This is, of course, your right & duty, Martin. How readers in other
parts of the world respond to such words is perhaps a problem. Is the
poem dated? How early is it? Such information might help, in this
case....
I wasnt necessarily thinking 'over there' <g>, but I can see your
point, what else can you use?
(there's that blues line, 'over yonders wall,' & ow I'm wondering if
one could do a pastiche or bricolage translation, finding various
phrases from other places to replace all of Rilke's....
I guess I shouldnt go there.....)
Doug
On 6-Mar-09, at 10:10 AM, Martin Walker wrote:
> Thanks for the feedback, Doug. I was expecting the objection - I had
> it myself. But "boy" is too familiar to me, lacking in the right
> connotations, and during my youth "lad" was not unusual, especially
> among those who weren't originally from the south of England. Rilke
> of course was from Prague (Habsburg empire) & grew up there in the
> 80s/90s; when he went to Munich in 96 he was a bit like a kind of
> rather foreign provincial (meeting Lou Andreas-Salome there in 97
> was his initiation into sophistication - psychoanalysis &
> whatever...). As for "yonder" - well, they still use it in country
> music, I think, and - seriously - "over there" does not get the
> Rilkean frisson of "drüben", which has something otherworldly about
> it - the rhythm is also wrong, an amphimacer instead of a trochee. I
> dare say my priorities themselves are weird!
> Martin
Douglas Barbour
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