-language poet, intensely lyrical in his writing. With his experiments of syntax and images, collections of Rilke’s poetry work towards a philosophy of objective impressions, and truths of human life. Perhaps his most well known books of poetry are Neue Gedichte (New Poems) and Duino Elegies, the second of which was said to “have had as much influence in German-speaking countries as [T. S. Eliot’s] The Waste Land has in England and America.” “Abend,” the poem that I translated, could be placed with Rilke’s Dinggedichte (“thing poems”), which search to explain the human through the non-human (Dinge).
about the translator
Michaela Kotziers began writing poetry in her first year of college and has since taken interest in translation, especially that of Old English poetry and with experiments in form.
