The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Read The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Online
Authors: Rainer Maria Rilke
Vintage International Edition, March 1989
Introduction copyright © 1982 by Robert Hass
Copyright © 1980, 1981, 1982 by Stephen Mitchell
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States by Random House, Inc., with the cooperation of Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, W. Germany, in 1982.
Some of these translations first appeared in the following periodicals:
American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, New York Review of Books, Occident, Paris Review, The Ten Directions, Threepenny Review, Zero.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Bechtle Verlag (Munich): Excerpts from Rainer Maria Rilke’s
Briefwechsel mit Benvenuta
, edited by Magda von Hattingberg
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.: “Sometimes a man stands up” (
this page
) from
Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke.
A Translation from the German and Commentary by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875–1926.
The selected poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Reprint.
Originally published: New York:
Random House, 1982.
English and German.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. Mitchell, Stephen. II. Title.
[
PT
2635.165
A
2525 1984] 831’.912 83-47799
Print ISBN: 978-0-679-72201-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-78754-5
v3.1
To Robert L. Mitchell
[Straining so hard against the strength of night]
‘We Must Die Because We Have Known Them’
[As once the wingèd energy of delight]
[What birds plunge through is not the intimate space]
[World was in the face of the beloved]
[Ach, aber mit Versen ist so wenig getan]
[Ich liege in meinem Bett, fünf Treppen hoch]
[Da saß ich an deinen Büchern]
[So angestrengt wider die starke Nacht]
>Man Muss Sterben Weil Man Sie Kennt<
In this eBook edition of
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
, the title of each poem contains a hyperlink that allows you to navigate back and forth between the English translation and the original German text.
There is a link labeled “Notes” on the initial page of each section that navigates to the pertinent notes for poems contained in that section. Each poem title in the Notes section links back to the English translation of the poem.
Last fall, in Paris, a friend promised to take me to the café, not far from Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, where Rilke was said to have breakfasted in the early years of the century when he was working as Rodin’s secretary. I was glad for the pilgrimage because, of all poets, Rilke is the hardest to locate in a place. He was born a year after Robert Frost, in 1875, a little too soon to be a young modernist, and the dissimilarity between his work and Frost’s is so great that the fact does not help to anchor for me a sense of his life. The house where he had lived in Prague as a child cannot be seen; it was destroyed during the war. Besides, Prague—“that, God forgive me, miserable city of subordinate existences,” he had written—seemed to explain very little. In his childhood, it was the capital of Bohemia. Rilke’s family belonged to the German-speaking minority that formed the city’s professional class in those years. He was insulted once to be called a German, and, when the speaker corrected himself, “I meant, Austrian,” Rilke said, “Not at all. In 1866, when the Austrians entered Prague, my parents shut their windows.” He had a lifelong sense of his own homelessness.