The capitalisation indicates the noun form, but plenty of translators have opted for the verbal phrase ‘being dead’. I’ve been thinking about whether you should translate Totsein in this line from Rilke as verb or noun, and whether doing so changes the reader’s understanding of the phrase.

I’ve been thinking about the gender of the noun ‘death’ in German (its masculine in German, but feminine in the Romance languages, like French and Spanish) – because I’ve been thinking, and writing, about the grammar of death in my work in progress. So, Totsein is a compound or hybrid noun, indicating the state of being dead. Nichtsein has a simlilar compound structure to Totsein: a noun formed of the verb sein, and another word (the adverb nicht: no or not). One of the examples for the verb sein in Inga’s dictionary is a translation of Hamlet’s famous line ‘To be or not to be’, translated into German as: sein oder Nichtsein. The first part is the noun (der) Tot – death – and the second the verb sein – the future tense of the verb ‘to be’. Totsein is one of those German words that’s comprised of two other words joined together. I had a bit of a wrangle with the word Totsein, and chatted with Inga about it. It’s a little like the opening line of Don Quixote, which can be used as a litmus test for any new translation of the work as a whole.įor me, however, one of Rilke’s most intriguing lines in the first elegy is the deceptively simple: Und das Totsein ist mühsam, which literally means ‘and death is hard/hard work/laborious’ or perhaps, if you’re willing to transform the noun Totsein into an adverb: ‘and dead is hard/hard work/laborious’. Lots of people speak about the difficulty of translating the first line of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, perhaps because it’s so well known ( Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel/Ordnungen?).

The first elegy rilke