I can't really tell you much about how this compares to other poetry in German, or other translations. I am not a German scholar. The translations are fairly literal, line for line. But the poems in this book opened my eyes to some of the beauty of the German language, as well as the delight there is in reading poetry in a different language. The puzzles that are posed. If I were going to teach German, I would use some of these poems fairly early in the process. ( )