Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition - Hardcover

Rilke, Rainer Maria; Snow, Edward

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865475466 ISBN 13: 9780865475465

Publisher: North Point Press, 2000

Synopsis

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic
orders? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure,
and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains
to 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.

About this title

About the Author

Edward Snow is a professor of English at Rice University. North Point Press has published his translations of Rilke's New poems [1907], New Poems [1908]: The Other Part, The Book of Images and Uncollected Poems. He is the recipient of an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for the body of his Rilke translations, as well as the Academy of American Poets' Harold Morton Landon Translation Award and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He is also the author of A Study of Vermeer and Inside Breugel.

Reviews

Named for the castle of his patroness, which overlooked the Adriatic, the ten Duino Elegies, spanning a decade in their composition, are esteemed by many of Rilkes American admirers, as well as by the poet himself, as marking the pinnacle of his career. That popularity no doubt explains the number of translations of this work in recent years. Its been said that reading a translation is like looking at a tapestry from the back: The broad shapes and bold outlines remain discernible, but it is too crude a representation to permit nuances of color and texture. Its also been remarked that the entire German language consists of a single root word and all the rest are prefixes and suffixes. As if these were not obstacle enough in the translators path, there is Rilkes own pronouncement that nothing means anything beyond what is stated in his poems, as though all allusion were solely in the readers imagination. Edward Snow (English/Rice Univ.), whose Rilke translations have been honored by the Academy of American Poets, is neither deterred nor waylaid. These are intense and symbolically complex poems. It must be tempting to get caught up in mystical metaphors and in the linguistic legerdemain that turns Dastehen into the inelegant English ``being-thereness.'' But Snow sidesteps most of that academic glossing and renders the elegies in a more colloquial English, whose immediacy goes far in translating the poets often haunted intensity. Even if ones shelves are bowed with translations of the elegies, it might be time to replace an older ``classical'' version with this fresher bilingual edition. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: North Point Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865475466
• ISBN 13: 9780865475465
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96