“If I cried out/who would hear me up there among the angelic orders?”

This was the first line of Rilke’s poetry I ever read. I opened the Duino Elegies translated by David Young while sitting on the pink granite cliffs of Acadia National Park in Maine, gulls circling in the blue skies above, the ocean and trawlers checking lobster traps below. Yes, I had chills. It was 1979 and I was twenty-seven-years old.

I have read other translations of the Elegies since then, including Stephen Mitchell’s The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, and The Rilke of Ruth Speirs. I was curious to read the first ever English translation, published in 1931.

“In the history of Rilke translation no version has proved entirely satisfactory to bilingual critics,” Lesley Chamberlain notes in the Introduction. Vita and Edward Sackville-West translated the poems into blank verse, which “straight away…carries the narrative forward,” while later translations were in free verse. I did feel this while reading the poems out loud.

Who would give ear, among the angelic host,
Were I to cry aloud? And even if one
Amongst them took me swiftly to his heart
I should dissolve before his strength of being.
For beauty’s nothing but the birth of terror,
Which we endure but barely, and enduring,
Must wonder at it, in that it disdains
To compass our destruction.

I liked the rhythm of these poems: “which we endure but barely,” compared to “beauty is only/the first touch of terror/we can still bear” in Young’s translation or “which we are just able to endure” in Mitchell’s.

Other times, I just did not care for the translation, such as the end of my favorite Elegy, the Eighth:

Who turned us then around in such a wise,
That we are always in that attitude,
Do what we may, of one who takes his leave?
As one on the last hill, from which he sees
His vale outspread once more, turns, stops, and lingers
–So do we live, and ever bid farewell.

It feels wordy to me, and lacks the emotion I always associate with these lines. Compare it to Mitchell’s “who has twisted us around like this, so that/no matter what we do, we are in the posture of someone going away.” Or Young’s ending, “that’s how we live/always/saying goodbye.”

I don’t read German. I literally flunked out of German I as a freshman in high school. I wish I had been adept at languages and could read Rilke in the original. I think each translation aids my understanding of these poems. And, it is so interesting to see how English the speaking world first encountered Rilke’s greatest work.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

This is the first work that I have read by Rilke and it will not be the last. Beautiful written that goes hand in hand with vivid and poignant imagery. I loved it.

Made by Ranier Maria Rilke, the Duino Elegies is 20th century poetry at its finest. Taking a decade to finish due to a creativity crisis, Rilke created a unique setting from things that inspired him and from that inspired many. He most certainly earned the title of “The most lyrically intense German-language poets"

Rilkes work is a must read for those interested in spirituality, self-help, and history. Personally, his take on angels is one of the best takes; Angels being from the unknown (invisible) terrifying the known (visible). These poems are perfect for the one who questions everything and the one who wants to learn everything.

Extraordinary, Astonishing, Phenomenal… These words are not enough to explain the genius that is Ranier Maria Rilke!

What an interesting project, to reprint the first complete English translation of the full Duino Elegies translated by Vita and her cousin Edward Sackville-West. There's a brief but helpful introduction that contextualises this translation, then we're straight into the poetry itself. Rilke seems to be writing an epic in fragmented form and this is poetry that requires concentration and sustained thought - not because it's difficult on the surface but because it's resonant and philosophical, abstract and diffuse. Cutting to the heart of life and death, these are pieces which are designed to be read, reread, struggled with and argued against to really get to their heart.

The translation is fluent and in blank verse so that a lyric quality is maintained but not knowing the original German, I can't say what might be lost in recreating a form rather than just attempting to translate text and meaning. So I'd suggest this as one translation of Rilke's work, which might be interestingly compared with other renditions in English.

Castle Boy Poetry

For scholars of Rainer Maria Rilke, I'm sure this is a much anticipated reissue of these 90-year-old English translations of his German poems. That's confirmed by the nearly 8,000 ratings this book has here on Goodreads in November of 2021 before it's even been published.

As someone who has been moved by readings of Rilke's poems in both English and German, I was surprised that I didn't get more out of reading these poems to myself. Perhaps I'm not schooled enough in early 20th-century poetry or I'm not Rilke's target audience, which arguably was people who had friends with castles or who owned castles themselves.

Rilke wrote these poems while staying in various castles, including the Castle of Duino, which gives this collection of 10 elegies their name. The new introduction from critic Lesley Chamberlain explains why cousins Edward and Vita Sackville-West are superior translators of these poems, not only for their knowledge of the German language and the nuances of early 20th-century English language, but also because they each owned castles. I mean what are the chances? Rilke himself died in a castle, despite not having the pleasure of owning one.

This book also includes the original translators' note from the 1931 edition, and even at that time, the Sackville-Wests described Rilke's poetry as "abstruse and elusive." So I guess, don't feel bad if some of this language is especially inaccessible 90 years later. If you're not a Rilke scholar of some sort, I recommend reading the introduction and translators' note to learn some more context about the poet and this edition. I would also recommend reading Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet for his musings on creative life, which I found to be far more accessible and surprisingly relatable in today's context.

I voluntarily obtained a digital version of this book free from Netgalley and Pushkin Press in exchange for an honest review.