In this sentence, the gesture of touching an artwork could be interpreted as capturing the artistic essence, but however abstract it appears, the rhetoric is intended to show the endeavor and the precision the understanding of art requires.

Nonetheless, compared to involving, there is more specificity to the action of touching which entails the aiming of the eyes and the reaching out of an arm in order to feel the texture of the touching object. I first translated berühren into “involve” - compared to the quotidian use of berühren, namely to touch an object, the relatively abstract idea of involving something seemed appropriate in the context of engaging an artwork through critical words.

Nothing touches an artwork so little like a person’s critical words… Mit nichts kann man ein Kunst-Werk so wenig berühren als mit kritischen Worten… My first attempt was imbued with enthusiasm to bring forth the textual meaning, but the result did not show enough consideration to each word’s specificity, especially verbs’. My deeper understanding of the texts was only awakened after two revisions of my own translation benefited from our class conferences. I choose to follow Rilke, and every time I am deeply immersed in his texts, he asks me to do exactly what I did before reading him: to visualize a space for experiencing and learning, a space where I use my perception of the physical environment - weight against my body, pressure on my skin, or that feeling of being small in the middle of a vast field, to understand the intangible mental struggle in engaging the creative, the artistic, and the spiritual. I do what I can to be a devoted reader and study the meaning of being a creative writer and translator thinking just how lovely it would be if I eventually deserve to be called one. I guess it is not about the actual surroundings, it is the act of finding, opening, and finally reading a letter addressed to a particular receiver that somehow stimulates me. Starting reading Rilke’s letters with this vision becomes a ritual, even though the image does not quite correspond to my environment (I do envision moving into a nice house with a yard a lot though) nor Kappus’ (Kappus was in the military). I held the letter extremely close to my eyes, then read it by the window.… I fetched the envelope, eagerly opened it as I turned back onto the path leading to my imaginary study before I could reach a paper knife there. When I was rereading Letters to a Young Poet, a collection of letters Rainer Maria Rilke exchanged with Franz Xaver Kappus, I saw myself peeping into a mailbox that stood alone in a garden - inside was a brown envelope in its aura. I learned to transport myself to different places with pure imagination. Read excerpts from Hoiyan Guo’s translations of Rilke’s Briefe an einen jungen Dichter

Rilke letters