Writ in Water?

Translation has been much maligned over the centuries, and that of poetry in particular (think of Dante, Cervantes, and Victor Hugo). The present article, drawing, for the most part, on modern German verse and its renditions into English, investigates the complex phenomenon of such endeavors and arrives at a somewhat different – or, at least, more differentiated – result. Of course, there is no dearth whatsoever of blunders and veritable howlers in translation; however, there do occur – if rather seldom, granted –instances of perfect and flawless end products and, indeed, even cases of a poetic enrichment of the original in the target language. The examples discussed include, among others, poems by Georg Trakl, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Günter Eich, Karl Krolow, Günter Kunert, and, above all, Hans Magnus Enzensberger from German literature as well as (seemingly artless) Eskimo, or Inuit, poetry as once collected, under the title Snehyttens Sange , by the Danish ethnologist Knud Rasmussen.