Robert Peters wrote: [much abridged]

>I do not admire Mahler's Lied as much as you do but it certainly is fine
>music - despite the fact that Bethge, the guy who translated Li-Po, is
>a second-rate poet (and not to be found in even the most encyclopedic
>anthologies of German poetry).

Bethge did not translate Li-Po.  The collection, "The Chinese Flute" from
which the poems of "Das Lied" [not to mention those for several works by
Webern and Toch] are taken is based on versions [or perhaps we should say,
adaptations, some of which also aren't real translations] in both French
and German going back at least to the 1870s, re-versified and paraphrased
by Bethge.

The entire matter was elegantly laid out by Donald Mitchell in "Gustav
Mahler:  Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death", the third volume of his
Mahler series, published in 1985.

It reminds me, perhaps inaccurately, of the tradition of
"pseudo-translations" into English starting many centuries back, of Homer
or of major monuments of Asian literature, based upon either earlier
English versions or upon translations [if such they are] from the original
into yet a third language.

Joel Lazar
Bethesda MD