Rainer Maria Rilke

Abstract

Translating poetry is something very few people do due to its difficulty, especially when the languages involved come from different origins and do not share tradition and rules. This is the main motivation of this project: to translate and work on a made-for-the- occasion anthology of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke's works of art, which contains five poems (three in German and two in French). Therefore, the aim of this project is to expose my translations into Catalan of those five sho1t poems, in which I try to solve the main problems that such different languages set up during translation, and contextualise the reader by providing them a brief biography of R. M. Rilke, an essay about the most common problems of translating poetry and also some published translations of the same poems. In order to do so, I selected a different methodology for each poem with the goal of approaching the translations in the most appropriate way possible depending on its characteristics: seeking rhyme, metrics, figures of speech, meaning or a reasonable combination of some. The results of the work are obtaining a faithful translation for each original poem, despite the huge differences among the languages involved. Once finished this work, I came to realise that the author used different writings depending on the language he used to create, and after analysing and commenting both original and translated poems, I can state that I have accomplished all my objectives, for I have achieved each translation satisfactorily despite the difficulty involved.