Copyright question

[stillsostrange]

Rilke's poems, I believe, are now public domain, but various English translations are copyrighted (and I'm never happy with them anyway). Can I use my own translation and avoid entanglements?

Comments

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Yep. Don't copy any of the individual phrases of the other translations, since copyright applies to parts as well as the whole, but the simpler it is (as simple as short sentences, fragments or titles, certainly) the less copyrightable it is. The Supreme Court pointed out, when this issue came to them in the form of similar advertisements, that with something so simple someone could easily copyright all the possible variations and in essence claim to own the language.