The Unknown Rilke [Paperback]

Rainer Maria Rilke (Author), Franz Wright (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1990

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Oh gods, gods! / You frequent infiltrators, sleepers inside things, / who rise exulting..." In this posthumous collection of poems and poetic fragments, Rilke (1875-1926) invokes the divine frequently. Yet "even to look at a star / requires some small earthly base," and the poetry moves most when it serves as a link between ourselves and what is beyond. In his communions here, Rilke is hardly "unknown," his elegaic, melancholy, and joyful moods are typically limpid and transcendent. But Wright (Entry in an Unknown Hand), a poet himself, has translated the German with a refreshing vernacular purity. "I think Rilke was quite literally seeking to create a visionary condition which might be prolonged indefinitely," he comments in the introduction, and the English allows that moment to last. The first half of the book, composed largely of retellings of Bible stories, and including the sequence The Life of Mary, is an oblique testament of faith from a man who apparently believed more in the authority of creation than of God. The second half is by nature more miscellaneous. In his seeking, not his finding, Rilke continues to reach us. --Independent Publisher

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Oberlin College Press; Expanded edition (January 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0932440568
• ISBN-13: 978-0932440563
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,237,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential, legible Rilke, June 1, 2001

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A Reader (La Jolla, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Unknown Rilke (Paperback)

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..."

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars immaculate conception, November 21, 2007

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msb "msb" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unknown Rilke (Paperback)

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.