Duino Elegies and other Selected Poems

Rainer Maria Rilke

Mar 2008 · AuthorHouse

About this ebook

Duino Elegies are the ten magnificent poems that defined the Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke's artistic vision of life, death, eternity, and the human condition. Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe invited Rilke to stay at her castle in Duino, on the coast of the Adriatic Sea near Trieste. He stayed alone in the castle for about four months and, on a cold day in January, 1912, when he was contemplating how to answer a business letter that he received, he walked out into the freezing windy morning and, walking along a path by the bastions looking down at the violent waves of the Adriatic a couple of hundred feet below him, he heard someone speak, but when he turned around, he was alone and the voice that he heard spoke the famous opening lines of the First Elegy: “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel/ Ordnungen?” (“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic/ Orders?”).  Dr. Gartner presents a new translation of Rilke's magnum opus as well as of a selection of ten famous poems from Rilke's collected works.

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About the author

More than any other modern German writer, Rainer Maria Rilke seems to match our romantic idea of what a poet should be, though, as with many writers, separating artistry from affectation is often difficult. Restless, sensitive, reverent, yet egotistical, Rilke often seems to hover in his poems like a sort of ethereal being. He was born in 1875 to a wealthy family in Prague. After a few years devoted to the study of art and literature, he spent most of his adult life wandering among the European capitals and devoting himself single-mindedly to poetry. His early poems reflect his interest in the visual and plastic arts, as he tries to lose himself in contemplation of objects such as an antique torso of Apollo.His later books of poetry, such as Duino Elegies (1923) and Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), on the contrary, focus intently on internal realms. The poetry of Rilke is noted, above all, for metaphysical and psychological nuances.