" The translation is designedly very literal, and the nature of German prose is such that an English rendering which aims—as this does—at close correspondence rather than happy paraphrase, can hardly avoid displaying at times a certain stiffness in the joints; but I have thought it right to reproduce Rilke’s oddities of expression and punctuation, which are no less curious in the original than they must seem here; and never to succumb to the temptation to write pretty-sounding English just because it is a poet that speaks. Rilke is a master of the unlikely, but poetically true, word; and a cunning employer of alliteration, personification, and hypallage. "

― Rainer Maria Rilke , Letters to a Young Poet