“Letters to a Young Poet,” a book written by Rainer Maria Rilke, was translated from German by Dr. Mark Harman, professor of English and modern language.
The translation took him about two years with his teaching and other obligations. Harman noted that one of his most productive times working on the project was at the European Translators’ Collegium in Straelen, Germany. It was there that he consulted German colleagues about peculiarities of Rilke’s German as well as their impression of his style in the book.
Harman’s interest sparked when he first read Rilke as an undergraduate at University College Dublin. It was not just Rilke’s intense poetry but also his early modernist novel, “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” (1910) that intrigued him. He has often discussed Rilke’s poems in his German and English classes at Etown.
When following a panel at Barnard College in New York City, an editor at Harvard University Press asked Harman whether he would be interested in doing a new translation of “Letters to a Young Poet.” “I leapt at the chance,” Harman said. “The book is particularly appealing to young people, especially to those with creative urges. Rilke offers his young correspondent, Franz Kappus, who had written to him out of the blue, advice not just about poetry, but also about love, sex, career choices, religion and so on. In a way, it’s a kind of highbrow self-help book. That may be one reason for its perennial appeal.”
A translation of a work that is well known in English is very different than it would be with an author who had not been previously translated. Harman set out to make a more poetic translation than the other four versions. “Some translators, including talented ones, opt always for the most colloquial possible rendering. But to my mind, Rilke’s prose is that of a poet and his prose is often quite poetic. Sometimes it even rhymes! Rather than turning his carefully crafted prose into the kind of English with which we might, say, order a pizza, I also wanted to mimic its at times elevated diction,” Harman said.
Harman’s translation was generally well received; the novelist and critic John Banville, who wrote about the book in the “New York Review of Books,” called his English “burnished.” “That is the effect I was aiming for,” Harman said.
“After all, Rilke was perhaps the greatest German poet of the twentieth-century, and I wanted to forge a style in English that would do him at least some justice.” Harman noted that he was pleasantly surprised when given such high praise.
He believes that “we translators need to be modest because our efforts are often mentioned only in an aside or even passed over completely.” Next fall, Dr. Harman will offer an upper-level English course on the greatest short stories of Franz Kafka, another writer whom he has translated and written about. The Rilke book is available at the Elizabethtown College bookstore.