Bøger af Rainer Rilke

The formative work of the legendary poet who sought to write "not feelings but things I had felt"When Rainer Maria Rilke arrived in Paris for the first time in September 1902, commissioned by a German publisher to write a monograph on Rodin, he was twenty-seven and already the author of nine books of poems. His early work had been accomplished, but belonged tonally to the impressionistic, feeling-centered world of a late-nineteenth-century aesthetic.Paris was to change everything. Rilke's interest in Rodin deepened and his enthusiasm for the sculptor's "art of living surfaces" set the course for his own pursuit of an objective ideal. What was "new" about Rilke's New Poems, published in two independent volumes in 1907 and 1908, is a compression of statement and a movement away from "expression" and toward "making realities." Poems such as "The Panther" and "Archaic Torso of Apollo" are among the most successful and famous results of Rilke's impulse.This selection from both books unites the companion volumes in a torrent of brilliant work intoxicated with the materiality of the world. Edward Snow has now improved upon the translations for which he received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award and with which he began his twenty-year project of translating Rilke.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelicorders? and even if one of them pressed mesuddenly to his heart: I'd be consumedin that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothingbut the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure,and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdainsto destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.-from "The First Elegy"Over the last fifteen years, in his two volumes of New Poems as well as in The Book of Images and Uncollected Poems, Edward Snow has emerged as one of Rainer Maria Rilke's most able English-language interpreters. In his translations, Snow adheres faithfully to the intent of Rilke's German while constructing nuanced, colloquial poems in English. Written in a period of spiritual crisis between 1912 and 1922, the poems that compose the Duino Elegies are the ones most frequently identified with the Rilkean sensibility. With their symbolic landscapes, prophetic proclamations, and unsettling intensity, these complex and haunting poems rank among the outstanding visionary works of the century.

Between the New Poems of 1907 and 1908 and his death in 1926, Rainer Maria Rilke published only two major volumes of poetry--the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, both in 1923. But during this period he was writing verse continually, often prolifically--in letters, in guest books, in presentation copies, and chiefly in the pocket-books he always carried with him. This body of uncollected work exceeds five hundred pieces: finished poems of great poise and brilliance, headlong statements that hurtle through their subjects, haunting "fragments," and short bursts that arc into the unpursuable. A remarkable number of them are among Rilke's finest poems.Snow's selection of more than a hundred of these little-known works distills the best of the uncollected poetry while offering a wide enough choice to convey Rilke's variety and industry during the years he wrote them. Uncollected Poems will lead students, scholars, and other readers to a fresh--and more accurate--understanding of this great poet's life and work.

Where Silence Reigns, a sampling from his essays, notebooks, and letters, shows Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), the pre-eminent modern poet of solitude and inwardness, seeking to reconcile his personal conflict between the claims of "life" and the claims of art. His subjects are commonplace, seemingly innocuous at times: the encounter between a man and a dog, a collection of dolls, a walk among trees. But always the deceptively simple external phenomenon is seen as the symbol, the catalyst of an intensely felt inner experience. As he confided to his friend Frau Wunderly-Volkart: "Oh, how often one longs to speak a few degrees more deeply! My prose... lies deeper... but one gets only a minimal layer further down; one's left with a mere intimation of the kind of speech that may be possible THERE where silence reigns." In addition to occasional pieces and notebook entries, this volume contains selections from the strange and haunting "Dream-Book," the lyrical "Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke," and the entire "Rodin-Book"--Rilke's appreciation of the great sculptor whom he had served as secretary.

This selection of poems from throughout Rilke's creative output is arranged chronologically, placing poems of similar themes and / or modes of expression close to one another, making bed-fellows of poems rarely seen together. The aim is to illuminate the underlying themes which Rilke said he had arrived at very early in his life

Rilke's prayerful responses to the french master's beseeching artFor 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 was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his New Poems. But Cezanne's impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay. Rilke's sense of kinship with Cezanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters -- passages from them appear verbatim in Rilke's great modernist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Letters on Cezanne is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art.

A collection of sonnets written four years before Rilke's death explores death through the Greek myth of Orpheus, imagining death as one of many transformative experiences in the human condition. Reprint.

Perhaps no cycle of poems in any European language has made so profound and lasting an impact on an English-speaking readership as Rilke's Duino Elegies. This translation was chosen by Phillip Pullman as one of his 40 favourite books.

In fifty-five sonnets, Rilke plays an astonishing set of philosophical and sensual variations on the Orpheus myth. 'Praising, that's it!' he declares; nature, art, love, time, childhood, technology, poverty, justice - all are encompassed in poems that spark with insight and invention, amongst the joyful and light-footed that Rilke ever wrote.

The late poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the summits of European poetry in the twentieth century. Completed in 1922, as were T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses, Duino Elegies ranks with them as a classic of literary Modernism and as an inquiry into the spiritual crisis of modernity. 1922 also saw the unexpected birth and completion of a new work, The Sonnets to Orpheus, a cycle of 55 sonnets giving lyrical expression to the philosophical insights gained in the Elegies. The third part of the late poetry consists of the less known brief lyrics Rilke wrote in the five years prior to his death in December 1926. Graham Good's edition is the first to combine translations of all three into a single volume. His versions represent the meanings and echo the sound patterns of the original within fluid and readable English verse, while the introduction and detailed commentary elucidate the contexts, themes and allusions to help make Rilke's late poetry accessible to contemporary poetry lovers and spiritual seekers. "Graham Good's translations of Rilke read like fresh, original poems. Fresh in their English rhymes and cadences, fresh as Rilke in transforming elegy into eulogy, sorrow into consolation, and the unforgiving world around us into a place where we can recreate ourselves. Good has heard and obeyed Pound's rallying-cry of "Make it new;" - and now he offers to restore us, as Rilke would restore us, through the poise and passion of his language." - Robert Fagles, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, and translator of best-selling editions of Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles.