THESE TRANSLATIONS OF RILKE's New Poemsbegan inauspiciously enough, some eighteen years ago, when I found myself in the wholly unanticipated position of being asked by a well-known American poet to translate “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” as a kind of initiatory assignment in a class. When I protested that I knew no German (no more than any dedicated follower of World War II movies, anyway) he feigned astonishment and promptly pointed me in the direction of a well-regarded German-English dictionary and the work of various illustrious translators, including J. B. Leishman and Edward Snow, among many others. “You can figure it out,” he advised.

Thus began the project whose fruits you see before you. Admitting to myself that it was finally time to start learning one of the great languages I had somehow neglected to investigate, I started the occasionally agonizing, yet at times surprisingly emotionally rewarding task of teaching myself bits and pieces of German through the difficult medium of Rilke's Neue Gedichte. This is not, perhaps, the way I would ordinarily advise someone to begin study of a major European language, but I felt the thrill of a challenge, and so I plunged in. Glacially, Anglo-Saxon syntax and etymology began to insinuate their way into my struggles, as the dictionaries got thumb-worn and the versions of my betters (all fluent readers and speakers of German, of course) came to my rescue, over and over again. Like some sort of Bletchley code-breaker, I was determined to understand the mysteries of adverbial suffixes, the intricacies of compound nouns and what would have to be, eventually, the English word order of German syntactical inversions.

How well those many tasks were accomplished, I leave to the reader and lover of poetry, for it was poetry above all, born of Rilke's amazing imagination and technical skill, that I aimed for.

Any translator—but especially a translator of poetry—owes his reader an account of his practice, out of both necessity and courtesy. In bringing Rilke's New Poemsover into English, I have followed the simple procedure of determining the formal qualities of each poem and then attempting to duplicate those qualities as closely as possible, while still making a credible poem in English andremaining as true as possible to the “literal” sense of the German.