Customer Reviews

The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Over the years I have owned and read a number of translations of Rilke's verse. I find this superb volume translated by Stephen Mitchell to be both the best selection of his poetry and the finest translation. Take nearly any of the poems in this volume and set it beside a competing translation, and the Mitchell version is both more poetic and more in keeping with the spirit of Rilke.

This volume collections all of the Duino Elegies, and generous portions of the various collections, including a fair number of the Sonnets to Orpheus. For most, this will be the only edition of Rilke's verse that they will need.

These are some great, great poems. Apart from the Duino Elegies, I believe my favorites would include the amazing "Archaic Torso of Apollo," in which the poet becomes so entranced studying the statue that it proclaims to him in closing, "You must change your life." "The Panther" is without any question one of the most haunting poems of the twentieth century, with its building sense of some great revelation, only to end with the expected image plunging into the heart and disappearing. My favorite poem in the collection, however, may be one from the UNCOLLECTED POEMS, the amazing "You Who Never Arrived," in which the poet muses on all the occasions upon which he and his beloved never met (Rilke's belief was that we are destined never to meet our true love), but nevertheless perhaps came tantalizing close. For instance, he walks into a shop from which she has just left, where the "mirrors are still dizzy with your presence." He ends his musings, "Who knows? perhaps the same/bird echoed through both of us/yesterday, separate, in the evening . . . "

This is an essential volume for any lover of great poetry. I can't recommend this highly enough.

I bought this book along time ago, but it has remained on my shelf untouched until tonight because I knew that Rilke wrote in German and that I would be reading a translation which I thought my detract from the power and original intention of the poetry. But I decided to open it tonight out of curiosity after reading a few of the letters from Letters to a Young Poet and Rilke immediately became my favorite poet. Even when I don't understand what he is saying his poems carry an immediacy and a power which bring me close to tears. I have not read any other translations of his work so I am not qualified to comment on the quality of this translation, but if you like poetry I would definately suggest getting your hands on some Rilke!

One defintion of poetry is that it is untranslatable. This volume is, i think, sufficient proof that that is nonsense. One has, perhaps, the sense that one is hearing an ecstatic music through a partition, with one's ear pressed, so to speak, to the wall; but one is hearing the music nonetheless. It seems to me that, along with Proust and only a few others, Rilke is one of the few modern writers with a genuinely philosophical intelligence. Indeed, if one wanted a way into Heidegger, one could do worse than begin by a serious reading of the poetry and prose of Rilke, esp. his poetics of the "Thing" and of the "Open". Auden called Rilke the "Santa Claus of Loneliness". This is rather too disparaging. The correct designation, i think, would be a terrible lonely elation - something which connects him to that other Prague born writer, Franz Kafka.

Rilke is, among other things, a secular mystic who rams language up against the wall of the inexpressible. Give me Proust, Rilke and Kafka for my desert island and i'll be content (so long, of course, as i have a constant supply of freshly ground coffee.)

"You are not my favorite poet. That implies comparison. You are poetry itself." in a letter from Marina Tseteyeva to Rilke.

Since I do not speak German, I can speak neither to the accuracy of translation nor interpretation (realizing that they are separate concepts). But I can tell you that this keeps me coming back for more (so much so I have 2 copies, plus a hardback, which differs slightly in content). It's the sort of book that if I loan it, I'm astonished to get it back. And don't really mind.

Mitchell has included in his notes excerpts from diaries and letters which I otherwise would never have had the joy of knowing, nor insght into not only the heart of the poet, but the heart of God as well.

Mitchell also has the integrity to refrain from attempting to translate some works which, I believe, he would have otherwise loved to share. His rationale, from the intro to the "Notes" section, follows:
"Translating poems into equivalent formal patterns is to some extent a matter of luck, or grace, and this is especially true of rhymed poems. Rilke called rhyme "a goddess of secret and ancient coincidences" and said that "she is very capricious; one cannot summon or foresee her; she comes as happiness comes, hands filled with the achievement that is already in flower." Some of my favorite poems never got beyond a rough draft, because that sweet goddess refused to make even the briefest appearance."

This poetry is a love letter to life, no matter what an acedemic might say about the relative merits of the translation/ interpretation. Reading Rilke, I understand why Jung (I think it was Jung) said, "Everywhere I go, I find the poet is there before me." (or words to that effect) Enjoy.

I got this book before going to live in Germany for 3+ years to get a feel for the country, for the language. The lack of giving this 5-stars isn't so much for the translation of poetry (since I could only order a ziegersnitzel, book a zimmerfrei, and little else en deutsche), but simply that the writing hasn't drawn me back into it time and time again like the bilingual translation I have of Octavio Paz. Whether it's the poetry from the poet or the poetry from the translater, I'm not sure. With that said, there is some brilliant poetry here and Steven Mitchell being a poet himself puts it down faithfully with regard for the poet's voice. I wasn't under the impression that German could be a poetic language, but after being exposed to it and reading this book I'm moved to change my opinion. Here's some of the better lines: True singing is a different breath, about nothing. A gust inside the God. A wind. And the beauty of bilingual editions gives us Rilke's words as well: In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch. Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind.

I simply cannot imagine not owning this book. For less than the price of a cd, less than the price of a good meal, you can reward yourself with two things: (1) perhaps the finest example of German poetry (the book is bilingual) this side of Schiller, and (2) without a doubt the finest translation of Rilke, or probably any poet, you will ever encounter in English. Those are hefty words, but I can say no less about this magnificent book. I often find myself reading the English more than the German, the translations are so elegant. In its review of the volume, the New York Times Book Review said that "it is easy to feel that, if Rilke had written in English, he would have written in this English." I concur. Mitchell should have won a Pulitzer, or whatever one gets for translations, for this book. I am only a cautious fan of his Tao Te Ching translation, though I know that he says up front that he is interpreting more than translating in that work (and with the TTC you can do that). But this book is superlative. Often, translators of poetry feel that they have to re-write the poem in order to get der Sinn, and Mitchell, himself a poet, could have done that easily and given us a nice book (even bad Rilke by a good translator is better than no Rilke at all). Mitchell did not do that; he very simply gave us Rilke, Rilke's poems, in English. They say what Rilke said, I don't know how else to say that. Mitchell wisely does not try to reproduce Rilke's rhyme schemes, though he does seem to match Rilke's alliterations note for note. This is not a flaw in the translations by any means; complex, artful, infuriating German sentence structure being what it is, I cannot imagine successfully duplicating the rhymes and still making a book as beautiful as the one Mitchell has made. German is a forbidding, precise, and multi-layered language, a daily Sprechstimme that is a far cry from the crude throat noises one often hears from people who wouldn't know German if it bit them (they are probably thinking of French, a terribly gutteral tongue that they likely haven't heard either). But, thankfully, Mitchell is not translating French (much; there are a few sketches included in French), and anyway everyone knows that Merwin is the past master at that. Baudelaire is about the only poet I can stand to read in French, anyway, maybe Rimbaud (Paul Schmidt's Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works is a masterful translation, the best on the market in English, and Rimbaud is difficult in French).

To conclude, Mitchell's poems in this volume aren't translations of Rilke's poems, so much as they are Rilke's poems. Let me give one example, the first stanza of the first of the Sonnetts to Orpheus,in German then in English:

Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung! / O Orpheus singt! O hoher Baum im Ohr! / Und alles schweig. Doch selbst in der Verschweigung / ging neuer Anfang, Wink und Wandlung vor.

Now, the same thing, in English:

A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence! / O Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear! / And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence / a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

This is what you want in a translation.

(By the way, if you are a student of any level interested in German poetry, you have to own this book, if just for the vocabulary (in case you are a heathen and cannot buy it for the sake of sheer joy).

I've read a few books of Rilke's poetry, but this is the one that made me love his work. I've compared Mitchell's translations with several others, including William H. Gass's recent "Reading Rilke" and no other translation comes close to Mitchell's in finding the power in Rilke's words. This is a book anyone with ANY interest in poetry must have.

stephen mitchell is a good translator. rilke is better, though

This is a luminous and remarkable book--it brings Rilke alive with integrity and poetic clarity to those of us who don't know German, and had previously lost what is most magical and fresh about this unusual, raw, Romantic poet. I am a poet and poetry professor at a San Francisco area college, which doesn't suggest I know everything but it hints that I've read a few other poetry books--and this is my very favorite one. Thank you Stephen Mitchell.

This is a good compelation of his works. In addition I appreciated that they included the original German text. Poetry "looses something in the translation." It is great for individuals learning German as it can be intimidating to read a German text. Therefore, you get the meaning of the text and the flow and beauty of a language that most people do not consider a lyracal language. Rilke is one of the greatest German poets and this is one of the best complations I have seen (and I lived in Germany) A must have for poetry lovers.