The Duino Elegies - Softcover

Rilke, Rainer Maria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1618952285 ISBN 13: 9781618952288

Publisher: Bibliotech Press, 2017

Synopsis

The Duino Elegies (German: Duineser Elegien) are a collection of ten elegies written by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Rilke, who is "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets," began writing the elegies in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (1855-1934) at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. The poems, 859 lines long in total, were dedicated to the Princess upon their publication in 1923. During this ten-year period, the elegies languished incomplete for long stretches of time as Rilke suffered frequently from severe depression--some of which was caused by the events of World War I and being conscripted into military service. Aside from brief episodes of writing in 1913 and 1915, Rilke did not return to the work until a few years after the war ended. With a sudden, renewed inspiration--writing in a frantic pace he described as a "boundless storm, a hurricane of the spirit"--he completed the collection in February 1922 while staying at Château de Muzot in Veyras, in Switzerland's Rhone Valley. After their publication in 1923 and Rilke's death in 1926, the Duino Elegies were quickly recognized by critics and scholars as his most important work. (wikipedia.org)

About this title

From the Publisher

David Oswald (b. 1953) is finishing his training in analytical psychology at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zrich, Switzerland, where he has been living for the past eight years. Raised in Owatonna, Minnesota, he has degrees in German from the University of Kansas and Mathematics from the University of Minnesota.

From the Back Cover

Named for the Castle of Duino, on a rocky headland of the Adriatic, the Duino Elegies speaks in a voice that is both intimate and majestic on the mysteries of human life and our attempt, in the words of the translator, 'to use our self-consciousness to some advantage: to transcend, through art and the imagination, our self-deception and our fear.'

Edition details

• Publisher: Bibliotech Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1618952285
• ISBN 13: 9781618952288
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 38