Name: Duino Elegies
ISBN: 9780307473738

Rainer Maria Rilke

An authoritatively translated, single-volume compendium of two of the early twentieth-century German poet's most beloved sequences offers insight into Rilke's influence, ability to identify with the world, and perspective on life as a spiritual quest. Original.

Duino Elegies

Seher Mohsin

Lily

This is the first time I read anything by Rilke, and already I know that this rather small set of elegies are among the most passionate, honest and anguished poems I have ever encountered. While I went into reading this book expecting something profoundly religious and mystical, I think the elegies only conform to such descriptions in the very limited sense of 'angels' being present in them. The pain and catharsis bound in stanzas are grounded in human pain, in mortality and existential angst. At times, Rilke's disquietude surpasses words and echoes in reader's body like a tangible, physical pain. It's such a captivating experience that made me impatient to read more of his poetry, while simultaneously lamenting my ignorance of German. I can only imagine how transcendental these elegies are in their original language.

Vita Sackville-West

Edward Sackville-West

In 1931, Virginia and Leonard Wolf's Hogarth Press printed a few hundred copies of a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, in English translation by the writers Vita Sackville-West and her cousin Edward Sackville-West. This marked the English debut of Rilke's masterpiece, which would go on to be rendered in English more than 20 times, influencing countless poets, musicians and artists around the world.

Published for the first time in 90 years, the Sackville-Wests' translation is both a fascinating historical document and a magnificent blank-verse rendering of the Elegies. Rilke's enchanting journey through love, death and solitude appears here in language of breathtaking immediacy and imagistic power. Featuring an introduction by critic Lesley Chamberlain, this new edition casts fresh light on one of European literature's great masterpieces.

One of the literary masterpieces of the century, this translation is now presented with facing-page German. We have a marvelous, almost legendary, image of the circumstances in which the composition of this great poem began. Rilke was staying at a castle (Duino) on the sea near Trieste. One morning he walked out on the battlements and climbed down to where the rocks dropped sharply to the sea. From out of the wind, which was blowing with great force, Rilke seemed to hear a voice: Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? (If I cried out, who would hear me up there, among the angelic orders?). He wrote these words, the opening of the first Duino Elegy, in his notebook, then went inside to continue what was to be his major work and one of the literary masterpieces of the century.