What do you think?
Rate this book
Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose
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 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.”
615 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
85 people are currently reading
2204 people want to read
About the author
Rainer Maria Rilke
1,794 books6,913 followersA 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.
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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews
May 21, 2024
Seeing your beloved’s face through a curtained window
Walking in the forest in the springtime with your eyes closed
Taking morning coffee in through the nose
Going dancing in your father’s old clothes
Hearing chamber music from behind a waterfall
Playing a guitar that's missing a string
Playing piano with boxing gloves on
Playing the cello using a fish
French kissing through a surgical mask
Conversing with the friend of a friend of a friend
Sleeping in the lobbies of five-star hotels
Licking ice cream in the Arctic
Dreaming of food
Watching a movie on a plane with the sound off
Getting off a train at all the wrong stations
Exploring a city bombed and rebuilt the night before
Fixing a problem with crazy glue
Forgetting to take pictures on your wedding day
Flying no higher than a foot off the ground
Making love to a beautiful statue
Playing strip poker with a blackhole
Finding fake money on a windy avenue
Visiting the Louvre wearing the wrong prescription glasses
And finding out the Queen of England is a changeling
Such are the many joys of reading Rilke in translation
June 25, 2009
Read before bed...it will give you beautiful dreams
April 24, 2007
At one point, I must have had every Rilke book that was translated into English. He is simply amazing. I ended up bequeathing the collection to a friend, who also felt the same about him. This book has been a wonderful companion and is always close at hand. I love the translations and the inter-paginated German and English. It has all of his major works, including Sonnets to Orpheus and The Duino Elegies. It also has plenty of poems, prose, and tons of great end-notes from his personal letters. If you want to get into the heart of Rilke, this book will get you beating to the rhythm.
I live my life in widening rings
which spread over earth and sky.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but that is what I will try.
I circle around God, the primordial tower,
and I circle ten thousand years long;
and I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm,
or an unfinished song.
I live my life in widening rings
which spread over earth and sky.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but that is what I will try.
I circle around God, the primordial tower,
and I circle ten thousand years long;
and I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm,
or an unfinished song.
January 18, 2018
This is honestly the best thing I have ever read. It took me forever to get through it because I kept stopping to highlight lines on every page. It's a masterpiece. A freaking masterpiece, I'm telling you.
December 15, 2024
Not all of the poems are five stars, but the Elegies certainly are, and much of the prose, and the inclusion of excerpts from Rilke’s letters add essential context to much of his work. I read Reading Rilke by Bill Gass alongside this, and the endeavor has definitely left me Rilke-pilled.
Archaic Torso made me do it.
Archaic Torso made me do it.
May 9, 2020
My mother used to read me Rilke’s poems before I went to bed, and now whenever I read his work, I am reminded of those moments we shared.
His work is beautiful, and even as I child, I loved to listen to his words. They sounded, and still sound, like magic to my ears. I highly suggest reading his poems before bed; they’re like lullabies.
His work is beautiful, and even as I child, I loved to listen to his words. They sounded, and still sound, like magic to my ears. I highly suggest reading his poems before bed; they’re like lullabies.
August 26, 2021
Martin Heidegger's philosophical glosses in
Poetry, Language, Thought
—explanations that only redoubled the poetic mystery—sent me back to Rilke, or maybe sent me to Rilke for the first time. A theme in these essays over the years (first announced here), has been the question of what it means to read lyric poetry, if its verbal density even can be read in the way that a novel or play (or epic poem) can, and whether, moreover, this permanent elusiveness raises it above or lowers it beneath modes like narrative and drama.
So have I read Rilke? I bought Stephen Mitchell's translation and selection Ahead of All Parting when I was a teenager. (I was inspired to do so by a comic-book writer who observed in an interview that budding authors admire Hemingway because he makes serious literature look attainable, whereas, for example, Rilke—I'd never seen this name in print before or even knew how it was pronounced—sets an impossible standard.) I have been browsing in the book ever since, preferring the delicate and ironic early lyrics to the heavier philosophic masterworks, without ever quite feeling that I'd "read" it.
Compounding the problem of lyric poetry per se is my ignorance of German. Epic and dramatic poems, like novels, translate; lyric poems, living as they do on words alone, not as much. With poems in the Romance languages, I can look with some comprehension, if not fluency, to the original words on the facing pages, but whatever Rilke achieves through sonic texture or the specific connotative and allusive potentials of German is beyond me, as is the accuracy of Mitchell's translation. Mitchell, however, does manage to convey a tone mixing wonder with authority, a perennial questioning with a handing down of wisdom—a sensibility that perhaps even in translation I can identify as Rilkean.
Over the last few days, I've read or reread (a mix of both) the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. I will at least gather below some impressions from the former, generally considered Rilke's masterpiece, completed as it was, after two decade-separated compositional fits of blazing inspiration that also produced the Sonnets to Orpheus, in modernism's annus mirabilis of 1922. The first line famously came to Rilke in 1912 on the battlements of Duino Castle— Dante was said to have written some lines of the Divine Comedy there—where he was a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis.
My point isn't to catch Rilke in a contradiction, like a journalist hounding a politician, but rather to show where his poem is most insightful in demonstrating, in enacting, modern humanity's contradictory desires—to revolutionizes ourselves beyond recognition and to repose in the customs and enchantments of the everyday. Mitchell quotes a letter where Rilke refers to the Divine Comedy as Dante's "gigantically evasive poem," yet perhaps the pre-modern poet shows more wisdom than the modern one when it doesn't even occur to him that the sacred and the profane could be synthesized without remainder. (I am modern too. Dante's wisdom is as unavailable to me as it is to Rilke; like most moderns I can only read the Purgatorio with any comfort. But the possibility that someone before Hegel might have understood something, should, if we are not terminally arrogant, be borne in mind.)
The Duino Elegies, anyway, aren't all thesis and theology. The central poem, written last, was inspired by Picasso's great painting, Famille de saltimbanques. Rilke pressed another heiress to let him write it in her room where the painting was housed, and it was worth it, for he poignantly conjures Picasso's acrobats ("wanderers, more transient than we ourselves") as figures for all human exile over the mysterious earth, from tumbling boy to expiring elder. As well as Picasso, the Fifth Elegy also draws on Kleist's Platonic dialogue "On the Marionette Theater." For Rilke as for his doomed Romantic precursor, in the inner theater of the psyche, the marionette performs more angelically than any human dancer or acrobat can because the puppet in its total thingliness is already wholly spirit, free of the human organism and its crippling self-consciousness. Better even than the puppets are the animals and other natural creatures (including children) of the Eighth Elegy. Unlike ourselves, they live within life instead of before it; they exist without the watching and objectification that characterizes world-conquering man who imprisons himself in his own frail creations:
Rilke, finally, reflects on men and women. He often mentions lovers as potential secular examples of people who live transfigured lives, yet he is also skeptical of how lovers make idols of one another to evade the "mission": "they keep on using each other," he complains, "to hide their own fate." Perhaps a primordial incompatibility between man and woman, a division that redounds to neither's credit, compounds the problem. The Third Elegy is about mothers and sons. Rilke charges the mother with cosseting the boy in a fantasy of false comforts, even as the child himself wanders through his own interior to find the barbarian horde of his warrior forebears. Women represent feeble art, men ignorant courage, and the union of man and woman—whether in the maternal dyad or the conjugal embrace—can only therefore be a fallen version of the androgynous poetry Rilke composes to urge us on, artistically and heroically, toward the angelic eschaton. That's if I understand him, and I wouldn't swear that I do.
I understand the Sonnets to Orpheus even less, but there is one line that stands out to me in the fifth sonnet: "And it is in overstepping that he obeys." Rilke's God, like Goethe's and Hegel's, will save neither the good person nor the person who understands perfectly, but only the poet, "ahead of all parting," "dead in Eurydice" and therefore a permanent voice immanent in unfolding nature—Orpheus, poet, considered as a name for anyone who dares.
So have I read Rilke? I bought Stephen Mitchell's translation and selection Ahead of All Parting when I was a teenager. (I was inspired to do so by a comic-book writer who observed in an interview that budding authors admire Hemingway because he makes serious literature look attainable, whereas, for example, Rilke—I'd never seen this name in print before or even knew how it was pronounced—sets an impossible standard.) I have been browsing in the book ever since, preferring the delicate and ironic early lyrics to the heavier philosophic masterworks, without ever quite feeling that I'd "read" it.
Compounding the problem of lyric poetry per se is my ignorance of German. Epic and dramatic poems, like novels, translate; lyric poems, living as they do on words alone, not as much. With poems in the Romance languages, I can look with some comprehension, if not fluency, to the original words on the facing pages, but whatever Rilke achieves through sonic texture or the specific connotative and allusive potentials of German is beyond me, as is the accuracy of Mitchell's translation. Mitchell, however, does manage to convey a tone mixing wonder with authority, a perennial questioning with a handing down of wisdom—a sensibility that perhaps even in translation I can identify as Rilkean.
Over the last few days, I've read or reread (a mix of both) the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. I will at least gather below some impressions from the former, generally considered Rilke's masterpiece, completed as it was, after two decade-separated compositional fits of blazing inspiration that also produced the Sonnets to Orpheus, in modernism's annus mirabilis of 1922. The first line famously came to Rilke in 1912 on the battlements of Duino Castle— Dante was said to have written some lines of the Divine Comedy there—where he was a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?In Ahead of All Parting, Mitchell ingeniously annotates the poems with explications from Rilke's voluminous correspondence—I'm reminded of a friend's anecdote about a philosophy seminar whose method was to explain any given passage of Kant with another quotation from Kant—and Rilke duly explains, in a 1925 letter to his Polish translator,
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
It is our task to imprint this temporary perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, "invisibly," inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible. […] The angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, already appears in its completion…The angel, then, is an image of future humanity, a humanity that has redeemed itself and its earth by transfiguring natural transience into the permanence of art—what Rilke's fellow modernist occultist poet Yeats called "the artifice of eternity." Many modern ideas draw together here. Concepts we tend to segregate as belonging to different domains and different ideologies show themselves intimate in the figure of Rilke's angel: not only aestheticism's severance of art from life, its insistence that the beautiful is in its essence "against nature," but also the relocation of Platonic or Christian transcendence into the immanent, as we find it in Hegel and Marx, the consummation of the historical process in an apocalyptic final this-worldly birth of a "new man." But Rilke's angel, like Benjamin's, is a somber modernist messenger, not so confident in 19th-century ideals of merely temporal and material progress, as the Seventh Elegy, with its intimations of Heidegger, discloses:
Nowhere, Beloved, will the world be but within us. Our lifeTechnology travesties art: it is a human artifice that battens on nature and drives out the material monuments of human culture. Yet technology serves art, too, by exiling culture deeper and deeper inside ourselves to be reborn as spirit. Cultural conservatives nowhere seem more persuasive to me than when they lament the decline of architecture, yet I've often thought that with the spread of literacy and mass communications, material public infrastructure has less need to be beautiful since we all carry a cathedral now in our heads. The Elegies' "thesis" reaches its climax in the Ninth, where Rilke elaborates at length the "mission" to pay attention to the world enjoined in the First Elegy:
passes in transformation. And the external shrinks into less and less. Where once an enduring house was,
now a cerebral structure crosses our path, completely
belonging to the realm of concepts, as though it still stood in the brain.
Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power,
formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.
Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up
these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still survives,
a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt before—
just as it is, it passes into the invisible world.
Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance
to build it insidethemselves now, with pillars and statues: greater.
Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,Despite the magnificent command ringing in our ears ("Speak and bear witness") we might notice some incongruities. (If it's not ambiguous, is it really poetry?) First, if the angel, as we've already established, was once ourselves and therefore has himself already transformed the visible into the invisible, then what need has he to hear of our "Things"? Hasn't he heard of them and, as it were, vaporized them already? Does our poet concede some fault in the invisible world, some angelic deficit, in the commissioning of the poet to work with worldly materials only?
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower… But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing.
[…]
Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness.
[…]
Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things.
But a tower was great, wasn't it? Oh Angel, it was—Which brings us to our second incongruity, this one performative: hasn't our poet spent almost the entirety of the Elegies at the verge of the unsayable, just as inspiration struck him on "the dreadful summit of the cliff / That beetles o'er his base into the sea"? We've heard a great deal more about angels and other invisibilia than about the things of this world. The incongruities are incongruous, then, even with one another: the poet prefers earth to heaven in theory but sings of heaven and not earth in practice.
even when placed beside you? Chartres was great—, and music
reached still higher and passed far beyond us. But even
a woman in love—, oh alone at night by her window…
didn't she reach your knee—?
My point isn't to catch Rilke in a contradiction, like a journalist hounding a politician, but rather to show where his poem is most insightful in demonstrating, in enacting, modern humanity's contradictory desires—to revolutionizes ourselves beyond recognition and to repose in the customs and enchantments of the everyday. Mitchell quotes a letter where Rilke refers to the Divine Comedy as Dante's "gigantically evasive poem," yet perhaps the pre-modern poet shows more wisdom than the modern one when it doesn't even occur to him that the sacred and the profane could be synthesized without remainder. (I am modern too. Dante's wisdom is as unavailable to me as it is to Rilke; like most moderns I can only read the Purgatorio with any comfort. But the possibility that someone before Hegel might have understood something, should, if we are not terminally arrogant, be borne in mind.)
The Duino Elegies, anyway, aren't all thesis and theology. The central poem, written last, was inspired by Picasso's great painting, Famille de saltimbanques. Rilke pressed another heiress to let him write it in her room where the painting was housed, and it was worth it, for he poignantly conjures Picasso's acrobats ("wanderers, more transient than we ourselves") as figures for all human exile over the mysterious earth, from tumbling boy to expiring elder. As well as Picasso, the Fifth Elegy also draws on Kleist's Platonic dialogue "On the Marionette Theater." For Rilke as for his doomed Romantic precursor, in the inner theater of the psyche, the marionette performs more angelically than any human dancer or acrobat can because the puppet in its total thingliness is already wholly spirit, free of the human organism and its crippling self-consciousness. Better even than the puppets are the animals and other natural creatures (including children) of the Eighth Elegy. Unlike ourselves, they live within life instead of before it; they exist without the watching and objectification that characterizes world-conquering man who imprisons himself in his own frail creations:
with all its eyes the natural world looks outIf the angel has transcended the visible to live in the invisible, the animal has no need to, since the animal was blessedly born before, not after, mundane human consciousness.
into the Open. Only our eyes are turned
backward and surround plant, animal, child
like traps as they emerge into their freedom.
[…]
And we: spectators, always, everywhere,
turned toward the world of objects, never outward.
It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down.
We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.
Rilke, finally, reflects on men and women. He often mentions lovers as potential secular examples of people who live transfigured lives, yet he is also skeptical of how lovers make idols of one another to evade the "mission": "they keep on using each other," he complains, "to hide their own fate." Perhaps a primordial incompatibility between man and woman, a division that redounds to neither's credit, compounds the problem. The Third Elegy is about mothers and sons. Rilke charges the mother with cosseting the boy in a fantasy of false comforts, even as the child himself wanders through his own interior to find the barbarian horde of his warrior forebears. Women represent feeble art, men ignorant courage, and the union of man and woman—whether in the maternal dyad or the conjugal embrace—can only therefore be a fallen version of the androgynous poetry Rilke composes to urge us on, artistically and heroically, toward the angelic eschaton. That's if I understand him, and I wouldn't swear that I do.
I understand the Sonnets to Orpheus even less, but there is one line that stands out to me in the fifth sonnet: "And it is in overstepping that he obeys." Rilke's God, like Goethe's and Hegel's, will save neither the good person nor the person who understands perfectly, but only the poet, "ahead of all parting," "dead in Eurydice" and therefore a permanent voice immanent in unfolding nature—Orpheus, poet, considered as a name for anyone who dares.
November 9, 2021
I dabbled a little in this book and was glad to be introduced to a poet I'd never heard of before. This edition features the original German (which I can't read) on the left, and the English translation on the right. I appreciate that the translation was not made to rhyme, as I feel that meaning is often lost when the translator prioritizes rhyme.
Rilke writes on many topics, and I love that he'll take any subject and paint it in words. He even does his own self-portrait.
My favorite part? Seeing the word "skull" in the translation and realizing that in German it's "Totenkopf." I don't know German, but I was able to discern that "Totenkopf" means something down the lines of "death head," and it is my new favorite word.
Rilke writes on many topics, and I love that he'll take any subject and paint it in words. He even does his own self-portrait.
My favorite part? Seeing the word "skull" in the translation and realizing that in German it's "Totenkopf." I don't know German, but I was able to discern that "Totenkopf" means something down the lines of "death head," and it is my new favorite word.
October 5, 2025
"Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive."
Rilke is undefeated.
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive."
Rilke is undefeated.
March 31, 2023
Durante el mes de marzo de 2023, que dediqué a la lectura de Rilke, este volumen, titulado Ahead of All Parting, junto con el titulado The Poetry of Rilke, de Edward Snow, fueron un apoyo fundamental.
Contiene las Elegías de Duino y los Sonetos de Orfeo completos, pero una selección de los otros libros de poesía de Rilke bastante más limitada que la edición The Poetry of Rilke de Snow. Sin embargo, a diferencia de esta última, Ahead of All Parting contiene una excelente selección de la prosa de Rilke, especialmente de los mejores pasajes de The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Ambas ediciones son bilingües alemán-inglés.
Comparadas con las traducciones de Snow -tanto de la poesía como de la prosa- así como con otras traducciones al español directas del alemán, las de Stephen Mitchell parecen ser menos fieles al texto original, más parafrásicas. A cambio son de más amable lectura, entran mejor por el oído.
En definitiva, un volumen bonito, bien editado, con una selección adecuada y unas traducciones que si bien son ligeramente "libres", son de muy grata lectura.
Contiene las Elegías de Duino y los Sonetos de Orfeo completos, pero una selección de los otros libros de poesía de Rilke bastante más limitada que la edición The Poetry of Rilke de Snow. Sin embargo, a diferencia de esta última, Ahead of All Parting contiene una excelente selección de la prosa de Rilke, especialmente de los mejores pasajes de The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Ambas ediciones son bilingües alemán-inglés.
Comparadas con las traducciones de Snow -tanto de la poesía como de la prosa- así como con otras traducciones al español directas del alemán, las de Stephen Mitchell parecen ser menos fieles al texto original, más parafrásicas. A cambio son de más amable lectura, entran mejor por el oído.
En definitiva, un volumen bonito, bien editado, con una selección adecuada y unas traducciones que si bien son ligeramente "libres", son de muy grata lectura.
June 19, 2007
This is the first book in my life that I read cover to cover twice in a row, and there is still more depth to explore.
I read every line, let it sink into my mind and arouse emotion fully. I believe this is called surrender.
Rilke is a very obvious existentialist. There is a fundamental quality to his writing and to his topics that make each metaphor matter.
Beware - he does not think of angels in the Christian sense, nor does he speak of God in the Christian sense. However I felt I was able to explore the concepts in spirituality he presents because I knew that he was not assuming the reader knows the definitions of the words he uses.
I read every line, let it sink into my mind and arouse emotion fully. I believe this is called surrender.
Rilke is a very obvious existentialist. There is a fundamental quality to his writing and to his topics that make each metaphor matter.
Beware - he does not think of angels in the Christian sense, nor does he speak of God in the Christian sense. However I felt I was able to explore the concepts in spirituality he presents because I knew that he was not assuming the reader knows the definitions of the words he uses.
February 18, 2008
This is Stephen Mitchell's translation. I wish I could read the original. So far, I prefer Mitchell's translations to others I have read.
I especially liked the prose translations.
I'd like to hear other thoughts re: whose translations of Rilke are "best" and why.
I especially liked the prose translations.
I'd like to hear other thoughts re: whose translations of Rilke are "best" and why.
January 12, 2009
This is one of my desert-island books ... I first encountered Rilke in 1984 ... He is my poet of poets ... and Stephen Mitchell's translations are unsurpassed.
November 4, 2009
one day i'll have this entire thing memorized.
December 13, 2011
If you read no other selection of Rilke's poetry, read this one. The selection is comprehensive, and Mitchell's translations are outstanding.
June 25, 2015
Didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would.
July 6, 2017
My bible.
April 10, 2020
Beautiful and pure. Rilke is like glass. (Also v. fond of cats and elegies.)
May 25, 2021
A very fine collection of poetry from the modern master Rainer Maria Rilke. I was a bit worried that I would not enjoy it, because I didn't much like translator Stephen Mitchell's selection of Pablo Neruda's poetry in Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon. In that Neruda collection, Mitchell explicitly states he chose his personal favourites and the book lacks comprehensiveness, as well as Mitchell's lines lacking the silver that I found in other translations. Happily, such criticisms could not be launched at Mitchell here: not only are his translations gorgeous at times, but the book does achieve comprehensiveness. The inclusion of the entirety of the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus is particularly welcome, and there are parts of the latter book which now rank as some of my favourite poems.
Rilke tackles some of the most pressing existential and philosophical questions of our time, not least the all-important search for meaning in a material world, and he does so in a way that is both complex (in structure) and simple (in the formulation of the words). This must surely be deliberate, for the observations he makes often suggest that the answers to such daunting, complex questions can sometimes be found in the simplest, clearest ways of thinking.
At first, I found some of the 'god' stuff rather unappealing, but particularly in The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke is evidently looking for an expansive spiritual connection to something which is unknown, rather than seeking the stricture of narrow religious dogma. This is evident in his book Letters to a Young Poet (not included here, but it is highly recommended) and, here, it is expressed most beautifully in Sonnets XXIV – XXVI of the First Part of The Sonnets to Orpheus, a mini cycle-within-a-cycle which captures the conflicting emotions – bursting vitality and directionless worry – of a progressing society which is coming to the realization that its gods are dead. Rilke speaks to our age.
Rilke tackles some of the most pressing existential and philosophical questions of our time, not least the all-important search for meaning in a material world, and he does so in a way that is both complex (in structure) and simple (in the formulation of the words). This must surely be deliberate, for the observations he makes often suggest that the answers to such daunting, complex questions can sometimes be found in the simplest, clearest ways of thinking.
At first, I found some of the 'god' stuff rather unappealing, but particularly in The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke is evidently looking for an expansive spiritual connection to something which is unknown, rather than seeking the stricture of narrow religious dogma. This is evident in his book Letters to a Young Poet (not included here, but it is highly recommended) and, here, it is expressed most beautifully in Sonnets XXIV – XXVI of the First Part of The Sonnets to Orpheus, a mini cycle-within-a-cycle which captures the conflicting emotions – bursting vitality and directionless worry – of a progressing society which is coming to the realization that its gods are dead. Rilke speaks to our age.
Read
September 8, 2024“We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting each other go. For holding on
comes easily; we do not need to learn it.” (from “Requiem for a Friend”)
“Here,
falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion
into the guessed-at, and onward.” (from “To Holderlin”)
“Nothing really belongs to us. We put our hands lightly around
the necks of unbroken flowers.” (from “Elergy”)
“Love does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person… rather, its is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become word, to become world in himself for another’s sake.”
“For fame is, after all, only the sum of all the misunderstandings hat gather around a new name.”
“Of course, he wants to escape, and he does; relieved, he nestles
into your sheltering heart, takes hold, and begins himself.”
“We never know
the actual, vital contour of our own
emotions—just what forms them from outside.
Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart’s
curtain?”
“And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,
trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,
in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.”
“When we were filled with joy,
it belonged to no one: it was simply there.”
“Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”
“The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of
possession one learns connection.”
“What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.”
letting each other go. For holding on
comes easily; we do not need to learn it.” (from “Requiem for a Friend”)
“Here,
falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion
into the guessed-at, and onward.” (from “To Holderlin”)
“Nothing really belongs to us. We put our hands lightly around
the necks of unbroken flowers.” (from “Elergy”)
“Love does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person… rather, its is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become word, to become world in himself for another’s sake.”
“For fame is, after all, only the sum of all the misunderstandings hat gather around a new name.”
“Of course, he wants to escape, and he does; relieved, he nestles
into your sheltering heart, takes hold, and begins himself.”
“We never know
the actual, vital contour of our own
emotions—just what forms them from outside.
Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart’s
curtain?”
“And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,
trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,
in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.”
“When we were filled with joy,
it belonged to no one: it was simply there.”
“Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”
“The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of
possession one learns connection.”
“What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.”
May 14, 2021
"Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive."
"It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible...this work, the work of the continual conversion of the beloved visible and tangible world into the invisible vibrations and agitation of our own nature..."
I think what impacted me most lept out at me from Rilke's prose ( "The Notebooks of Malte..." ) and - as with any 'selections' volume - one will be given only a taste of these ❤️ passages:
"in my depths I know that submission leads further than rebellion; it shames that which is usurpation, and it contributes indescribably to the glorification of the rightful power. The rebel pulls himself out from the attraction of one center of power, and he may perhaps succeed in escaping from its field; but beyond it he finds himself in the void and has to look around for another gravitational force to draw him in. And this one is generally even less legitimate than the first. Why not then see in the power we live in, the greatest power of all, unperturbed by its weaknesses and fluctuations? Somewhere the arbitrary will of itself collide against the law, and we save energy if we leave it to convert itself."
"It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible...this work, the work of the continual conversion of the beloved visible and tangible world into the invisible vibrations and agitation of our own nature..."
I think what impacted me most lept out at me from Rilke's prose ( "The Notebooks of Malte..." ) and - as with any 'selections' volume - one will be given only a taste of these ❤️ passages:
"in my depths I know that submission leads further than rebellion; it shames that which is usurpation, and it contributes indescribably to the glorification of the rightful power. The rebel pulls himself out from the attraction of one center of power, and he may perhaps succeed in escaping from its field; but beyond it he finds himself in the void and has to look around for another gravitational force to draw him in. And this one is generally even less legitimate than the first. Why not then see in the power we live in, the greatest power of all, unperturbed by its weaknesses and fluctuations? Somewhere the arbitrary will of itself collide against the law, and we save energy if we leave it to convert itself."
October 6, 2019
In some ways this book is beyond writing about for me at the moment. It is profoundly and transcendently beautiful and heavy. Some of the best writing on grief, love, art, and our yearning for and often futile grasping at the beyond.
I've perused many translations of Rilke's poetry, and there are other approaches I also enjoy, but Stephen Mitchell's work here stands above them, for me. The others feel too smooth. Here there is beauty but also the testing and folding and stretching of language aimed at something that must almost by definition remain beyond and ungraspable.
This collection (as stated in the title) also includes some prose work by Rilke, which I read last because it seemed less urgent to me... but then upon reading it found it to be, again, profound, beautiful, and challenging. (All the poetry is presented in bilingual form on facing pages. The prose includes only the English translation.)
I've perused many translations of Rilke's poetry, and there are other approaches I also enjoy, but Stephen Mitchell's work here stands above them, for me. The others feel too smooth. Here there is beauty but also the testing and folding and stretching of language aimed at something that must almost by definition remain beyond and ungraspable.
This collection (as stated in the title) also includes some prose work by Rilke, which I read last because it seemed less urgent to me... but then upon reading it found it to be, again, profound, beautiful, and challenging. (All the poetry is presented in bilingual form on facing pages. The prose includes only the English translation.)
November 21, 2023
“. . . Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.”
Funny guy, though Rilke wrote way more than ten good lines.
The way he describes the inexplicable is amazing to me; he gives corporeal life to abstract concepts, making them heavy with a real weight that I can hold (and how terribly heavy they are). But even the way he describes ordinary things! I’ll never see an evening as anything other than “The sky puts on the darkening blue coat / held for it by a row of ancient trees”. Simple words that have great effect in my mind, a masterful skill of his. I had to stop constantly while reading and sit with a line because of its beauty and marvel at just how smart Rilke had to be. A new favorite poet of mine.
Funny guy, though Rilke wrote way more than ten good lines.
The way he describes the inexplicable is amazing to me; he gives corporeal life to abstract concepts, making them heavy with a real weight that I can hold (and how terribly heavy they are). But even the way he describes ordinary things! I’ll never see an evening as anything other than “The sky puts on the darkening blue coat / held for it by a row of ancient trees”. Simple words that have great effect in my mind, a masterful skill of his. I had to stop constantly while reading and sit with a line because of its beauty and marvel at just how smart Rilke had to be. A new favorite poet of mine.
April 14, 2024
This was the first book of Rilke’s poetry I ever read. I borrowed a physical copy from a library by my former work. I wasn’t able to finish it by the time it was due, so I returned it….in March of 2020. A pandemic, a job change, a move, motherhood, and so many life changes later…I’ve never been able to find the book again to finish it.
But it gave me enough of a taste of Rilke to know that this was a poet I needed to come back to. I’ve borrowed others since and finally purchased my own gigantic copy of his full work. I’m grateful for this first and lovely introduction to some of Rilke’s best and would highly recommend it if you come across it.
But it gave me enough of a taste of Rilke to know that this was a poet I needed to come back to. I’ve borrowed others since and finally purchased my own gigantic copy of his full work. I’m grateful for this first and lovely introduction to some of Rilke’s best and would highly recommend it if you come across it.
November 9, 2024
“Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”
Rilke is the poet of my being. His writing is infinitely delicate, sensitive, meandering, unexpected, comforting. The Sonnets to Orpheus show themselves to the reader as if the reader could be familiar with their realm.
Really, amazing.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”
Rilke is the poet of my being. His writing is infinitely delicate, sensitive, meandering, unexpected, comforting. The Sonnets to Orpheus show themselves to the reader as if the reader could be familiar with their realm.
Really, amazing.
December 22, 2024
And with bated breath, you reach out past this halcyon wave, chance you touch this fleeting moment of sunbeam struck scene — stay, stay, and grace me in girdled rain swept ecstasy… all ends in swift cut, quick sorrow, gasping to know what was, and when whence?
Someday, I too hope to lay in high lofts on the carpets where awesome angels rest
Someday, I too hope to lay in high lofts on the carpets where awesome angels rest
May 9, 2021
(poetry part only) I was only interested in reading the poetry, and I was struck by the depth of Rilke's thoughts and the eloquence of his words, even in translation. I read this because I'm interested in reading his "Book of Hours", which I will definitely be acquiring soon.
Read
February 19, 2023Amazing. Great to have the German and English translation side by side. To be honest I couldn’t read every page but hopefully enough to get a good feel for this. Incredibly inspiring to listen to the “On Being” podcast episode on Rilke.
March 18, 2024
I don't really read poetry but this felt exceptional. I will return to this as I feel there are many depths to these works. The prose/essays were of excellent standard too. Like a lighter, less brash Nietzsche.
June 9, 2017
Beautiful wordplay, although I wish Rilke's poems had themes I could relate to.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews