Duino Elegies And Other Selected Poems

Duino Elegies are the ten magnificent poems that defined the Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke's artistic vision of life, death, eternity, and the human condition. Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe invited Rilke to stay at her castle in Duino, on the coast of the Adriatic Sea near Trieste. He stayed alone in the castle for about four months and, on a cold day in January, 1912, when he was contemplating how to answer a business letter that he received, he walked out into the freezing windy morning and, walking along a path by the bastions looking down at the violent waves of the Adriatic a couple of hundred feet below him, he heard someone speak, but when he turned around, he was alone and the voice that he heard spoke the famous opening lines of the First Elegy: “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel/ Ordnungen?” (“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic/ Orders?”). Dr. Gartner presents a new translation of Rilke's magnum opus as well as of a selection of ten famous poems from Rilke's collected works.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is universally recognized as among the most important twentieth-century German-language poets. Here, for the first time, are all the surviving translations of his poetry made by Ruth Speirs (1916-2000), a Latvian exile who joined the British literary community in Cairo during World War Two, becoming a close friend of Lawrence Durrell and Bernard Spencer. Though described as 'excellent' and 'the best' by J. M. Cohen on the basis of magazine and anthology appearances, copyright restrictions meant that during her lifetime, with the exception of a Cairo-published Selected Poems (1942), Speirs was never to see her work gathered between covers and in print.This volume, edited by John Pilling and Peter Robinson, brings Speirs' translations the belated recognition they deserve. Her much-revised and considered versions are a key document in the history of Rilke's Anglophone dissemination. Rhythmically alive and carefully faithful, they give a uniquely mid-century English accent to the poet's extraordinary German, and continue to bear comparison with current efforts to render his tenderly taxing voice.

A new translation of Rilke’s classic elegies—ten mystical, radiant poems that bring together the beautiful and the sacred. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies are one of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century. Begun in 1912 while the poet was a guest at Duino Castle on the Adriatic Sea and completed in a final bout of feverish inspiration in 1922, the ten elegies survey the mysteries of consciousness, whether human or animal, earthly or divine. Poet and translator Alfred Corn brings us closer to Rilke’s meaning than ever before and illuminates the elegies’ celebration of life and love. Also included are a critical introduction exploring the nuances of the translation, several thematically linked lyrics, and two of the “Letters to a Young Poet” to complete the volume.

Long considered the definitive English translation of Rilke's brilliant andhaunting masterworks, A. Poulin's edition of Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus provides an essential introduction to some of the most passionate and intensely creative visionary poetry of the twentieth century. With a new foreword by the esteemed poet Mark Doty and a fresh new design, Poulin's revered translation is certain to acquaint a new generation of readers with the works of Rilke.

The first-ever English translation of Rilke’s landmark poetry cycle, by Vita and Edward Sackville-West ­– reissued for the first time in 90 years In 1931, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published a small run of a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, in English translation by the writers Vita and Edward Sackville-West. This marked the English debut of Rilke’s masterpiece, which would eventually be rendered in English over 20 times, influencing countless poets, musicians and artists across the English-speaking world. Published for the first time in 90 years, the Sackville-Wests’ translation is both a fascinating historical document and a magnificent blank-verse rendering of Rilke’s poetry cycle. Featuring a new introduction from critic Lesley Chamberlain, this reissue casts one of European literature’s great masterpieces in fresh light.

The reputation of Rainer Maria Rilke has grown steadily since his death in 1926; today he is widely considered to be the greatest poet of the twentieth century. This Modern Library edition presents Stephen Mitchell’s acclaimed translations of Rilke, which have won praise for their re-creation of the poet’s rich formal music and depth of thought. “If Rilke had written in English,” Denis Donoghue wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “he would have written in this English.” Ahead of All Parting is an abundant selection of Rilke’s lifework. It contains representative poems from his early collections The Book of Hours and The Book of Pictures; many selections from the revolutionary New Poems, which drew inspiration from Rodin and Cezanne; the hitherto little-known “Requiem for a Friend”; and a generous selection of the late uncollected poems, which constitute some of his finest work. Included too are passages from Rilke’s influential novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and nine of his brilliant uncollected prose pieces. Finally, the book presents the poet’s two greatest masterpieces in their entirety: the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. “Rilke’s voice, with its extraordinary combination of formality, power, speed and lightness, can be heard in Mr. Mitchell’s versions more clearly than in any others,” said W. S. Merwin. “His work is masterful.”

Rilke is one of the leading poets of European Modernism, and one of the great twentieth-century lyric poets in German. From The Book of Hours in 1905 to the Sonnets of Orpheus written in 1922, he constantly probed the relationship between his art and the world around him, moving from the neo-romantic and the mystic towards the precise craft of expressing the everyday in poetry. This new edition--the only bilingual edition to include such a broad range of poems--fully reflects Rilke's poetic development. It contains the full text of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, and selected poems from The Book of Images, New Poems, and earlier volumes, and from the uncollected poetry 1906-26. The translations are accurate, sensitive, and nuanced, and are accompanied by an introduction and notes that chart the development of Rilke's poetic practice and his central role in modern poetry. The book also includes a chronology, select bibliography, and explanatory notes that identify people and places, and include key commentary by Rilke from letters or notes. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The fifty poems presented here in chronological order were written by Rilke between 1897 (he was twenty-one) and 1926, the year of his death from leukemia at the age of fifty-one. They come from his early poems, his volumes "The book of images", "New poems, I & II", and from the uncollected poems of his last twenty years. They were chosen for their rhymed and metered composition, characteristic of Rilke's art in the major part of his poetical oeuvre, except for the Duino Elegies, which were written in free verse. Rilke considered as a betrayal of his poetry any translation that would not reproduce, together with his thinking, the internal movement, the rhythm, the rhyme, the music of the original. The goal of the translator has been to make that music "heard" as much as possible, to try and reproduce the structure, rhyme and rhythm, of the poems, in order for these translations to sound as echoes of the originals.