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The Unknown Rilke

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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This edition presents mostly unpublished work completed or abandoned during the last two decades of Rilke's life.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..."

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.