Rilke remade the sturdy sonnet, recast the sonorous song. He quickened the German language itself.
Born Rene Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (1875–1927), Rainer Maria Rilke was an influential German poet, novelist, and translator perhaps best known for Duino Elegies and his prose piece Letters to a Young Poet. He married Clara Westhoff, a sculptress, in 1901. Although they were only together for a year, they had one daughter together. Rilke died of leukemia in Montreaux, Switzerland in 1927.
Translated by Babette Deutsch
Although The Book of Hours is the work of Rilke’s youth, it contains the germ of his mature convictions. Written as spontaneously received prayers, these poems celebrate a God who is not the Creator of the Universe but rather humanity itself and, above all, that most intensely conscious part of humanity, the artist. Babette Deutsch’s classic translations—born from “the pure desire to sing what the poet sang” (Ursula K. Le Guin)—capture the rich harmony and suggestive imagery of the originals, transporting the reader to new heights of inspiration and musicality.
Where Silence Reigns, a sampling from his essays, notebooks, and letters, shows Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), the pre-eminent modern poet of solitude and inwardness, seeking to reconcile his personal conflict between the claims of “life” and the claims of art. His subjects are commonplace, seemingly innocuous at times: the encounter between a man and a dog, a collection of dolls, a walk among trees. But always the deceptively simple external phenomenon is seen as the symbol, the catalyst of an intensely felt inner experience. As he confided to his friend Frau Wunderly-Volkart: “Oh, how often one longs to speak a few degrees more deeply! My prose… lies deeper… but one gets only a minimal layer further down; one’s left with a mere intimation of the kind of speech that may be possible THERE where silence reigns.” In addition to occasional pieces and notebook entries, this volume contains selections from the strange and haunting “Dream-Book,” the lyrical “Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke,” and the entire “Rodin-Book”––Rilke’s appreciation of the great sculptor whom he had served as secretary.
Possibility of Being is a selection of poems by one of the most moving and original writers of this century, Rainer Maria Rilke (1857-l926). The title (taken from one of the Sonnets to Orpheus, ’’Ibis is the Creature") reflects the central concern of both Rilke’s life and art: the achievement of “being,” which this most spiritual yet least doctrinaire of modern German poets defined as “the experiencing of the completest possible inner intensity.’’ The eighty-four poems included in this small volume will serve as a sound and inviting introduction to Rilke’s strategies in the pursuit of “being.” And just as the unicorn in “This Is the Creature” has an eternal “possibility of being” but only becomes visible in the mirror held by a virgin, so can our own possibilities become manifest in the mirror held by the sensitive artist. The poems are chosen from The Book of Hours (1899-1903), The Book of Images (1902 and 1906), New Poems (1907 and 1908), Requiem (1909), Duino Elegies (1923), Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), and the posthumous Poems 1906-26. This selection was made by Professor Theodore Ziolkowski of Princeton University, who drew from the various New Directions volumes of Rilke’s work translated by J. B. Leishman.
Rilke remade the sturdy sonnet, recast the sonorous song. He quickened the German language itself.
If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.
