

The greatly esteemed essayist, novelist, and philosopher reflects on the art of translation and on rainer maria rilke's duino elegies-and gives us his own translation of Rilke's masterwork.

After nearly a lifetime of reading Rilke in English translation, William H. Gass undertook the task of translating Rilke's writing himself, in order to see if he could, in that way, get closer to the work he so deeply admired. Gass examines the genesis of the ideas that inform...