Customer Reviews

Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Norton Paperback)

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This is the book that introduced me to Rilke, and I still find myself reading it 35 years later. Ms. Norton's translations are not themselves poetry, nor do they need to be. The originals are here; the English versions are accurate enough to let the reader do without a dictionary. What more do you really need?

There are no Duino Elegies here, nothing from "The Book of Hours", and none of the French poems, but "The Panther", "Spanish Dancer", and "Archaic Torso of Apollo" are included, so the novice need not fear missing out on all the famous stuff.

By the way, the book starts off with some rather disappointing juvenilia, too saccharine for me even when I was 15, but the rest of the poems demonstrate that it is unwise to dismiss a poet just because he or she wrote dreck in the high school literary magazine.