Bilingual Edition. Awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize 2013 for translation from German. In his powerful new translation, skilfully shaped into current English, Ian Crockatt succeeds in catching Rilke's blend of crafted sensuality and inward-focused spiritual searching, while his comprehensive introduction and notes to this selection are both informative and enlightening. Rainer Maria Rilke was described by another great poet, Maria Tsvetaeva as 'not a poet, but the embodiment of poetry'. His work spans the divide between Europe's turn-of-the-century decadence and its post First World War revolutionary modernism, always struggling to develop, to seek and reach beyond itself.
Author
A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923). People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language. His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety—themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets. His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.
