In his Introduction to the Letters, Harman remarks further on Rilke’s relationship to language: The letters were written in German, but Rilke himself was multilingual and once wrote in French that “pour dire tout, il faudrait savoir toutes les langues” (to say everything, one would need to know every language). Rilke’s writing is notoriously difficult to do justice in translation. He undertook this new translation in an attempt to remove some of the accretion he saw in other English translations, so as to let the original art of Rilke’s letters show through.
In a recent episode of The Book Show podcast ( which you can listen to here), Harman explained his view that translation can be like a coating of dust on a painting, lending a patina that doesn’t actually reflect the underlying work.
We’ve just published a handsome little edition of the letters, newly translated and introduced by Mark Harman, a Professor of English and German at Elizabethtown College whose translations of Kafka have been widely acclaimed. The ten letters that Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to an aspiring young poet from 1902 through 1908 comprise a much-loved trove of advice on living a purposeful life in or out of the arts.
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