New Poems, 1908: The Other Part

by Rainer Maria Rilke, Edward Snow (Translator)

Rilke's association with Rodin in 1902 inspired in him a new poetic method. 'Somehow, ' he wrote, 'I too must come to make things... realities that emerge from handiwork. Somehow I too must discover the smallest basic element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of representation for everything.' Until this work, Rilke's voice had come from the interior, expressing feelings and moods. New Poems represented a turning point, an intoxication with the materiality of the world.

Genres: Poetry, German Literature

240 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1987

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.

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sequel to Rilke’s 1907 volume has less gentle sadness over the world’s lost significance. His apartness is clearer and less regretted. Eg. the poems on Christian art.

[Cassandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was struck by how much this poetry insists upon the gaze, the eye, and the way that the object demands the gaze or interrupts it. Some of the poems were not so good, too complex and heavy, or too abstract -- some of that may be the act of translation, of course, but it is hard to know, and Rilke is of course famous both for his complexity and his abstraction. But the majority of them were very good, and I must read it again in a few years to see what I make of it them; they do have the weight of objects, as he wished, poems as created things with concrete reality to them despite being only in words.

[Edgar Trevizo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishing!

[Anne Farrer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm trying my best to like these much-revered icons of poetry, but perhaps the interpretation is above my pay grade.

This book had about 80 poems and I truthfully was only moved by one of them: Encounter in the Chestnut Lane

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Somehow I too must come to make things; not plastic, but written things—realities that emerge from handwork. Somehow I too must discover the smallest basic element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of representation for everything.…"


The Last Judgment

So frightened, beyond their wildest fright,
disordered, often full of holes and loose,
they hunker down in the exploded furrows
of their field, not to be dissuaded

of their shrouds, which they have grown to like.
But angels come, and begin at once
to trickle oil into the dried-out sockets
and to put in each one’s armpits

whatever in the tumult of that life
its user managed not to desecrate;
for it still has a bit of warmth there,

so that it won’t chill the hand of God
when, up above, from either side he gently
grasps it, to feel if it’s still good.


Eve

Simply she stands at the cathedral’s
great ascent, close to the rose window,
holding the apple in the apple-pose,
guiltless-guilty once and for all time

of the growing she gave birth to
when from the circle of the eternities
she lovingly went forth, to battle
her way through the earth like a young year.

Ah, she’d have gladly lingered in that land
for just a bit longer, attending
to the animals’ insight and accord.

But since she found the man determined,
she went with him, aspiring after Death;
and she had hardly got to know God.


Lunatics in the Garden
Dijon

The abandoned monastery still closes
around the courtyard, as though a wound were healing.
Those who live there now also enjoy recess
and take no part in the life outside.

Whatever could happen came and went.
Now they walk gladly with familiar paths,
and separate and come upon each other
as though they circled, willing, primitive.

Some of them, true, tend the spring beds there,
humble, wretched, down on their knees;
but they have, when no one sees it,
a surreptitious, twisted

gesture for the tender early grass,
a testing, half-afraid caressing:
for that is friendly, and the roses’ red
may grow menacing and too intense

and may once again take them beyond
what their souls recognize and know.
But this can still be kept a secret:
how good the grass is and how soft.


Edward Snow Translation

*

[Virtuella · Rating 5 out of 5]

After decades of cherry-picking from this collection, I have finally read it cover to cover. So, not every poem Rilke wrote was absolute genius, but most of them are. New favourites include: Die Parke; Orpheus.Eurydike.Hermes; Der Junggeselle, Der Pavillion, Josuas Landtag, Im Saal.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

ein paar herausragende gedichte, aber vieles ist überflüssig und langweilig, weil immer im selben stil

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second volume of new poems. Amazing. sigh.

[Laura-nassidesa Eschbaugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A line from the last poem. The Buddha in Glory
Yet already there's begun inside you
what last beyond the suns

These are poems of great beauty and a great addition to the series.

[Mills College Library]

831 R573o 1987

[elisabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

[Gerrit Gmel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Immer noch kein Fan von Gedichten...

[Horatio · Rating 4 out of 5]

First 1/2 kinda terrible, last 1/2 absolutely wonderful