Rainer Maria Rilke
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 that overwhelming 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"
Over the last fifteen years, in his two volumes of New Poems
6) Poems
Rilke's prayerful responses to the french master's beseeching art
For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes.
Virtually every day in the fall of 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke returned to a Paris gallery to view a Cezanne exhibition. Nearly as frequently, he wrote dense and joyful letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, expressing his dismay before the paintings and his ensuing revelations about art and life.
Rilke
In 1984 Edward Snow won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets for the first volume of these translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's watershed work, NEW POEMS, 1907. His work was praised for the resonance of the English and its faithfulness to the density and meaning of the German.
Like the poems in the first volume, these are presentations of objects, "thing-poems" (Dinggedichte). In 1902 Rilke left
Selected work from the modernist poet thematically centered on our relation to the physical world and our minds, featuring original texts and translations.
The Inner Sky is a selection of poems and prose by the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, set with the original text and a translation, and including more than a dozen works that have never before appeared in English. The translations, by the NEA and PEN Award–winning author
Now substantially revised by Edward Snow, whom Denise Levertov once called "far and away Rilke's best translator," this bilingual edition of The Book of Images contains a number of the great poet's previously untranslated pieces. Also included are several of Rilke's best-loved lyrics, such as "Autumn," "Childhood," "Lament," "Evening," and "Entrance."
16) New poems (1907)
Rainer Maria Rilke's move to Paris in 1902 and his close association with Rodin led him to take a new direction in his poetry. Between 1906 and 1908 he produced a torrent of brilliant work that was published in two separate volumes under the title Neue Gedichte, or New Poems. As the celebrated Rilke translator Edward Snow observes, these books "together constitute one of the great instances of the lyric quest for objective experience."
...–RAINER MARIA RILKE
In this treasury of uncommon wisdom and spiritual insight, the best writings and personal philosophies of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, are gleaned by Ulrich Baer from thousands of pages of never-before translated correspondence.
The result is a profound...
