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agnusde2017's avatar

I often shy away from translations, or more precisely I am driven away by the chasm of accomplishment which frequently separates a well wrought original from the ghost of a translation. Fortunately I have not encountered such difficulties when reading David Gosselin's renditions of Schiller, and his latest effort, The Pilgrim, is no exception in this regard. It seems to capture well Schiller's straightforward but rich narrative and musical qualities. The modulation of line lengths and rhymes seems to me, even with my limited German, to hearken back to the octosyllabic and heptasyllabic elegance and clarity of the original, without neglect to the music of Sciller's lines. David Gosselin's version lives up to the expectation that a translation not suffer from failing to be a good poem in its own right.

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Michael R. Burch's avatar

It helps for a translator to have an affinity for the poet he translates, and I think David Gosselin has a real affinity for Schiller. And vice versa.

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