Duino Elegies

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic"
"orders? and even if one of them pressed me"
"suddenly to his heart: 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 T"he 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.
Edward Snow has been translating the poetry of Rilke for over a decade, work for which he has received an Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets (twice), and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Snow is a professor of English at Rice University and is also the author of "A Study of Vermeer" and "Inside Breughel."
Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and traveled throughout Europe for much of his adult life, returning frequently to Paris. There he came under the influence of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and produced much of his finest verse, most notably the two volumes of "New Poems" as well as the great modernist novel "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." Among his other books of poems are "The Book of Images" and "The Book of Hours." He lived the last years of his life in Switzerland, where he completed his two poetic masterworks, the "Duino Elegies" and "Sonnets to Orpheus." He died of leukemia in December 1926.
Begun in a period of spiritual crisis in 1912, and completed in a second such creative burst in 1922, this collection of complex, symbolic, and haunting lyrics is considered Rilke's signature achievement. Snow, widely seen as the finest Rilke translator of his generation, here continues his unprecedented effort to render the great poet's masterworks in English. The ten poems in the "Duino Elegies" are among the most visionary writings of the twentieth century--and in this new bilingual translation (with the German and English on facing pages) both scholars and general readers will find the language uniformly clear, flexible, and accurate.
"I have been engrossed in English versions of the "Duino Elegies" for years, and Snow's is by far the most radiant and, as far as I can tell, the most faithful . . . Reading this rendition provided new revelations into Rilke's symbolic landscapes of art, death, love, and time."--Frederic Koeppel, "The Memphis Commercial Appeal"
"This translation of the "Elegies" is the finest that I have ever read . . . Snow has gradually been building a reputation as Rilke's best contemporary translator in English. His version of the "Elegies" should cement that reputation, and elevate it."--Brian Phillips, "The New Republic"