Duino Elegies: A New Translation

by Rainer Maria Rilke, Mark S. Burrows (Translator)

The Duino Elegies stand as the capstone of Rilke’s poetic work. He began work on them at Schloss Duino, an Italian seaside village, during the winter of 1912, completing them a decade later in 1922. These poems articulate Rilke’s hope, voiced in the Tenth Elegy, “that I, one day, standing at the end of this harsh vision, / might sing out with joy and praise to the assenting angels.” They stand as his “final testament” as a writer, an epic work which traces “the long experience of love” that shapes our lives. Across the span of these poems we find ourselves in a visionary landscape where love and death, suffering and rejoicing, anguish and celebration together constitute “the Whole.” Rilke invites us to practice what he once called “heart-work,” a way of living by which we learn to see how “being-here is magnificent.”


Amid the chorus of translators who have approached this cycle, Mark S. Burrows’ version stands out in capturing the peculiar power of his images while also honoring the luminous strangeness of his voice. This elegant, original translation by this distinguished Rilke scholar includes an introduction, an afterword that explores the themes central to the poet’s mystical vision, and explanatory notes to the text. It also includes a selection of Rilke’s letters and journal entries in which he addresses the poems’ complexities, elucidates otherwise cryptic allusions found in the elegies, and comments on the personal circumstances of its composition.


This edition celebrates the centenary of the poet’s death in 1926.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication September 22, 2026

About the author

A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923).

People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.

His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .

He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.