Rainer Maria Rilke

In 1903, a student at a military academy sent some of his verses to a well-known Austrian poet, requesting an assessment of their value. The older artist, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), replied to the novice in this series of letters—an amazing archive of remarkable insights into the ideas behind Rilke's greatest poetry. The ten letters reproduced here were written during an important stage in Rilke's artistic development, and they contain many of the themes that later appeared in his best works. The poet himself afterwards stated that his letters contained part of his creative genius, making this volume essential reading for scholars, poetry lovers, and anyone with an interest in Rilke, German poetry, or the creative impulse.

This representative selection from Rilke's large and extraordinary correspondence provides a kind of spiritual autobiography of the poet. The period here covered reflects all the great experiences of Rilke's early adult his difficult beginnings, his relationships with Lou Andreas-Salome and with his wife Clara, his two journeys to Russia, his contact with the Worpswede artists, the influence of Paris, the revelation of Cezanne. Many of the letters are psychologically revealing; many touch upon characteristic themes, or freshly transcribe experience that sooner or later passes into the poetry.

A collection of haunting, mystical poems of the night by the great Rainer Maria Rilke - most of which have never before been translated into English One night I held between my hands your face. The moon fell upon it. In 1916, Rainer Maria Rilke presented the writer Rudolf Kassner with a notebook, containing twenty-two poems, meticulously copied out in his own hand, which bore the title "Poems to Night." This cycle of poems which came about in an almost clandestine manner, are now thought to represent one of the key stages of this master poet's development. Never before translated into English, this collection brings together all Rilke's significant night poems in one volume.

For the past twenty-five years, North Point Press has been working with Edward Snow, “Rilke’s best contemporary translator” (Brian Phillips, The New Republic ), to bring into English Rilke’s major poetic works. The Poetry of Rilke —the single most comprehensive volume of Rilke’s German poetry ever to be published in English—is the culmination of this effort. With more than two hundred and fifty selected poems by Rilke, including complete translations of the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies , The Poetry of Rilke spans the arc of Rilke’s work, from the breakthrough poems of The Book of Hours to the visionary masterpieces written only weeks before his death. This landmark bilingual edition also contains all of Snow’s commentaries on Rilke, as well as an important new introduction by the award-winning poet Adam Zagajewski. The Poetry of Rilke will stand as the authoritative single-volume translation of Rilke into English for years to come.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a young German poet returned from a journey to Russia, where he had immersed himself in the spirituality he discovered there. He "received" a series of poems about which he did not speak for a long time - he considered them sacred, and different from anything else he ever had done and ever would do again. This poet saw the coming darkness of the century, and saw the struggle we would have in our relationship to the divine. The poet was Rainer Maria Rilke, and these love poems to God make up his Book of Hours.

One of the literary masterpieces of the century, this translation is now presented with facing-page German. To Rilke himself the Sonnets to Orpheus were "perhaps the most mysterious in the way they came up and entrusted themselves to me, the most enigmatic dictation I have ever held through and achieved; the whole first part was written down in a single breathless act of obedience, between the 2nd and 5th of February, without one word being doubtful or having to be changed." With facing-page German.

From the author of Letters to a Young Poet, one of the greatest letter collections of all time, comes a new selection of the great poet's writings to bereaved friends and acquaintances, reflecting on death and dying, providing comfort in a time of grief. Gleaned from Rainer Maria Rilke's voluminous, never-before-translated correspondence, this book collects the poet's best writings on grief and loss in one place for the first time. The result is a profound vision of the mourning process and a meditation on death's place in our lives, as well as a compilation of sensitive and moving expressions of consolation and condolence. Following the format of Rilke's classic, Letters to a Young Poet, this volume arranges a series of letters to Rilke's mourning friends, composed into a continuous, uninterrupted sequence, showcasing the full range of Rilke's thoughts on finding meaning and, perhaps, some form of comfort in the process of grieving.

While his old furniture rots in storage, Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris, with little but a library reader's card to distinguish him from the city's untouchables. Every person he sees seems to carry their death with them, and he thinks of the deaths, and ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which only he remains. The only novel by one of the greatest writers of poetry in German, the semi-autobiographical Notebooks is an uneasy, compelling and poetic book that anticipated Sartre and is full of passages of lyrical brilliance. Michael Hulse's new translation perfectly conveys the unsettling beauty of the original and is accompanied by an introduction on Rilke's life and the biographical and literary influences on the Notebooks. This edition also includes suggested further reading, a chronology, and notes.

"[This collection] says more about art than any other book I know...These letters distill for the reader the essence of what a painting truly is...The greatness of Cézanne could be conveyed only by an artist equally great."--HOWARD MOSS, The New Yorker Virtually every day in the fall of 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke returned to a Paris gallery to view a Cézanne exhibition. Nearly as frequently, he wrote dense and joyful letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, expressing his dismay before the paintings and his ensuing revelations about art and life. Rilke was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his New Poems. But Cézanne's impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay. Rilke's sense of kinship with Cézanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters -- passages from them appear verbatim in Rilke's great modernist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Letters on Cézanne is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art. "Rilke makes the feeling and views around great art real, weaving into his letters the indescribable thing that gives us beauty, truth, pleasure."--HELEN FRANKENTHALER, Art & Antiques "[These letters] are themselves extraordinarily peaceful and concentrated, seeping with the sense and recognition of Cézanne's colors, in nature as on canvas, colors which seem a part of Rilke himself, of the words and paper."--JOHN BAYLEY, The New York Review of Books

Born in 1875, the German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke published his first collection of poems in 1898 and went on to become renowned for his delicate depiction of the workings of the human heart. These translations by M.D. Herter Norton offer Rilke's work to the English-speaking world in an accurate, sensitive, modern version.

Rilke’s Book of Hours falls into three parts: The Book of Monkish Life (1899), The Book of Pilgrimage (1901), and The Book of Poverty and Death (1903). Although these poems were the work of Rilke’s youth, they contain the germ of his mature convictions. Written as spontaneously received prayers, they celebrate a God who is not the Creator of the Universe, but seems to be rather humanity itself, and, above all, that most intensely conscious part of humanity, the artist. This exquisite gift edition contains Babette Deutsch’s classic translations, which capture the rich harmony and suggestive imagery of the originals, allowing interpretations both religious and philosophical, and transporting the reader to new heights of inspiration and musicality.

Esta correspondencia constituye el testimonio de un encuentro singularísimo entre un joven poeta y un escultor consagrado de sesenta y un años, refleja la relación de dos figuras máximas de la poesía y del arte a finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX, Rainer Maria Rilke y Rodin.

Estas Cartas a un Joven Poeta, publicadas más de veinte años después de la muerte de su autor, fueron dirigidas por Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) a Franz Xaver Kappus, entre 1903 y 1906, desde los diversos lugares a donde le condujo su vida itinerante, resultado de acuciantes preocupaciones económicas y de una casi constante dependencia de sucesivos mecenazgos. Escritos en una época en la que Rilke iniciaba la transición desde una poesía ensoñadora e intimista a otra más cercana al mundo de la materia y de las formas, estos breves textos son también un documento revelador del ideario del poeta y de su concepción del mundo, desde su visión de la vocación y de la inspiración literarias hasta sus meditaciones sobre la soledad inherente a la tarea del creador.

(...)"Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht." (...)Das berühmteste Gedicht Rilkes, "Der Panther", erschien in Buchform erstmals 1907 in der Sammlung "Neue Gedichte".In der hier vorliegenden Neuausgabe sind sämtliche Werke der "Neuen Gedichte" ungekürzt enthalten.Rainer Maria Rilke.Der Panther (Gedichte).Enthält sämtliche Gedichte der Ausgabe "Neue Gedichte", Insel Verlag, Leipzig 1907.Neuausgabe, Göttingen 2019.LIWI Literatur- und Wissenschaftsverlag

Parallel German text and English translation. The influence and popularity of Rilke’s poetry in America have never been greater than they are today, more than fifty years after his death. Rilke is unquestionably the most significant and compelling poet of romantic transformation, of spiritual quest, that the twentieth century has known. His poems of ecstatic identification with the world exert a seemingly endless fascination for contemporary readers. In Stephen Mitchell’s versions, many readers feel that they have discovered an English rendering that captures the lyric intensity, fluency, and reach of Rilke’s poetry more accurately and convincingly than has ever been done before. Mr. Mitchell is impeccable in his adherence to Rilke’s text, to his formal music, and to the complexity of his thoughts; at the same time, his work has authority and power as poetry in its own right. Few translators of any poet have arrived at the delicate balance of fidelity and originality that Mr. Mitchell has brought off with seeming effortlessness. Originally published: New York : Random House, 1982.

Composed in 1899 when Rilke was only twenty-three, the interconnected tales of Stories of God were inspired by a trip to Russia the young poet had made the year previously. It is said that the vastness of the Russian landscape and the profound spirituality he perceived in the simple people he met led him to an experience of finding God in all things, and to the conviction that God seeks to be known by us as passionately as we might seek to know God. All the great themes of Rilke's later powerful and complex poetry can be found in the Stories of God , yet their charming, folktale-like quality has made them among the most accessible of Rilke's works, beloved by all ages.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his I'd be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure, and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying. -from "The First Elegy" Over the last fifteen years, in his two volumes of New Poems as well as in The Book of Images and Uncollected Poems , Edward Snow has emerged as one of Rainer Maria Rilke's most able English-language interpreters. In his translations, Snow adheres faithfully to the intent of Rilke's German while constructing nuanced, colloquial poems in English. Written in a period of spiritual crisis between 1912 and 1922, the poems that compose the Duino Elegies are the ones most frequently identified with the Rilkean sensibility. With their symbolic landscapes, prophetic proclamations, and unsettling intensity, these complex and haunting poems rank among the outstanding visionary works of the century.

This selection includes the original poems in German with their translations and commentary. Contents: I live my life -- I have many brothers -- We don't dare -- I love the dark hours -- You darkness, that I come from -- I have faith -- I am too alone -- You see, I want a lot -- Because One Man -- My life is not -- I find you -- And then that girl -- I can hardly believe -- This is my labor -- All of you undisturbed cities -- How many thousands -- Just as the watchman -- In this town -- Sometimes a man stands up -- The king of the world -- Already the ripening barberries -- It's possible -- And the great cities -- And where is he -- THe Way In -- Childhood -- From Childhood -- Sense of Something Coming -- Loneliness -- Human Being at Night -- Sunset -- The Solitary Person -- Autumn -- Storm -- The Neighbor -- Pont du Carrousel -- The Ashantis -- Evening in Skane -- Moving Forward -- October Day -- The Man Watching -- Title Poem -- The Song the Beggar Sings -- THe Songs the Blind Man Sings -- The Song the Drunkard Sings -- The songs the Widow Sings -- The Songs the Idiot Sings -- The Songs the Orphan Sings -- The Songs the Leper Sings -- The Panther -- The Swan -- Roman Countryside -- Leda -- Archaic Torso of Apollo -- The Solitary Man -- Buddha In side the Night -- "We Must Die Because We Have Known Them" -- Mourning -- Left Out to Die -- Again, Again -- On Music -- Imaginary Biography -- Fox Fire -- Just as the Winged Energy of Delight -- A Walk -- Palm -- For Erika -- A tree rising -- It was girl, really -- A god can do it -- O you lovers that are so gentle -- Don't bother about a stone -- Is he from our world -- To praise is the whole thing -- Where praise already is -- Only the man who has raised his strings -- You stone coffins of the ancient world.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry and letters have inspired countless readers around the world with their wisdom and insight into how we can be more than ourselves without recourse to religion, politics, or ideology: through the experiences of art and love. Gathered here for the first time in original translations are Rilke’s candid, piercing, and lyrical reflections on love—the experience he considered paramount for human existence but also, with the exception of death, the event for which we are least prepared. Selected from Rilke’s poetry and his vast correspondence, these passages present Rilke’s contemplations on falling in love, being in love, losing love, and the mystical ways in which love endures.

Rilke is one of the most widely read poets of the 20th century. In his poetry, Rilke addresses the problems of death, God, and "destructive time," and attempts to overcome and transform these problems into an indestructive inner world.