2.18 Readings__Yide Cai

I have very conflicted feelings about Robert Bly’s close examination of his own translation. On one hand, I find his methodology deeply admirable. His willingness to produce multiple drafts, to move patiently downward into meaning, and to be transparent about his own cultural bias as an American translator are all genuinely illuminating. His reflection on “spring,” for instance how in an American context it suggests freedom and spontaneity, while in German it carries the sense of something earned through discipline and labor was especially revealing to me. That kind of self-awareness feels rare and valuable.

I was also struck by his comment that every language has two ends, and that the “high end” of English is essentially dead, while German still allows a writer like Rilke to access both extremes. This resonated strongly with me as a writer, particularly as a playwright. Theater may be the art form where this loss is most acutely felt: contemporary English drama often feels trapped in a narrow band of register.

Yet, despite how compelling Bly’s process and insights are the final translated poem he arrives at reads terribly to me. Phrases like “wholly glad,” along with his use of ellipses (“…”) feel stiff, and strangely inhuman. They don’t sound like spoken English, or even written English. Ironically, I much prefer the Al Poulin translation that Bly criticizes. Even Bly’s own third version (on page 9) reads far better to me; from that point onward, each subsequent version seems to deteriorate. This gap between method and outcome is unsettling. His interpretation of the poem feels sound and intelligent, but the translation itself fails to carry that intelligence into language.

I’m also uncomfortable with Bly’s recurring obsession with “pagan” versus “Christian” worldviews, and his digressions into Nordic and Celtic mythologies. These tangents feel oddly fetishistic and largely ungrounded in Rilke’s actual life or intellectual formation. At moments, they verge on something uncomfortably close to white supremacist romanticism. Rilke, in my understanding, is about as far from a “Nordic” writer as possible. He lived extensively in France, was shaped by pan-European traditions, and, like most major writers, freely drew on Greek and Roman concepts alongside Christian imagery. Bly’s insistence on this binary feels more reflective of his own preoccupations than of Rilke’s poetic world.

My experience reading Suzanne Jill Levine was almost the opposite problem. As someone who knows very little about Cuban literature and only has limited familiarity with Spanish or Latin American cultural contexts, I found her essay regrettably inaccessible. The language feels heavily coded and self-referential, as if it assumes an intimate familiarity with Infante’s work and with Spanish-language literary play. Without already speaking Spanish or having read Infante myself, I struggled to grasp what was at stake. Rather than opening the text up, the essay seemed to close in on itself.

And unrelated to the readings, I have also been developing a broader thought about translation as a practice in different cultural contexts. In English-speaking countries, especially in the U.S., translation often feels like a luxury rather than a necessity. There is no real urgency to translate other languages into English; the world already comes to English. In China, by contrast, translation is a necessity. One simply lives with it. People don’t ask as many theoretical questions about whether translation is “possible” or “faithful enough”. It must happen. That difference in urgency fundamentally shapes attitudes toward translation, the demographics of who becomes a translator, and the kinds of risks translators are willing to take.