The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke
Though renowned for his major works written in German, Rainer Maria Rilke (18751926) is still to be discovered as the author of a sizable oeuvre of French poems. To this day, the majority of his worldwide readership focuses on the Duino Elegies, which he struggled with for ten years (19121922), and Sonnets to Orpheus, a sequence he wrote in eighteen days (1922). The great difference in the length of time he needed to complete these works arose from the following. Nourished by his numerous travels and his vision of Europe as his cultural homeland, his creative powers collapsed under the conditions imposed by World War 1, and were not restored until 1921/22 when he found a secluded domicile in the Swiss Valais. Around 1960, a new generation of readers rediscovered his New Poems (1907/08) and his novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), both of which he wrote while living in Paris. But two significant parts of his work continued to be relatively unknown: his German poems dating from the last years of his life, and some 400 French poems of which all but 28 were written after 1922. Owing to Poulin's dedicated work of translation, a fivevolume series of Rilke's French poems has appeared since 1979. In the new bilingual edition, this series is reprinted, together with a miscellany of occasional poems published for the first time. Though not as rich in semantic and syntactical finesse as the best of his German poetry, Rilke's French poems are refined and subtle. Some of them mirror his exuberance and his relief that once again he was able to write, while in others there lingers a trace of persistent sadness, as in the verses addressed to a rose: "You are left / with us now, sharing, / desperately, this life, this life / where you don't belong." Poulin's English versions capture the essence of the originals, and they are also graceful renditions of their rhythms. The convenience of finding all of Rilke's French poems in one book adds to the attractiveness of this new collection. --FromIndependent Publisher