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The Best of Rilke
A distinguished poet-translator presents faithful verse translations of 72 poems in a bilingual edition with commentary and biographical material.
Rainer Maria Rilke’s best poems are finally available in translations so faithful yet free flowing that a reader forgets they were not originally written in English. Applying the same principle of “form-true” rendering that earned him the Bollingen Prize for his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, poet-translator Walter Arndt boldly claims to reproduce in English for the first time the prosodic identity of Rilke’s finest rhymed poems.
Rainer Maria Rilke’s best poems are finally available in translations so faithful yet free flowing that a reader forgets they were not originally written in English. Applying the same principle of “form-true” rendering that earned him the Bollingen Prize for his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, poet-translator Walter Arndt boldly claims to reproduce in English for the first time the prosodic identity of Rilke’s finest rhymed poems.
187 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1989
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About the author
Rainer Maria Rilke
1,548 books7,004 followersA 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 31, 2007
RILKE IS JOKES.
December 10, 2009
How can you quibble with such perfection as "The Swan"? The way Rilke evokes the gait of the bird with his words alone...
November 4, 2021
I was a bit disappointed with this book. Maybe it was the translation? I've heard such amazing things about Rilke that I won't give up just yet. It was cool that the publisher included the original poems in German.
November 17, 2023
Gah! I adore him! My favorite poet and writer!
June 15, 2024
Arndt’s inclusion of alternate translations and accompanying commentary was helpful not only in experiencing Rilke’s work but in understanding the art and nuance of translating poetry.
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December 29, 2014I'll never think of Rilke's poems about the poor and otherwise miserable the same way again: “To the twentieth-century reader of normal sensibility and social compassion all but the American ”yuppy” of the 1980s and the generations of plutocrats who bred him the gallery of “insulted and injured” (Dostoevsky) presented in Rilke’s cycle Voices would be an obvious and powerful, if understated, argument for social remedy and reform. Rilke, on the other hand, arch-reactionary in these matters, saw an esthetic rightness in poverty and inequality, decried interference with established misery for betterment’s sake, and subscribed to the medieval motto “God bless the squire and his relations, and keep us in our proper stations.” This callous Bourbon cast of mind, suspected by few of his friends and probably connected with his lifelong craving for aristocratic roots and ties, is discernible already in relatively early works like the Prague tales, Stories of Our Lord, and Of Poverty and of Death. Answering a journalistic questionnaire thirty years later, far from revising his relish of inequality, he kneaded his sentiments into a miniature social theory:
people would be mistaken to allocate any of my strivings to this category [of social concern]. An element of human sympathy, of fraternal feeling comes naturally to me, to be sure, and must be rooted in my being… But what totally distinguishes such a cheerful and natural attention from “social concern,” as people understand it, is a complete disinclination, even distaste, for changing anyone’s situation, or, as the saying goes, improve it. No one’s situation in the world is such that it could not be of peculiar benefit to his soul. If at some point I was able to cast the imaginary voices of the dwarf or the beggar into the mould of my heart, the metal of this casting was not derived from the wish that the dwarf’s or the beggar’s lot might be lightened; on the contrary, only exaltation of their incomparable fates enabled the poet, in his abrupt resolve to treat them, to be veracious and thorough, and he had to fear and decline nothing more than a corrected world in which the dwarves are elongated and the beggars enriched. The god of plenitude sees to it that these variants do not cease, and it would be the shallowest of interpretations were one to take the poet’s enjoyment of this suffering multiplicity for an esthetic alibi…”
people would be mistaken to allocate any of my strivings to this category [of social concern]. An element of human sympathy, of fraternal feeling comes naturally to me, to be sure, and must be rooted in my being… But what totally distinguishes such a cheerful and natural attention from “social concern,” as people understand it, is a complete disinclination, even distaste, for changing anyone’s situation, or, as the saying goes, improve it. No one’s situation in the world is such that it could not be of peculiar benefit to his soul. If at some point I was able to cast the imaginary voices of the dwarf or the beggar into the mould of my heart, the metal of this casting was not derived from the wish that the dwarf’s or the beggar’s lot might be lightened; on the contrary, only exaltation of their incomparable fates enabled the poet, in his abrupt resolve to treat them, to be veracious and thorough, and he had to fear and decline nothing more than a corrected world in which the dwarves are elongated and the beggars enriched. The god of plenitude sees to it that these variants do not cease, and it would be the shallowest of interpretations were one to take the poet’s enjoyment of this suffering multiplicity for an esthetic alibi…”
March 22, 2014
It's been a while since I had read poetry books before my departure to Costa Rica, and all of sudden I've found the e-pub file of Rilke on my repository folders when I wanted to cleaned up some files. Hence, I decided to spent some of my time and I managed to finish this wonderful translation made by Walter Arndt.
Well, long story short, this selection is a good one, there are some notes that became my favorite ones, inter alia Elegy for Marina Tsvetaeva, A New Year's, and Intimation of Reality. For the latter, I will excerpt it here:
"We have no clue to this departed state,
It does not share with us. We feel no task
To tender admiration, love, or hate
To Death, with whom the fretful stylized mask
Of tragedy so oddly misagrees.
The world is yet so full of parts we play.
While we still worry if we pleased that day,
Death also plays, although he does not please.
But when you left, there fell into the scene
A ray of realness through the very gap
By which you left us: greenness of true green,
Natural sunshine, forest real with sap.
We act, at times lay gestures by, recite
Things studied anxiously and hard by rote,
But of your being, now remote and quite
So that, swept up in it for a short stint,
We do real life, not thinking of applause."
(p. 79 -80).
I think I have to say a billion thanks to Walter Arndt for his brilliant translation too!
Well, long story short, this selection is a good one, there are some notes that became my favorite ones, inter alia Elegy for Marina Tsvetaeva, A New Year's, and Intimation of Reality. For the latter, I will excerpt it here:
"We have no clue to this departed state,
It does not share with us. We feel no task
To tender admiration, love, or hate
To Death, with whom the fretful stylized mask
Of tragedy so oddly misagrees.
The world is yet so full of parts we play.
While we still worry if we pleased that day,
Death also plays, although he does not please.
But when you left, there fell into the scene
A ray of realness through the very gap
By which you left us: greenness of true green,
Natural sunshine, forest real with sap.
We act, at times lay gestures by, recite
Things studied anxiously and hard by rote,
But of your being, now remote and quite
So that, swept up in it for a short stint,
We do real life, not thinking of applause."
(p. 79 -80).
I think I have to say a billion thanks to Walter Arndt for his brilliant translation too!
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September 4, 2011Rilke is one of the most amazing poets, no... writers, to ever have put pen to paper. I was first introduced to his brilliancy by Maggie Stiefvater's, Wolves of Mercy Falls series, with her charater Sam, and since then I have become infatuated.
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August 11, 2008I don't know why I've heard this guy's name so much. His poems do nothing for me! Pretty boring stuff.
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November 21, 2009None
March 15, 2014
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews