Duino Elegies

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

The Duino Elegies (German: Duineser Elegien) are a collection of ten elegies written by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Rilke, who is "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets," began writing the elegies in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (nee Princess Marie zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst) (1855-1934) at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. The poems were dedicated to the Princess upon their publication in 1923. During this period, the elegies languished incomplete as Rilke suffered frequently from severe depression—some of which was caused by the events of World War I and his conscripted military service. Aside from one brief episode of writing in 1915, Rilke did not return to the work until a few years after the war ended. With a sudden, renewed inspiration—writing in a frantic pace he described as "a savage creative storm"—he completed the collection in February 1922 while staying at Château de Muzot in Veyras, in Switzerland's Rhone Valley.

The Duino Elegies are intensely religious, mystical poems that weigh beauty and existential suffering. Beauty is said to be "nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure / and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us."

The poems employ a rich symbolism of angels and salvation but not in keeping with typical Christian intrepretations. Rilke begins the first elegy in an invocation of philsophical despair, asking: "Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?" (trans. "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the heirarchies of angels?"), and later declares that "every angel is terrifying."

Writing and publication history

Duino Castle near Trieste, Italy, was where Rilke began writing the Duino Elegies in 1912--recounting that he heard the famous first line as a voice in the wind while walking along the cliffs and that he wrote it quickly in his notebook.

Muzot Castle in Veyras, Switzerland, was where Rilke completed writing the Duino Elegies in "a savage creative storm" in February 1922.

Rilke had been visiting Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis in the Duino castle near Trieste in January 1912 and, according to his own recounting, had taken a stroll near the castle, atop the steep cliffs that dropped down to the beach.

Rilke said later he had heard a voice calling to him as he walked near the cliffs, and he had used its words as the opening of the first Elegy: "Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?" (Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the heirarchies of angels?).

A cycle of major poems had been in Rilke's mind already before this moment of inspiration, and within days he produced the first two elegies and some fragments which would find their way into the others, including the opening section of the tenth. After this, inspiration for the cycle stopped abruptly and could not be recaptured, although he continued with other poetic drafts.

The completion of the elegies was delayed by Rilke's battle with depression, and also by the First World War which shook the foundations of his beliefs and his way of life; the German-speaking aristocracy among which he had moved and his native country, the Austrian Empire, were among the prime casualties of the war. The cycle was completed only in February 1922, when Rilke was staying at the Muzot castle in Veyras, Rhone Valley, Switzerland. It was also during this time that Rilke wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke described the sudden return of inspiration in a letter at this time as "a savage creative storm", and claimed that he had dropped meals because the poetic spirit took hold of him for many hours on end, but his host denied that he had ever appeared disorderly or untidy, or missed out on a meal, and the few surviving manuscript drafts do not look as if written in frantic haste.

Translations

Rilke's Duino Elegies are likely his most popular works in the English-speaking world, and have been translated over twenty times since they were first published in England with a translation by Vita Sackville-West in 1931, and in the United States with a translation by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender in 1939.

• Duineser Elegien: Elegies from the Castle of Duino, trans. Vita Sackville-West (Hogarth Press, London, 1931)
• Duino Elegies, trans. J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (W. W. Norton, New York, 1939)
• Duino Elegies, trans. Jessie Lemont (Fine Editions Press, New York, 1945)
• Duineser Elegien: The Elegies of Duino, trans. Nora Wydenbruck (Amandus, Vienna, 1948
• Duinesian Elegies, trans. Elaine E. Boney (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1975)
• Duino Elegies, trans. David Young (W. W. Norton, New York, 1978) ISBN 0-393-30931-2
• Duino Elegies, trans. Gary Miranda (Azul Editions, Falls Church, VA, 1996) ISBN 885214-07-3
• Duino Elegies, trans. Robert Hunter w/ block prints by Mareen Hunter (Hulogosi Press, 1989))
• Duino Elegies trans. Stephen Cohn (Carcanet Press, 1989) ISBN 978-0-85635-837-1
• Duino-Elegieë trans. H.J. Pieterse from German to Afrikaans (Protea, Pretoria, 2007) ISBN 978-1-86919-151-1
• Duino Elegies, trans. Martyn Crucefix (Enitharmon Press, London, 2008)

References

Further reading

• Baron, Frank; Dick, Ernst S.; and Maurer, Warren R. (editors). Rainer Maria Rilke: The Alchemy of Alienation. (Regents Press of Kansas, 1980).
• Gass, William H. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
• Graff, W. L. Rainer Maria Rilke: Creative Anguish of a Modern Poet. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956).
• Guardini, Romano; (trans. by Knight, K.G.). Rilke's "Duino Elegies": An Interpretation (Henry Regnery, 1961).
• Komar, Kathleen L. Transcending Angels: Rainer Maria Rilke's "Duino Elegies". (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).

External links

• The Duino Elegies in German
• The Duino Elegies in English. Translated by A.S. Kline
• The Duino Elegies in English. Translated by S.M. Cohn