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    Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition
    Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition
    Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition

    By Rainer Maria Rilke and Edward Snow

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic
    orders? and even if one of them pressed me
    suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed
    in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
    but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure,
    and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains
    to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.
    -from "The First Elegy"

    Over the last fifteen years, in his two volumes of New Poems as well as in The Book of Images and Uncollected Poems, Edward Snow has emerged as one of Rainer Maria Rilke's most able English-language interpreters. In his translations, Snow adheres faithfully to the intent of Rilke's German while constructing nuanced, colloquial poems in English.

    Written in a period of spiritual crisis between 1912 and 1922, the poems that compose the Duino Elegies are the ones most frequently identified with the Rilkean sensibility. With their symbolic landscapes, prophetic proclamations, and unsettling intensity, these complex and haunting poems rank among the outstanding visionary works of the century.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJun 3, 2014
    ISBN9781466872622
    Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition
    Author

    Rainer Maria Rilke

    Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and traveled throughout Europe for much of his adult life, returning frequently to Paris. There he came under the influence of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and produced much of his finest verse, most notably the two volumes of New Poems as well as the great modernist novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Among his other books of poems are The Book of Images and The Book of Hours. He lived the last years of his life in Switzerland, where he completed his two poetic masterworks, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukemia in December 1926.

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    Reviews for Duino Elegies

    3.5/5

    9 ratings6 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Ligt het aan de vertaling? Dit is iets te hermetisch voor mij. Ooit nog eens proberen
    • 1/5
      Ligt het aan de vertaling? Dit is iets te hermetisch voor mij. Ooit nog eens proberen
    • 4/5
      Not a penultimate favorite, but this kind of poetry definitely sucks you deep inside the marrow of the bones of its message. It's a very flowing format and the words wrap around you slowly like ribbons to take into every sensation of it.

      I almost devoured the whole thing in one sitting.
    • 5/5
      Incredibly beautiful and illuminating. I already have some passages memorized and hope to learn more.
    • 3/5
      My deutsch wird worse, no question, but the gnarled syntax didn't make things any easier for me here, and then when I powered through I found a bunch of death-and-the-ineffable-obsessed, mistful pomposity. The kind of shit that makes you want to blow a raspberry or make a jerkoff motion. I was ready to write the guy off, but then I got to the Tenth Elegy, which is, of course, magnificent, phantasmagoric, Eurydicean, everything I wanted the others to be. Not a fretting on neurosis, but a vision of the Underworld that is this world.Und wir, die an steigendes Glück denken, empfänden die Rührung, die uns beinah bestürzt, wenn ein Glückliches fällt.
    • 5/5
      "Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?" So begins Rilke's cry to heaven, and he stays with this theme throughout the Elegies. Rilke understands more than most that the encroachment of the divine is a thing of beauty, but he also understand that beauty is indeed terrifying, if we are really paying attention. At least, the beauty of angels is terrifying. Rilke is a poet for the head and the heart, and in about equal amounts. His writing is durable...not always a thing of beauty in and of itself, but if he cannot always portray it, he leads you to it, time and time again.

    Book preview

    Duino Elegies - Rainer Maria Rilke

    The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

    Contents

    Title Page

    Copyright Notice

    Preface

    Die Erste Elegie / The First Elegy

    Die Zweite Elegie / The Second Elegy

    Die Dritte Elegie / The Third Elegy

    Die Vierte Elegie / The Fourth Elegy

    Die Fünfte Elegie / The Fifth Elegy

    Die Sechste Elegie / The Sixth Elegy

    Die Siebente Elegie / The Seventh Elegy

    Die Achte Elegie / The Eighth Elegy

    Die Neunte Elegie / The Ninth Elegy

    Die Zehnte Elegie / The Tenth Elegy

    Also by Edward Snow

    About the Authors

    Copyright

    PREFACE

    The Duino Elegies take their name from Castle Duino, an ancient fortress-like structure set high atop cliffs overlooking the Adriatic near Trieste. It was once a Roman watchtower, and Dante supposedly wrote parts of The Divine Comedy there. During the winter of 1911–12, Rainer Maria Rilke, feeling empty and despondent since completing The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in 1910, was residing there alone when the inspiration for the elegies came to him. Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe (1855–1934), the friend and patron who made the castle available to him, relates in her memoir the story of their genesis:

    Rilke later told me how these elegies arose. He suspected nothing of what was taking hold inside him; though he may have hinted of it in a letter he wrote: The nightingale is approaching— Had he perhaps felt what was on its way? But things seemed again to fall silent. A great sadness came over him; he began to think that this winter too would be fruitless.

    Then, one morning, he received a troublesome business letter. He wanted to be done with it quickly, and had to concern himself with sums and other such tedious matters. Outside, a violent north wind was blowing, but the sun shone and the blue water had a silvery gleam. Rilke climbed down to the bastions which, jutting to the east and west, were connected to the foot of the castle by a narrow path along the cliffs. These cliffs fall steeply, for about two hundred feet, into the sea. Rilke paced back and forth, deep in thought, since the reply to the letter so concerned him. Then, all at once, in the midst of his brooding, he halted suddenly, for it seemed to him that in the raging of the storm a voice had called to him: Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders? He stood still, listening. What is that? he half whispered. What is it, what is coming?

    He took out his notebook, which he always carried with him, and wrote down these words, together with a few lines that formed themselves without his intervention. Who had come? And then he knew the answer: the god …

    Very calmly he climbed back up to his room, set his notebook aside, and replied to the difficult letter.

    By that evening the entire elegy had been written down.¹

    Rilke was elated; he copied the poem into a green leather-bound notebook that he and the princess had bought together in Weimar and sent it to her in Vienna on January 21 as the first Duino work (and the first for a long time!). Within days he had composed the effortless-seeming Second Elegy as well, along with fragments of the third, sixth, and ninth, and the opening fifteen lines of the tenth. His task as a poet had been announced to him.

    But nothing further would materialize at Duino. Rilke left the castle in May with no more written, and recommenced the wanderings that had preceded his stay there. Though he continued to write brilliant poems in his notebooks—150 in 1913 and 1914, several of them masterpieces—the Elegies and his failure to sustain them were what obsessed him now.² (Yes, the two elegies exist, he wrote to his ex-lover and lifelong confidant Lou Andreas-Salomé from Spain in January 1913, but I can tell you when we meet how small and sharply riven a fragment they form of what was then delivered into my power.) During the next few years he would make sporadic progress: he forced the uneven Third Elegy to completion in October 1913 in Paris, and composed more lines of the sixth; in November 1915 he wrote the terse, elliptical Fourth Elegy in just two days in Munich. But that would be all for more than six years, until, in February 1922, in another castle-solitude in Switzerland, the floodgates broke.

    Rilke had been living alone since July 1921 in the Château de Muzot, a small medieval tower in the Rhône valley near the village of Sierre, Switzerland, where he had deliberately isolated himself in hope of recapturing the inspiration of the elegies. (I am now taking root and spinning a web around myself inside a primeval tower … in the midst of this incomparably grand, magnificent landscape, he wrote to Francisca Stoecklin on November 16.) There, during three weeks in February, he experienced a creative storm so extraordinary that his later mythologizing of the resulting work as given to him, a dictation for which he served as medium or scribe, is understandable. It began on February 2, when he unexpectedly began writing sonnets. After three days of uninterrupted work, he had produced twenty-five of the twenty-six poems that would form the first part of the Sonnets to Orpheus. On the morning of February

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