Jay Hopler and I started collaborating on this translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s long poem, “The Book of Pilgrimage” (1901) (one of the three poems in The Book of Hours) in fall of 2021; we worked on it in fits and starts, with periods of sustained attention—all very much dependent on Jay’s health and the progress of his illness—through the winter and spring, up until a few months before his death in June 2022. What is printed here is as far as we got. I had the thought of continuing with the whole and dedicating it to him, but the poignancy (for me) of the fragment somehow spoke volumes more than I could ever hope to say, either through the prism of translation or more directly.

Jay and I worked well together, and we had a lot of geeky poetry fun going back & forth, figuring out how we met and diverged by turns. In the end, though, it was left to me to make final decisions about the alternatives we had left open as we made our way through this thicket of gorgeously dense and lyrically intricate interlacey verse in Rilke’s characteristically elaborate early style. After a while, what was Jay and was Josh in the translation ‘in-progress’ melted together with Rilke, and it got stirred pretty well through the google doc deliberations. There is one clause, however, which is all Jay, and which I leave intact as a kind of indelible voice print in honor of his sly quick inventiveness: ‘I was a burned-out house / a real murderer’s squat’;-- the German reads more (literally) like, ‘I was a house after a fire / where only murderers sometimes sleep’. Jay’s note on the translation worksheet reads, ‘I realize this might be too loosey goosey, but I couldn't resist’. Agreed, it’s a bit dissonant for Rilke’s style and voice; but what we managed to do falls somewhere between translation and imitation or ‘version-ing’, which is a way of coming at translation that, separately, both of us practiced (he especially with his Trakl and Lasker-Schüler). Mostly, what we cared about was capturing Rilke’s rhythm of thought and feeling more than the technical linguistic equivalences (let alone the rigor of Rilke’s formal architecture); we tried deliberately to occupy that ‘rock and a hard place’ space between equivalency and analogy that puts a squeeze on translators: a living speech that allowed for occasional anachronism (e.g. syntactic inversion). In the end, it’s all a matter of ear.

For a fuller account of the translation, and how Jay and I came to do this work together, see “Remembering Jay Hopler”.