Duino Elegies

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Overview

Perhaps no cycle of poems in any European language has made so profound and lasting an impact on an English-speaking readership as Rilke's Duino Elegies. These luminous new translations by Martyn Crucefix, facing the original German texts, make it marvellously clear how the poem is committed to the real world observed with acute and visionary intensity.

Completed in 1922, the same year as the publication of Eliot's The Waste Land, the Elegies constitute a magnificent godless poem in their rejection of the transcendent and their passionate celebration of the here and now. Troubled by our insecure place in this world and our fractured relationship with death, the Elegies are nevertheless populated by a throng of vivid and affecting figures: acrobats, lovers, angels, mothers, fathers, statues, salesmen, actors and children. This bilingual edition offers twenty-first century readers a new opportunity to experience the power of Rilke's enduring masterpiece.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781907587658
Publisher:	Enitharmon Press
Publication date:	01/23/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	275 KB

About the Author

Perhaps the greatest lyric poet of the twentieth century, RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875 - 1926) was born in Prague and led a nomadic existence, living in Germany, Russia, Spain, Italy and France before his death in Switzerland from leukaemia. He dedicated himself exclusively to his work, including the New Poems (1907 - 8), the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Duino Elegies (1923) and Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). MARTYN CRUCEFIX's own poetry - for which he has won numerous prizes, including a major Eric Gregory award and a Hawthornden Fellowship - has been praised as 'urgent, heartfelt, controlled and masterful' (Poetry London). His collections include Beneath Tremendous Rain (1990), At The Mountjoy Hotel (1993), On Whistler Mountain (1994), A Madder Ghost (Enitharmon, 1997), An English Nazareth (Enitharmon, 2004) and Hurt (Enitharmon, 2012). His translation of Rilke's Duino Elegies (Enitharmon, 2006) was shortlisted for the Corneliu Popescu Prize and chosen by the novelist Philip Pullman as one of his 40 favourite books.

Read an Excerpt

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic

orders? And even if one of them pressed me

suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed

in his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure,

and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains

to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.

-from "The First Elegy"

Table of Contents

Translator's Note     7
Introduction     9
Die erste Elegie     14
The First Elegy     15
Die zweite Elegie     22
The Second Elegy     23
Die dritte Elegie     28
The Third Elegy     29
Die vierte Elegie     36
The Fourth Elegy     37
Die funfte Elegie     42
The Fifth Elegy     43
Die sechste Elegie     50
The Sixth Elegy     51
Die siebente Elegie     54
The Seventh Elegy     55
Die achte Elegie     62
The Eighth Elegy     63
Die neunte Elegie     68
The Ninth Elegy     69
Die zehnte Elegie     74
The Tenth Elegy     75
Commentary     83

What People are Saying About This

Denise Levertov

"Far and away Rilke's best contemporary translator."

Editorial Reviews

For a decade and a half...snow has gradually been building a reputation as Rilke's best contemporary translator in English. His version of the Elegies should cement that reputation, and elevate it: Snow may be the best translator that Rilke has ever had.
—The New Republic

Brian Phillips

Waterfield who received a doctorate in classics and English literature at Christ Church, Oxford and has worked as a music instructor in the UK and Germany, offers what he considers a poetic, rather than literal, translation of Rainer Marie Rilke's "The Duino Elegies." A brief introduction to Rilke and this collection of poems, is followed by both the original German and English translation of the ten elegies, with additional introductions before each poem. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Shortlisted for the 2023 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Translation Prize

'Alison Croggon's transformative and impassioned translation of Rilke's Duino Elegies attempt the extraordinary - to bring existence into a temporal-spatial focus. Signature, regret, pain, trauma, wonder, euphoria, wonder, rapture and an immersion in the senses are all contained in the crispness and experiential sensibility that guides Croggon's relationship with the original poems. Croggon lives in the wild beauty of these elegies and makes them glow in translation... This is an incendiary work.' - John Kinsella

'Alison Croggon's new translation of the Elegies has a directness, immediacy, sensuality, and violence that distinguishes her from precursors like J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender.' - Australian Book Review

'Croggon shows us how to do things with lyric in ways I can only envy.' - Jill Jones

'Alison Croggon is one of the most powerful lyric poets writing today.' - Australian Book Review

'Alison Croggon's transformative and impassioned translation of Rilke's Duino Elegies attempt the extraordinary - to bring existence into a temporal-spatial focus. Signature, regret, pain, trauma, wonder, euphoria, wonder, rapture and an immersion in the senses are all contained in the crispness and experiential sensibility that guides Croggon's relationship with the original poems. Croggon lives in the wild beauty of these elegies and makes them glow in translation... This is an incendiary work.' - John Kinsella

'Croggon's poems offer something intense, difficult and fragile, but simultaneously intimate and hugely rewarding in the reading.' - Cordite Poetry Review

'Alison Croggon is one of the most powerful lyric poets writing today.' - Australian Book Review

From the Publisher