Rebecca Reilly

When I Go

Arts & Literature

“Petermann’s translations of Rilke create a lovely and often astonishing intimacy, as though they are in a relationship with the French poem on the page: a deep, romantic friendship, where one has come to know the other in the rhythms of their breath, but is still surprised and delighted by their singular gestures. ‘I see no difference,’ Paul Celan once wrote, ‘between a poem and a handshake.’ These translations hold Rilke’s poems as though they are holding hands through the languages that separate them, not in imitation, but in the more true fidelity of friendship, of accompaniment. Not original and copy, but dear friends who know each other well.”