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(More customer reviews)I couldn't even begin to speak of the value of Bachmann's poetry, personal and phenomenological as it is; can only be silent on the subject of its beauty. The two stars in this review are all hers, and the three missing are because Peter Filkins has made a tremendous effort to misconstrue and mutilate every line she wrote, leaving a horrible, pedantic, confused and leaden mess of English doggerel to stand in for her richly efficient Austrian-German poetic. If you can read German, all the German is here, so by all means buy the book and treasure it; if you can't, consider her poems as yet untranslated. May not be the worst abuse to good poetry I've seen (neither is the Hamburger Celan, although that's also pretty strange), considering that I don't for instance read Chinese -- but it's the one that has caused me the most genuine anger and frustration.
I don't think Filkins' translation was in poor faith; he appears to be a poet himself, which is surprising, and he does take pains to retain word order from the German and, most jarringly, preserve rhyme schemes. (Remember high school "translations" of Chaucer? Oh, the grief...) But there are just as many flat-out semantic errors in translation as ingenious attempts at preservation, and it's clear he has no intuition for Bachmann's thought patterns and her ear for sound. Here's hoping someone who does eventually replaces this "standard" text with a more sensitive rendering.
For the record, this reviewer has disagreed strongly with everything Susan Sontag has said about Central European literature, notably Peter Nadas' "A Book of Memories."
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bilingual edition, Austria, tr Peter Filkins --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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