Product Description
This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. The Library also understands and values the usefulness of print and makes reprints available to the public whenever possible. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found in the HathiTrust, an archive of the digitized collections of many great research libraries. For access to the University of Michigan Library's digital collections, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu and for information about the HathiTrust, please visit http://www.hathitrust.org ... Read more

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Rilke is one of the most widely read poets of the 20th century. In his poetry, Rilke addresses the problems of death, God, and "destructive time," and attempts to overcome and transform these problems into an indestructive inner world. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Duino Elegies
Tops!This translation of Rilke is regarded by many of us as the best.

'Nuff said. :)

Fantastic translation, but meek reading
Mitchell's translation takes on the complexities of Rilke and somehow manages to render them elegantly, effectively and without sacrificing clarity. But his reading! He sounds like a Disney mouse trebling and whimpering through his own fantastic translation, which is a disappointment, given how powerful it is. Still, this is a great asset; I recommend highly. It is amazing to listen to the words as spoke from as close to the poet as one can reach, and once you get past the weak performance, the poetry is ringing.

A Rilke that reads as if Rilke wrote in English
I've found other translations of Rilke obtuse, frustratingly difficult to get the first layer of sense out of, let alone the multiple layers and connections going all the way down. Poulin's translation renders Rilke crisply, briskly musical, urgent, hallucinatory, and true. I read these words in this order and they succeed in completely breaking me open. Which I count as a poetic success.

Rilke rains on my parade
While audio readings are usually annoying (check out T.S. Eliot reading T.S. Eliot) this particular version benefits from Mitchell's suberb translations and Rilke's vivid imagery.Who among the angels hierarchies.... ... Read more

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The first English translation of two stories from Rilke's earliest prose work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Atmospheric, lyrical early stories
These two stories are lovely, and a bit different from the Rilke works to which we English-speakers are exposed. They are very interesting for those enchanted with Prague, as Rilke mentions many landmarks within the city (buildings, graveyards, and such that still exist), and the translator doesa very nice job footnoting all the locations mentioned. Both these storiesdeal with the relationship between the Germans and the Czechs in Praguewhen Rilke lived there, which is fascinating, since this is no longer thesituation at present. The stories are both romantic, but <> is the better one, being a more convincing picture ofreality and less muddled. ... Read more

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Rainer Maria Rilke's central importance to the history of literature in the 20th century is based on the power and memorability of his lyrics, and on his successful struggle to articulate a new form of human consciousness and a new vision of the human relation to the rest of creation. Franz Wright's brilliant translations of some of Rilke's neglected poems are now well-known and widely admired. They are here enhanced by an additional selection and by a new Introduction, by the translator, that traces Rilke's progress toward ultimate mastery and breadth of vision. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

immaculate conception
Wright does what few who dare to translate Rilke do:while remaining true to the often dazzlingly complex German, he brings the text once again to life in an English that is up to the original - and that is high praise, indeed.Perhaps only poets of the stature of Franz Wright should dare to do this near-impossible task of translating Rilke.It is an immaculate conception in English, and for those without recourse to the original a more than adequate compensation.

Essential, legible Rilke
In the very fine introduction to this book, Wright draws Rilke parallel to a comment about Rimbaud: "(he) was neither a seer or a prophet nor a god: he was a poet, *that is enough*." Rilke is one of the West's major poets, no matter how far back in time you go. Period. And if you think you know the poet, but you haven't read these poems, these clear & wise translations... You don't know Rilke.

I have no idea why this book is not better known. I myself was turned onto it by the provocative author Jonathan Carroll, in one of his fine novels. Yes, this contains some fragmentary, unfinished poems Rilke was working on during difficult periods of his life. Yes, some are reflections on Biblical characters. But they transcend the subject the same as Rilke transcends most other poets' ideas of poetry - where it can go, where it can take you, both as reader and as writer. Rilke exemplified, intentionally or not, a new vision of human consciousness, where it fits in relation to everything else. In Rilke, as with most great poetry (and most great art), it is not so much paying attention to his words when you read him - if poetry comes to you, it will come between the words, in the spaces you find yourself creating for it to fill, in a certain accumulation of insight and wisdom. In this, Rilke is one of the world's rare geniuses.

This edition presents mostly unpublished work completed or abandoned during the last two decades of Rilke's life. It is full of presentiments and "echoes" of his final masterwork, Duino Elegies. These rank among some of his finest, most lucid - if fragmentary - works. The honesty of Rilke's insight is sometimes stunning, heartbreaking, breath-stopping.

From the introduction: "'Life and death,' [Rilke wrote], 'at the core they are one.' Rilke was seeking the angel: not to woo him, he acknowledged - and in whose ears, if he cried out, he might not be heard at all; the angel, not the Christian angel, but a noun which has no corresponding entity in space, and yet exists for us by virtue of that noun, of language itself: exists in us, in perceiving and being perceived, in whatever impulse it was that first caused human beings to speak, to sing, to praise. The poems in [the last section of this edition] were some of Rilke's milestones, or precarious footholds and handholds on that desolate mountain of the heart..." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not the best introduction to the works of Rilke
For anyone interested in learning about Rilke and reading his poetry, this book isn't the best introduction. It's a collection of poems taken from Rilkes' "Book of Hours," "The Book of Images," "New Poems," Requiem," "Duino Elegies," and Sonnets to Orpheus."

If I knew that it was an anthology, I probably wouldn't have bought it. The poems chosen for the book were hand-picked by Theodore Ziolkowski and I definitely think he could have done a better job.

1. from Autumn- "And night by night, down into solitude/the heavy earth falls far from every star."

... Read more

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RAINER MARIA RILKE: Dance the Orange: Selected Poems

translated by Michael Hamburger and edited by Jeremy Mark Robinson

This new collection includes poems taken from the time of the great German poet's New Poems through the Duino Elegies to the last pieces. These are some of Rainer Maria Rilke's best works; they are intense, compact, lyrical and lucid, by turns erotic, heartfelt and mystical. Hamburger's excellent translations have the German original facing each poem.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the greatest of all lyrical poets. Rilke is part of that group of European poets and writers which includes Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, Georg Trakl, Marina Tsvetajeva, and friends such as Andre Gide, Lou Andreas-Salome and Paul Valery.

Rilke was an incredibly inventive creator of poetry, who could forge the myriad states and images of love, from the delicate, detailed and subtle, to the passionate, illuminating and ecstatic.

Rilke was adept at inflecting language with blissful tones: while he could describe the many experiences of love, he found it difficult to turn them into realities, to act on his words. For him love could be a transitory, fragile state between two people. 'Why do people who love each other separate before there is any need? Because it is after all so very temporary a thing, to be together and to love one another'. Rilke saw life as a 'continuous flow of vicissitudes', change following change, so that parting was inevitable, and people should become used to it ('at any moment be ready to give each other up, let be and not hold each other back'.

Product Description
This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. The Library also understands and values the usefulness of print and makes reprints available to the public whenever possible. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found in the HathiTrust, an archive of the digitized collections of many great research libraries. For access to the University of Michigan Library's digital collections, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu and for information about the HathiTrust, please visit http://www.hathitrust.org ... Read more