“Rilke’s late work (including Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus and the last, short poems) is diaphanous and subtle, an urgent and suggestive record of the soul’s darkest fertile places - perhaps the most haunting such record we have in all of poetry. Robert Fagles, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, and translator of best-selling editions of Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles Good has heard and obeyed Pound’s rallying-cry of ‘Make it new!’ - and now he offers to restore us, as Rilke would restore us, through the poise and passion of his language.” Fresh in their English rhymes and cadences, fresh as Rilke in transforming elegy into eulogy, sorrow into consolation, and the unforgiving world around us into a place where we can recreate ourselves. “Graham Good’s translations of Rilke read like fresh, original poems. His versions represent the meanings and echo the sound patterns of the original within fluid and readable English verse, while the introduction and detailed commentary elucidate the contexts, themes and allusions to help make Rilke’s late poetry accessible to contemporary poetry lovers and spiritual seekers.Ĭlick here to read an excerpt from Rilke’s Late Poetry. Graham Good’s edition is the first to combine translations of all three into a single volume. These last poems constitute a kind of third testament, along with the Elegies and Sonnets.

The third part of the late poetry consists of the less known brief lyrics Rilke wrote in the five years prior to his death in December 1926. This is dedicated to Orpheus, the mythic singer and lyre player, who becomes a symbol for Rilke of the acceptance of transience in life and transformation in art. The ten long poems grapple with the issue of how the human condition and the role of art have altered in the modern era, with the decline of religion and the acceleration of technology.ġ922 also saw the unexpected birth and completion of a new work, The Sonnets to Orpheus, a cycle of 55 sonnets giving lyrical expression to the philosophical insights gained in the Elegies. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, Duino Elegies ranks with them as a classic of literary Modernism and as an inquiry into the spiritual crisis of modernity. The late poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the summits of European poetry in the twentieth century. Rainer Maria Rilke, Poetry, Translation.Rilke’s Late Poetry Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus and Selected Last Poems Translated and with an Introduction and Commentary by Graham Good

Rilke elegies