I found Rilke’s attention to transience and mutability resonant with the dharma, and I took solace in his lines praising immanence: to have once existed, / even if only once, to have been a part / of this earth-can never be taken back. Seem to need us, to put themselves in our care

The things of this world, these passing things, In the Ninth Elegy, after asking why we’re here on earth in the first place, Rilke writes:īut because just being here matters, because The book lived in my bag collecting dog-ears and underlines for the rest of the summer. I remember it clearly because I read for so long that I burned the back of my neck as the shadow of the tree I’d been lying under moved away with the shifting sun-and because the lines in the book felt like they’d been spoken directly into my chest. I lay in the grass, shirtsleeves rolled onto my shoulders, and read the whole book in an afternoon.

I purchased a copy at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland, Oregon, and then biked east over the Willamette River to Alberta Park.

With their symbolic landscapes, prophetic proclamations, and unsettling intensity, these complex and haunting poems rank among the outstanding visionary works of the century.I remember the day I first read the Duino Elegies of the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Written in a period of spiritual crisis between 19, the poems that compose the Duino Elegies are the ones most frequently identified with the Rilkean sensibility. In his translations, Snow adheres faithfully to the intent of Rilke's German while constructing nuanced, colloquial poems in English. 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.

For beauty is nothingīut the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure,Īnd we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains Orders? and even if one of them pressed me Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic

Rilke duino elegies deutsch