Features April 2010
Teaching a dumpling to dance
On The Poetry of Rilke: Bilingual Edition, translated by Edward Snow.
In his greatest poems, and especially in the Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke lodged wide extremes of feeling in chilly but resonant abstractions. His most memorable lines arrive amid a veritable retinue of universals. Autumn, Loneliness, the Beloved, along with other cloudy presences, populate his verse; it is rarely, if ever, this autumn or my loneliness or a remembered lover with a definite address. Such particulars didn’t much interest him—he was an elegist of essences. In a lesser poet, this practice would have fogged the verse intolerably.
But Rilke knew how to make the loftiest abstractions pulse with expectancy. In this he was abetted by the German language. German likes nothing better than to couple dodgy antinomies in precarious compounds; how satisfying to be able to toss off such a dense phrase as the “Jetzt-Spitze im Zeitverfluá,”...
A Message from the Editors
Support our crucial work and join us in strengthening the bonds of civilization.
Your donation sustains our efforts to inspire joyous rediscoveries.
