7/5/2023 0 Comments Rainer maria rilke elegies![]() ![]() Seventy years after Rilke's death, from leukemia in Switzerland, hastened when he pricked his finger on one of his beloved roses, we live in modernism's plastic aftermath. But his poetry is troubling (that last verse is a good example), and it's troubling to us in ways that a literary modernist like Rilke would not have counted on. My stab at translation yields up, I hope, a little of Rilke's muscular delicacy, his quality of being at the same time supple and ethereal, of molding abstract ideas palpably, like clay. These verses are from his late masterpiece, the Duino Elegies, which Rilke completed in 1922, the literary annus mirabilis that saw the publication of Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land. ![]() Isn't it time to free ourselves, with love, -from the one we love, and, trembling, endure. ![]() Don't lovers constantly tread over each other's boundaries, after mumbled vows about space,sustenance, and home? when you raise yourselves and press your mouths together-drink upon drink: strange how each of you drinks your way past the other.īut whenever we mean one thing, wholeheartedly, another is right there, tugging on ourfeelings. ![]()
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