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The Essential Rilke: Bilingual Twentieth-Century German Poetry – The Complete Duino Elegies in Graceful Translation
German poet Rainer Maria Rilke(1875-1926) enjoys ever-increasing popularity. His Duino Elegies is considered on of the greatest long poems of the twentieth century. Yet translations from his native German have always presented the elusiveness of Rilke's imagery, the playful way he both distorts and subverts his own language, and the depth and complexity of his poetry make it difficult for translators to preserve the beauty and meaning of the original text. In his stunning bilingual selection that includes the entire Duino Elegies as well as a number of favorite and less familiar shorter poems, Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann manage to retain power and grace of Rilke's words. Throughout his poetry, Rilke addresses questions of how to live in and relate to a world in a voice that is simultaneoulsy prophetic and intensely personel. These translations offer new insight into this enigmatic German poet whose work will continue to be read and admired throughout the world.
157 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1999
40 people are currently reading
1103 people want to read
About the author
Rainer Maria Rilke
1,799 books6,938 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews
November 20, 2017
This is a small collection of Rilke's poems, with original German on the left, the translation on the right side. This decreases the number of essentials to include, but what is there is a perfect way to introduce yourself to Rilke (I have already read the New Poems, but since it's been years from that, this is still a new to me).
This is a selected number of poems plus all of Duino Elegies; this is also a revised edition. The introduction talks about how tricky it is to translate Rilke, and I can see why. Some of the longer poems take their time to open up, and probably need a number of readings to do so.
There is still plenty of favorites I found, especially favorite being "Requiem For A Friend" (the background of that is explained in the introduction, too).
...Perhaps, after all, we should have rounded up
some wailing women? Women who weep
out loud for money, whom one can pay
to bawl all through the quiet hours of the night.
Oh, how we need customs. Oh, how we sufffer from the lack
of customs. They pass, we talk them out of existence.
And this is why you had to come back, yourself, dead, and help
here with me catch up on all thelamenting. Can you hear
me wail?...
There is also something great in the bit about traveling and living so the deceased can somehow also travel and see them. Other favorites include "Autumn Day", "The Beggar's Song", "The Panther", "Going Blind", "Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes", and "The Fifth Elegy" in Duino Elegies.
Truth is, I think reading this Essential collection is a great place to start, to get a feel of the poet's style, and you don't feel overwhelmed by the length of the book. (Like the cover art also.) The book goes quickly (or you can read it slowly, especially the long ones).
This is a truly good collection, and the translation work was done well. Although I wish I could read the left-side text, the right-side works, and is beautiful. :)
This is a selected number of poems plus all of Duino Elegies; this is also a revised edition. The introduction talks about how tricky it is to translate Rilke, and I can see why. Some of the longer poems take their time to open up, and probably need a number of readings to do so.
There is still plenty of favorites I found, especially favorite being "Requiem For A Friend" (the background of that is explained in the introduction, too).
...Perhaps, after all, we should have rounded up
some wailing women? Women who weep
out loud for money, whom one can pay
to bawl all through the quiet hours of the night.
Oh, how we need customs. Oh, how we sufffer from the lack
of customs. They pass, we talk them out of existence.
And this is why you had to come back, yourself, dead, and help
here with me catch up on all thelamenting. Can you hear
me wail?...
There is also something great in the bit about traveling and living so the deceased can somehow also travel and see them. Other favorites include "Autumn Day", "The Beggar's Song", "The Panther", "Going Blind", "Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes", and "The Fifth Elegy" in Duino Elegies.
Truth is, I think reading this Essential collection is a great place to start, to get a feel of the poet's style, and you don't feel overwhelmed by the length of the book. (Like the cover art also.) The book goes quickly (or you can read it slowly, especially the long ones).
This is a truly good collection, and the translation work was done well. Although I wish I could read the left-side text, the right-side works, and is beautiful. :)
January 31, 2022
"For beauty is nothing but the onset of terror we're still just able to bear, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying"
I absolutely adore Rilke. His prose is beautiful, it resonates with lyrical intensity. Smoothly elegant and unhurriedly paced.
I absolutely adore Rilke. His prose is beautiful, it resonates with lyrical intensity. Smoothly elegant and unhurriedly paced.
March 7, 2013
If you want to hear angel speak, read Rilke's poetry. Because he's got God whispering at his ears.
January 15, 2020
Lovely Selection with face-to-face German language original and English
Review of the Ecco Books hardcover edition (1999)
Review of the Ecco Books hardcover edition (1999)
January 4, 2022
I mostly want to note that The Ninth Elegy is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read in a while. This quick collection definitely gave the best taste of Rilke’s genius and left me wanting to read more of his work.
November 12, 2023
sei allem Abschied voran, als wäre er hinter dir, wie der Winter, der eben geht. denn unter Wintern ist einer so endlos Winter, daß, überwinternd, dein Herz überhaupt übersteht.
&
nicht sind die Leiden erkannt, nicht ist die Liebe gelernt, und was im Tod uns entfernt, ist nicht entschleiert
&
nicht sind die Leiden erkannt, nicht ist die Liebe gelernt, und was im Tod uns entfernt, ist nicht entschleiert
Read
February 12, 2010Why, if our time on earth could be
spent as laurel, its green darker than
all others, its leaves edged with
little waves (like the smile of a wind)--: then why do we
have to be human--and, avoiding destiny,
long for destiny? . . .
Oh not because happiness is,
that rash profit taken just prior to oncoming loss,
not out of curiosity, or to give practice to the heart,
reasons which would hold for the laurel too. . . . .
But because being here is so much, and everything
seems to need us in this fleeting world, and
strangely speaks to us. Us, the most fleeting. Once
for everything, only once. Once and no more. And we, too,
only once. Never again. But to have been here,
this once, if only this once:
to have been of the earth seems irrevocable.
And so we push ourselves, and want to achieve it,
want to contain it all in our simple hands,
our more overcrowded gaze, our speechless heart.
Want to become it.--And give it, to whom? Best of all,
hold on to all of it forever . . . Ah, but into that other relation,
what can we carry over? Not the power to see, learned here
so slowly, and none of the things that happen here. Not one.
The pain, then. Above all the sadness,
and the long experience of love,--nothing
but the unsayable. But later,
among the stars, what good is it: they are better unsayable.
For the wanderer doesn't bring back from the mountainside
to the valley a handful of earth, unsayable to everyone, but
rather a word gained, a pure word, the yellow and blue
gentian. Are we perhaps here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit tree, window,--
at most: column, tower . . . . but to say, you understand,
oh, to say them as even the things themselves
never meant so inwardly to be. Isn't this the devious cunning
of our reticent earth when it urges lovers on:
that in their emotion each and every thing would delight in itself?
Threshold: what does it mean to two
lovers when they wear away a little their own older threshold,
they too, after the many before,
before those to come . . . . lightly.
Here is the time for the sayable, here its home.
Speak and acknowledge it. More than ever
things that can be experienced fall away,
pushed aside and superseded by unseeable acts,
acts under crusts that readily shatter
when the inner workings outgrow them and seek new containment.
Between the hammers
our heart endures, like the tongue
between the teeth, which yet
continues to praise.
Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you won't impress him with your glorious emotions; in space,
where he feels with more feeling, you're a newcomer. Rather show him
some simple thing, something shaped through the generations,
that lives as ours, near to our hand and in our sight.
Tell him of things. He'll stand more awed; as you did
beside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how joyful, how innocent, how much ours, a thing can be,
how even the lamenting fo sorrow resolves into pure form,
serves as a thing, or dies into a thing--, and, when it crosses over,
blissfully flows out of the violin.--And these things,
that live by going away, know that you praise them; fleeting,
they look to us for rescue, us, the most fleeting of all.
They want us to transform them completely in our invisible heart
into--oh infinitely--into ourselves. Whoever finally we will be.
Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise
in us invisible?--Isn't your dream
one day to be invisible?--Earth! invisible!
What if not transformation is your urgent commission?
Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, no more
of your springtimes are needed to win me over--, one,
ah, a single one, is already too much for my blood.
Namelessly, I have chosen you, from afar.
You have always been right and now your sacred idea
is the intimacy of death.
Look, I'm alive. On what? Neither childhood nor future
becomes less. . . . . Overabundant being
wells up in my heart.
-The Ninth Elegy
spent as laurel, its green darker than
all others, its leaves edged with
little waves (like the smile of a wind)--: then why do we
have to be human--and, avoiding destiny,
long for destiny? . . .
Oh not because happiness is,
that rash profit taken just prior to oncoming loss,
not out of curiosity, or to give practice to the heart,
reasons which would hold for the laurel too. . . . .
But because being here is so much, and everything
seems to need us in this fleeting world, and
strangely speaks to us. Us, the most fleeting. Once
for everything, only once. Once and no more. And we, too,
only once. Never again. But to have been here,
this once, if only this once:
to have been of the earth seems irrevocable.
And so we push ourselves, and want to achieve it,
want to contain it all in our simple hands,
our more overcrowded gaze, our speechless heart.
Want to become it.--And give it, to whom? Best of all,
hold on to all of it forever . . . Ah, but into that other relation,
what can we carry over? Not the power to see, learned here
so slowly, and none of the things that happen here. Not one.
The pain, then. Above all the sadness,
and the long experience of love,--nothing
but the unsayable. But later,
among the stars, what good is it: they are better unsayable.
For the wanderer doesn't bring back from the mountainside
to the valley a handful of earth, unsayable to everyone, but
rather a word gained, a pure word, the yellow and blue
gentian. Are we perhaps here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit tree, window,--
at most: column, tower . . . . but to say, you understand,
oh, to say them as even the things themselves
never meant so inwardly to be. Isn't this the devious cunning
of our reticent earth when it urges lovers on:
that in their emotion each and every thing would delight in itself?
Threshold: what does it mean to two
lovers when they wear away a little their own older threshold,
they too, after the many before,
before those to come . . . . lightly.
Here is the time for the sayable, here its home.
Speak and acknowledge it. More than ever
things that can be experienced fall away,
pushed aside and superseded by unseeable acts,
acts under crusts that readily shatter
when the inner workings outgrow them and seek new containment.
Between the hammers
our heart endures, like the tongue
between the teeth, which yet
continues to praise.
Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you won't impress him with your glorious emotions; in space,
where he feels with more feeling, you're a newcomer. Rather show him
some simple thing, something shaped through the generations,
that lives as ours, near to our hand and in our sight.
Tell him of things. He'll stand more awed; as you did
beside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how joyful, how innocent, how much ours, a thing can be,
how even the lamenting fo sorrow resolves into pure form,
serves as a thing, or dies into a thing--, and, when it crosses over,
blissfully flows out of the violin.--And these things,
that live by going away, know that you praise them; fleeting,
they look to us for rescue, us, the most fleeting of all.
They want us to transform them completely in our invisible heart
into--oh infinitely--into ourselves. Whoever finally we will be.
Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise
in us invisible?--Isn't your dream
one day to be invisible?--Earth! invisible!
What if not transformation is your urgent commission?
Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, no more
of your springtimes are needed to win me over--, one,
ah, a single one, is already too much for my blood.
Namelessly, I have chosen you, from afar.
You have always been right and now your sacred idea
is the intimacy of death.
Look, I'm alive. On what? Neither childhood nor future
becomes less. . . . . Overabundant being
wells up in my heart.
-The Ninth Elegy
February 12, 2023
As much as I made fun of Rilke and how tedious deciphering his work was, I grew fond of his work and his pessimism. Sometimes the lines from his elegies means absolute nonsense to me, but the beauty of the words strung together into a line that just sits right in your head is the reason why I continued to read it (that and the fact that I am an overachiever with crippling anxiety and the thought of doing bad in IB Lit makes me want to cry).
I think I agree with a lot of what Rilke said, especially. I, too, would rather be a laurel than human.
I think I agree with a lot of what Rilke said, especially. I, too, would rather be a laurel than human.
March 18, 2019
Absolut großartige Lyrik
April 5, 2019
I love how these translations read. So smooth and seamless. Rilke's unequivocably lyrical voice reminds me of some of my favorite poets writing in Spanish. Among my favorites are the uncollected poems included here.
December 16, 2019
I appreciate seeing the original German side-by-side with the translation! It completely changes the reading experience for me, particularly with poetry.
Read
June 27, 2021Beautiful and lyrical, Rilke speaks life to moments and feelings and longings hard to put into words.
Read
July 8, 2023“to have been *of the earth* can never be taken back”
September 18, 2016
"...so we live, forever taking our leave."
4,5 stars. Rilke delights in sorrow and solitude, the intimate death and the continual transformation of the human-self. At the same time he revered life and all it entailed; worshipped the Earth, the stars, animalkind. It's plain to see that life is sacred to him, but there is no life without death, and he treated both with equal awe and reverence. He understood the innate cycle, the Ouroboros that governs all things, which in the physical world manifested in the change of seasons and the passage of time. Most importantly (in my opinion), he deeply understood the ephemerality of being human. This is a trait I admired the most in poets and the singular thing that rendered my enjoyment to the fullest of a poet's work, perhaps because the first poet I've ever read had laid it out so clearly.
I think he truly shines in Duino Elegies. His longer poems are magnificently lyrical and full of profound, vibrant imagery. He truly had a gift with words, and you can easily tell that he was a highly sensitive soul, gifted with grand powers of observation. In the Eighth Elegy, he lamented about that elusive thing that sets mankind apart from animals, that darkly gleaming consciousness, that intelligence that separates us from the rest of the world.
Sonnets of Orpheus is also grand--"Be dead forever in Eurydice--"--and I love Requiem for a Friend, but in my opinion, nothing could quite compare to the solemn magnificence of Duino Elegies. There is a certain solemnness to Rilke's words, as if the world stopped breathing and the entire galaxy stopped moving, as if time is a solid object, and I think Duino Elegies captured this feeling best.
He's definitely one of my favourite poets now, and I'd definitely recommend this book. I think it's a good starting point for Rilke's works.
4,5 stars. Rilke delights in sorrow and solitude, the intimate death and the continual transformation of the human-self. At the same time he revered life and all it entailed; worshipped the Earth, the stars, animalkind. It's plain to see that life is sacred to him, but there is no life without death, and he treated both with equal awe and reverence. He understood the innate cycle, the Ouroboros that governs all things, which in the physical world manifested in the change of seasons and the passage of time. Most importantly (in my opinion), he deeply understood the ephemerality of being human. This is a trait I admired the most in poets and the singular thing that rendered my enjoyment to the fullest of a poet's work, perhaps because the first poet I've ever read had laid it out so clearly.
I think he truly shines in Duino Elegies. His longer poems are magnificently lyrical and full of profound, vibrant imagery. He truly had a gift with words, and you can easily tell that he was a highly sensitive soul, gifted with grand powers of observation. In the Eighth Elegy, he lamented about that elusive thing that sets mankind apart from animals, that darkly gleaming consciousness, that intelligence that separates us from the rest of the world.
Sonnets of Orpheus is also grand--"Be dead forever in Eurydice--"--and I love Requiem for a Friend, but in my opinion, nothing could quite compare to the solemn magnificence of Duino Elegies. There is a certain solemnness to Rilke's words, as if the world stopped breathing and the entire galaxy stopped moving, as if time is a solid object, and I think Duino Elegies captured this feeling best.
He's definitely one of my favourite poets now, and I'd definitely recommend this book. I think it's a good starting point for Rilke's works.
January 24, 2022
This selection includes poems from:
The Book of Images
,
New Poems
,
Requiem
,
The Life of the Virgin Mary
,
Duino Elegies
, and
Sonnets to Orpheus
; along with a number of Uncollected Poems...
From The Book of Images (1902, 1906)...
From New Poems (1907, 1908)...
From Requiem (1909)...
From The Life of the Virgin Mary (1913)...
From Uncollected Poems ...
From Duino Elegies (1923)...
From Sonnets to Orpheus (1923)...
From The Book of Images (1902, 1906)...
Always I go from gate to gate,
rained on, scorched by the sun;
suddenly I press my right ear
into my right hand.
And now my own voice comes to me
as if I'd never known it.
So that I'm not certain who's shouting out,
I or someone else.
I cry out for a pittance.
The poets cry out for more.
At last I close my face
by closing both my eyes;
lying so heavy in my hand
it almost looks like rest.
So they don't think I hadn't
a place to lay my head.- The Beggar's Song, pg. 7
From New Poems (1907, 1908)...
His gaze has grown so tired from the bars
passing, it can't hold anything anymore.
It is as if there were a thousand bars
and behind a thousand bars no world.
The soft gait of powerful supple strides,
which turns in the smallest of all circles,
is like a dance of strength around a centre
where an imperious will stands stunned.
Only at times the curtain of the pupils
silently opens - . Then an image enters,
passes through the taut stillness of the limbs -
and in the heart ceases to be.- The Panther, pg. 13
From Requiem (1909)...
I have my dead and I have let them go
and been surprised, to see them so consoled,
so soon at home in death, just right this way,
so unlike what we hear. Only you, you come
back; you brush against me, you move about, you want
to knock into things, to make them sound of you,
telling me you're here. Oh don't take away what
I'm slowly learning. For I'm right; you're mistaken
if, touched, you feel homesickness
for any thing. We transform it;
it isn't here, we mirror it into us,
out of existence, the moment we can see it.
[...]- Requiem for a Friend, pg. 43
From The Life of the Virgin Mary (1913)...
What they felt then: is it not
above all other mysteries the sweetest
and yet still earthly:
when he, pale from the grave,
his burdens laid down, went to her:
arisen in all places.
Oh, first to her. How they
inexpressibly began to heal.
Yes, to heal: that simple. They felt no need
to touch each other strongly.
He placed his hand, which next
would be eternal, for scarcely
a second on her womanly shoulder.
And they began
quietly as trees in spring
in infinite simultaneity
their season
of ultimate communing.- The Quieting of Mary with the Resurrected One, pg. 63
From Uncollected Poems ...
Long you must suffer, not knowing what,
until suddenly, from a piece of fruit hatefully bitten,
the taste of the suffering enters you.
And then you already almost love what you savour. No one
will take it out of you again.- Long you must suffer, pg. 67
From Duino Elegies (1923)...
Who, if I screamed out, would hear me among the hierarchies
of angels? And if one should suddenly take
me to his heart: I would perish from his
greater existence. For beauty is no more
than the beginning of terror that we're still just able to bear,
and we admire it so, because it serenely disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.
[...]- The First Elegy, pg. 77
From Sonnets to Orpheus (1923)...
Though the world changes quickly,
like shapes of clouds,
everything once finished falls
back to ancient ground.
Far above change and progress,
wider and more free,
your early song still persists,
god with the lyre.
Suffering has not been understood,
love has not been learned,
and what goes from us in death
is not revealed.
Over the land song alone
hallows and celebrates.- I, 19, pg. 155
August 10, 2023
Rereading 9th August 2023
Thoughts from 2014
The Essential Rilke is a lovely edition that has the German and English translation side by side. This really helped me to get at least a basic understanding of the poems, since when the English was particularly dense, I could also check out the sentence in German. Rilke is a very visual poet, using vivid images or adapting well-known myths. I can't say I understood even a third of all that he was doing, but I really enjoyed many of his poems.
Thoughts from 2014
The Essential Rilke is a lovely edition that has the German and English translation side by side. This really helped me to get at least a basic understanding of the poems, since when the English was particularly dense, I could also check out the sentence in German. Rilke is a very visual poet, using vivid images or adapting well-known myths. I can't say I understood even a third of all that he was doing, but I really enjoyed many of his poems.
Want to read
September 10, 2008I really got into Rilke from reading The Time Traveler's Wife, actually - the author quoted Rilke in the beginning pages of a few chapters.
August 16, 2010
This book has gone everywhere with me for the past 10 years. It never leaves my bedside & I always take it with me if I travel somewhere. The prose of Rilke is extrodinary.
January 27, 2020
I gotta read more of this guy. Smart, powerful, glowing language, even in translation, even for a person who doesn't like poetry.
October 23, 2020
Seltsam,
alles, was sich bezog, so lose im Raume
flattern zu sehen. Und das Totsein ist mühsam
und voller Nachholn, daß man allmählich ein wenig
Ewigkeit spürt.—Aber Lebendige Machen
alle den Fehler, daß sie zu stark unterscheiden.
Engel (sagt man) wüßten oft nicht, ob sie unter
Lebenden gehn oder Toten.
Duino Elegies: Die Erste Elegie
Strange,
to see elements, once related, flutter
loosely in space. And being dead is toilsome,
and full of the retrieving needed if little by little
we’re to feel a bit of eternity.—Yes, but the living
are mistaken to draw these distinctions so strictly.
Angels (it’s said) often don’t know if it’s the living
they move among or the dead.
Duino Elegies: The First Elegy
translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann
Strange,
everything that related so loosely in space
to see flutter. And being dead is tedious
and full of catching up to do, gradually
a little Eternity feels.—But make living ones
all the fault that they are too different.
Angels (they say) often do not know whether they are under
the living go or the dead.
Duino Elegies: The First Elegy
translated by Google Translate
Dear Reader: If you’re incensed because I dared give Rilke three stars, calm down. The three stars are for the translation, not for Rilke. Galway Kinnell, not fluent in German, works with Hannah Liebmann, wer spricht deutsch, to translate Rilke’s Duino Elegies and a few other selected poems spanning his career as poet. They provide the original text on the facing pages, and this helped a lot. Rilke employs rhyme schemes and repetition which are at times lost or dropped in Kinnell’s translation in favor of clarity. In the end, though, I couldn’t tell whether Kinnell was spot-on, in which case Rilke is more interesting in what he talks about than how he writes about it, or failing to properly capture the essence of reading Rilke in the original.
Take the three passages above. Aside from clarifying syntax, there’s not a whole lot of difference between Kinnell/Liebmann and a Google Translation. And I admit it: I prefer Google translation of “…being dead is tedious and full of catching up to do” to Kinnell’s “…And being dead is toilsome, and full of the retrieving needed.” In the original German, there’s also a musicality which is wholly missing from both these attempts. The mess gets much worse with Rilke’s selections from The Sonnets to Orpheus: Kinnell makes no attempt to match the prosody of the original. He wants his translations to be accurate—but we’re reading poetry here. Accuracy has little to do with this exercise.
I have reservations regarding translated modern poetry; I believe it isn't possible. Yet, this thin volume is an excellent introduction to Rilke, providing the entire Duino Elegies as well as the fascinating poems “The Panther,” “Requiem for a Friend” and “The Quieting of Mary with the Resurrected One.” I’m going to search other translations, compare, ruminate. This thin volume has sparked my resolve to delve more deeply in Rilke’s work and to stop dismissing “non-English poets of the 20th and 21st centuries” because translations cannot replicate the experience of the original. After all,
Nicht sind die Leiden erkannt,
nicht ist die Liebe gelernt,
und was im Tod uns entfernt,
Ist nicht entschleiert.
Einzig das Lied überm Land
heiligt und feiert.
Suffering has not been understood,
love has not been learned,
and what goes from us in death
is not revealed.
Over the land song alone
hallows and celebrates.
alles, was sich bezog, so lose im Raume
flattern zu sehen. Und das Totsein ist mühsam
und voller Nachholn, daß man allmählich ein wenig
Ewigkeit spürt.—Aber Lebendige Machen
alle den Fehler, daß sie zu stark unterscheiden.
Engel (sagt man) wüßten oft nicht, ob sie unter
Lebenden gehn oder Toten.
Duino Elegies: Die Erste Elegie
Strange,
to see elements, once related, flutter
loosely in space. And being dead is toilsome,
and full of the retrieving needed if little by little
we’re to feel a bit of eternity.—Yes, but the living
are mistaken to draw these distinctions so strictly.
Angels (it’s said) often don’t know if it’s the living
they move among or the dead.
Duino Elegies: The First Elegy
translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann
Strange,
everything that related so loosely in space
to see flutter. And being dead is tedious
and full of catching up to do, gradually
a little Eternity feels.—But make living ones
all the fault that they are too different.
Angels (they say) often do not know whether they are under
the living go or the dead.
Duino Elegies: The First Elegy
translated by Google Translate
Dear Reader: If you’re incensed because I dared give Rilke three stars, calm down. The three stars are for the translation, not for Rilke. Galway Kinnell, not fluent in German, works with Hannah Liebmann, wer spricht deutsch, to translate Rilke’s Duino Elegies and a few other selected poems spanning his career as poet. They provide the original text on the facing pages, and this helped a lot. Rilke employs rhyme schemes and repetition which are at times lost or dropped in Kinnell’s translation in favor of clarity. In the end, though, I couldn’t tell whether Kinnell was spot-on, in which case Rilke is more interesting in what he talks about than how he writes about it, or failing to properly capture the essence of reading Rilke in the original.
Take the three passages above. Aside from clarifying syntax, there’s not a whole lot of difference between Kinnell/Liebmann and a Google Translation. And I admit it: I prefer Google translation of “…being dead is tedious and full of catching up to do” to Kinnell’s “…And being dead is toilsome, and full of the retrieving needed.” In the original German, there’s also a musicality which is wholly missing from both these attempts. The mess gets much worse with Rilke’s selections from The Sonnets to Orpheus: Kinnell makes no attempt to match the prosody of the original. He wants his translations to be accurate—but we’re reading poetry here. Accuracy has little to do with this exercise.
I have reservations regarding translated modern poetry; I believe it isn't possible. Yet, this thin volume is an excellent introduction to Rilke, providing the entire Duino Elegies as well as the fascinating poems “The Panther,” “Requiem for a Friend” and “The Quieting of Mary with the Resurrected One.” I’m going to search other translations, compare, ruminate. This thin volume has sparked my resolve to delve more deeply in Rilke’s work and to stop dismissing “non-English poets of the 20th and 21st centuries” because translations cannot replicate the experience of the original. After all,
Nicht sind die Leiden erkannt,
nicht ist die Liebe gelernt,
und was im Tod uns entfernt,
Ist nicht entschleiert.
Einzig das Lied überm Land
heiligt und feiert.
Suffering has not been understood,
love has not been learned,
and what goes from us in death
is not revealed.
Over the land song alone
hallows and celebrates.
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January 7, 2023from “the bowl of roses” - Noiseless living, opening without end, filling space without taking space from the space that all the other things in it diminish, almost without an outline, like something omitted, and pure inwardness, with much curious softness shining into itself - right up to the rim: is anything as known to us as this?
from “requiem for a friend” - I have my dead and I have let them go and been surprised, to see them so consoled, so soon at home in death, just right this way, so unlike what we hear. Only you, you come back; you brush against me, you move about, you want to knock into things, to make them sound of you and tell me you're here. Oh don't take away what I'm slowly learning. For I'm right; you're mistaken if, looking back, you feel homesickness for any thing here. We transform it; it isn't here, we mirror it into us, out of existence, the moment we can see it.
For this is guilt, if it is anything: to fail to increase the freedom of a love by all the freedom we can raise within ourselves. When we love, we have, at most, this: to let each other go; for holding on comes easily, we don't have to learn it.
from “requiem for a friend” - I have my dead and I have let them go and been surprised, to see them so consoled, so soon at home in death, just right this way, so unlike what we hear. Only you, you come back; you brush against me, you move about, you want to knock into things, to make them sound of you and tell me you're here. Oh don't take away what I'm slowly learning. For I'm right; you're mistaken if, looking back, you feel homesickness for any thing here. We transform it; it isn't here, we mirror it into us, out of existence, the moment we can see it.
For this is guilt, if it is anything: to fail to increase the freedom of a love by all the freedom we can raise within ourselves. When we love, we have, at most, this: to let each other go; for holding on comes easily, we don't have to learn it.
May 15, 2018
I believe I now understand what a proper translation can do for a collection. This, while a labor of love, does not do justice to Rilke in the way that "Duino Elegies" translated by Edward Snow does. The later is a moving body of work that climbs into the depth of Rilke's masterpiece to present a significant portion of its emotive style to the English reader; this particular piece, however, simply presented a selection of Rilke to the English audience. I want to say that quality trumps quantity, but even then, translators have to capture the essence of the creative, not simply present a translation of the work. I only give it three stars because this work presents a larger selection of Rilke, but it is by no means the richness that one may experience from a better translation like Edward Snows.
July 11, 2023
The Essential Rilke translated
There is really nothing to spoil out. It’s about your ability to interpret and decode what he is saying. I do like his reference to religion and overall this book kinda makes me feel better about someone close to you dying.
I love how roses are used and swans. They are beautiful to show human interactions.
However Rilke is so confusing and unless you read the last few pages of the book — you probably need a dictionary and read through multiple times and search the analysis.
I would recommend Tagore’s Stray Birds better tho.
There is really nothing to spoil out. It’s about your ability to interpret and decode what he is saying. I do like his reference to religion and overall this book kinda makes me feel better about someone close to you dying.
I love how roses are used and swans. They are beautiful to show human interactions.
However Rilke is so confusing and unless you read the last few pages of the book — you probably need a dictionary and read through multiple times and search the analysis.
I would recommend Tagore’s Stray Birds better tho.
February 14, 2023
bro gives me the most traumatising reading experience yet but his prose makes me want to convert to christianity and whatever shit he's delusional about. one star off because he is so confusing yet so rewarding when you understood the ~shit~ he's talking about. i would not touch his other work if possible, also, man had a better character development i've ever seen and it honestly is surreal to think about it.
March 10, 2023
Rilke is as good a reason as any to study German. Reading this excellent bilingual edition, you nonetheless notice that no translation can do justice to the playfulness and lightfootedness of the original - even though the meaning is conveyed properly. Rilke transcends tragedy and loss, transforms it into something sacred and sublime with imagery that touches one deeply despite its sometimes hermetic tendencies.
April 5, 2020
Rilke wrote one of my all-time favorite books, but I had never read his poetry. So I wanted to check this out. I’m not very big on poetry, and unfortunately this book confirmed that again. It’s not about Rilke; it’s about me. This wasn’t my thing, and I am actually rounding up to a 3, just because I’d be too embarrassed to give Rilke anything less!
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May 29, 2021Rilke is indeed an essential read and the thoughts that I get while reading his words urge me to go out on a march supporting the motion of adding him to the current academic curriculum starting from the higher secondary level itself. And obviously making him a 'mandatory' read.
Rilke is pure, ingenious, direct and true to his nature and being.
Rilke is beautiful.
Rilke is pure, ingenious, direct and true to his nature and being.
Rilke is beautiful.
September 7, 2021
Catching up on classics. I have loved the snippets of Rilke I’ve read and appreciate seeing them in context now (even more so after reading Spring by Ali Smith that goes briefly into part of his life) but I didn’t feel like the poems resonated deeply with me at this time. There is something about the highly educated white man writing about the classics - and women - that begs to be disrupted.
November 21, 2021
Embarrassed to give Rilke a 3? Maybe it should be more for some beautiful lines and ideas? I found myself lost in the flowery language and maybe that just tells me this kind of poetry isn’t for me. I felt this book dealt with some of the big existential questions but again I found my mind wandering. I think I’ll read, Letters to a Poet to really try to see the love for Rilke.
July 1, 2018
I didn't dig the translation... Wish I could read German.
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