BLP’s own David Rigsbee reviews Daniele Pantano’s translation of Robert Walser in Issue 58 of The Cortland Review, writing “Daniele Pantano, himself a Swiss poet who has previously translated Durrenmatt and Trakl, does a superb job in making the English speak in German, even as it speaks in English, so that I found myself lifting my eyes from the text, saying, wait a minute: this is not in English: it’s in German! Only then does “this” refer to the original, which is indeed not here. It is usually the case that a translation becomes at once an elegy for the poem that isn’t there: the striver’s sense of linguistic duty that emanates from the translation only reminds one of the fact. Pantano’s renderings are free of that sense of the loss of meaning.” Click here to read the entirety of David’s informed and compelling review, and here to buy a copy of Oppressive Light.
