This is a true story. One of overwhelming joy, but it starts in East Berlin under the socialist dictatorship, where Der Herr der Ringe (The Lord of the Rings) was a book of legend.

All books printed in the West were illegal, so politically adventurous people like my parents who had some would lend them to each other, and sometimes not get them back, like if the borrower had been arrested. But Der Herr der Ringe was so special that the owner of the only copy in the city refused to take that risk, so he declared that anyone who wanted to read it had to do so at his home.

My mom did that. My siblings and I were already familar with Der Hobbit – we illegally owned a copy and we were all fast readers. My mom told us how this follow-up book was much more exciting. She couldn’t read it to us. So she told it to us, like a fairytale, when we had several hours, like during a long journey on East Germany’s decrepit trains.

By the summer of 1990, East Germany had been collapsing all around us (and my parents had been organizing that collapse at our home) for months, and for fourth graders like me, much of the importance of that was that from fifth grade, we would not be forced to learn Russian like our predecessors but got a choice that included English as an option. English class was great. Everyone loved it, including the teacher. She was a very capable teacher, spoke many languages and had previously taught Russian to fifth graders, before our year when approximately nobody chose that over fancy new English. I think she loved our unfamiliar enthusiasm and the much better teaching materials. At roughly the same time, my mom, doing political things in not yet reunified West Germany, was gifted a copy of Der Herr der Ringe. I immediately read all of it at a tempo few people other than my mom would expect from a fifth grader, so my younger, smarter siblings could get to it ASAP. After them I kept reading it through again and again, counting my read-throughs proudly.

I recall having read it cover to cover ten times by the glorious day when I was 14 years old and we got a English language copy of The Lord of the Rings, just from the store because that was legal now. Here’s a language learning tip: in the language you’re acquiring, read a book you love so much and have read in its entirety so often that you pretty much know it by heart.

but the point of this story is: I was unprepared for how toweringly much better the poems were in the original. I cried so incredibly hard over those couple of days, overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of poems that I had thought I understood before because in their inferior German translations I could recite them all from memory.

I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew:
Of wind I sang, a wind there came and in the branches blew…

Of course I told my mom. She explained to me that poetry translation is the hardest kind of translation because you have to get right not just the story and the tone, but also the rhymes and the rhythm at the same time. That is a surpassingly impactful thing to say to a teen who is thinking about translation all the time because he’s reading his favourite book in a new language. And then she gave me a bilingual edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets so I could study how different translators had chosen to interpret the originals.

I’ve been translating poetry a lot lately, because I’m very sick and the only advantage of that is that it gives me spare time. But it’s all my own poetry, English to German, so I don’t think about the process in the abstract. Recently I got to translate another poem I love from German to English, that was sufficiently different (and much less involved) to think about, and that’s when I remembered this history of why I love poetry translation so very much. And why I take it so seriously; I’m always trying to beat the (objectively highly accomplished) translator of my, until HPMOR, favourite book!