Description

George did not set out to translate. His word is Umdichtung, re-poetising. He remakes all 154 sonnets in his own language and under his own law: lower case throughout, punctuation reduced to the raised point, a syntax strained to hardness. The result has divided readers for a century — unfaithful to some, one of the peaks of twentieth-century German poetry to others. What is not in doubt is that George found in the Shakespearean sonnet — love for a young man, beauty passing, the verse as the only immortality — an exact mirror of his own project. The Bondi edition, German text only.