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Leipzig: Im Insel-Verlag. 1923. 8vo. Original marbled paper-covered boards, green paper inlay lettered and framed in gilt to front board; pp. 63, [1]; light rubbing to extremities of boards, mild spotting and staining throughout (though less than usual with this volume), wrapper a touch frayed to upper edge of front panel; a near fine copy, in like dustwrapper; contemporary pencilled inscription to the title page preceding the Part I: "In memoriam Hiddensee. / R. B. / September 1923" (see below).An uncommonly bright, sharp copy of the first edition of Rilke's swan song, in a startlingly fresh example of the scarce dustwrapper, and with an intriguing contemporary inscription.Rilke's sequence of fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus came as a late and unexpected flowering after a period during which the poet was unable to write. "These strange Sonnets," Rilke wrote in the year of publication, "were not intended or expected; they appeared [.]. I could do nothing but surrender, purely and obediently, to the dictation of this inner impulse." He had begun writing the Duino Elegies in 1912, but a combination of private and personal circumstance (the approaching war uppermost) led to a depressive illness which postponed their completion for nearly a decade. In 1921, Werner Reinhart invited Rilke to stay at the Chateau de Muzot near Veyras in the Rhone Valley, and it was there that news arrived of the premature death of Wera Knoop, (1902-21), daughter of his friend Gerhard Ouckama Knoop and childhood playmate of his own daughter Ruth. She was nineteen years old. The news unexpectedly galvanised the poet, prompting the composition of the first twenty-six Sonnets to Orpheus (reportedly in three days), the completion of the long gestating Elegies, followed by the remaining twenty-nine Sonnets (the Elegies and Sonnets, according to Rudiger Gorner, constitute the "pinnacles of Rilke's poetic achievements, [and] twin peaks of German poetry in the twentieth century"). Famously allusive (and elusive), the figures of Orpheus and Eurydice permeate rather than dictate the sequence, the titular Orpheus acting "as an agent of transition and transformation" (Gorner) in poems where instability, metamorphosis, and the connection of seeming opposites - life/death; nature/culture - is paramount. Since the 1930s, and J. B. Leishman's first rendering of the Orpheus sonnets (published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at The Hogarth Press), they have led a parallel life in English, most recently in a series of resonant versions "after" Rilke's originals by the Scottish poet, Don Paterson, in 2006. Hiddensee, the Baltic island resort mentioned in the contemporary inscription in this copy, became a fashionable destination during the period of hyperinflation affecting the German mark between 1921 and 1923, when holidays abroad had become largely unaffordable. Hunich p. 92; Ritzer E46; Sarkowski 1357. See: Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Rilke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
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