Mother Tongue, Holy Tongue

Abstract

Beneath that evergreen energy we have for perfecting our English versions of Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Garcia Lorca and others, there runs a counternotion, a reluctance to translate authentic verse at all. Let me not translate, not render the precarious adequacy of poetic language even more precarious. And when a writer must remake his native tongue to speak what he has to, as Paul Celan did with German, and when he builds into his speech a drastic questioning of language and poetry themselves, then I feel the translator’s reluctance all the more keenly, almost as a matter of principle.