Snag Your Copy New Poems, 1907 Written And Illustrated By Rainer Maria Rilke Formatted As Paperback

I too must come to make things not plastic, but written thingsrealities that emerge from handwork.
Somehow I too must discover the smallest basic element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of representation for everything.
"


The Last Judgment

So frightened, beyond their wildest fright,
disordered, often full of holes and loose,
they hunker down in the exploded furrows
of their field, not to be dissuaded

of their shrouds, which they have grown to like.

But angels come, and begin at once
to trickle oil into the driedout sockets
and to put in each ones armpits

whatever in the tumult of that life
its user managed not to desecrate
for it still has a bit of warmth there,

so that it wont chill the hand of God
when, up above, from either side he gently
grasps it, to feel if its still good.



Eve

Simply she stands at the cathedrals
great ascent, close to the rose window,
holding the apple in the applepose,
guiltlessguilty once and for all time

of the growing she gave birth to
when from the circle of the eternities
she lovingly went forth, to battle
her way through the earth like a young year.


Ah, shed have gladly lingered in that land
for just a bit longer, attending
to the animals insight and accord.


But since she found the man determined,
she went with him, aspiring after Death
and she had hardly got to know God.



Lunatics in the Garden
Dijon

The abandoned monastery still closes
around the courtyard, as though a wound were healing.

Those who live there now also enjoy recess
and take no part in the life outside.


Whatever could happen came and went,
Now they walk gladly with familiar paths,
and separate and come upon each other
as though they circled, willing, primitive.


Some of them, true, tend the spring beds there,
humble, wretched, down on their knees
but they have, when no one sees it,
a surreptitious, twisted

gesture for the tender early grass,
a testing, halfafraid caressing:
for that is friendly, and the roses red
may grow menacing and too intense

and may once again take them beyond
what their souls recognize and know.

But this can still be kept a secret:
how good the grass is and how soft.



Edward Snow Translation

This is an excellant collection of poems, the translations true to what Rilke wrote.
I have read snatches of some of these works but it is wonderful to have the whole collection Perhaps the following poem summarizes my first impression of Rilke's New Poems:

The Rose Window

In there: The lazy pacing of their paws
creates a stillness that's almost dizzying
and how, then, suddenly one of the cats
takes the gaze on it, that strays now and then,
violently into its great eye
The gaze that, as if seized by a whirlpool's
circle, for a little while swims
and then sinks and ceases to remember,
when this eye, which apparently rests,
opens and slams shut with a roaring
and tears it deep into the red blood :
Thus, long ago, out of the darkness
the cathedrals' great rose windows
seized a heart and tore it into God.


This translation above is slightly different from the one in the book page, but the poetic breakingthrough from the ordinary to the transcending moments.
Rose Window of a Cathedral may be exactly what Rilke's poems are about: an accessible pictorial narrative yet infused with a transcending glow, both beautiful and terrifying with the potential of a sudden pounce.


Quite a few of the poems are from biblical sources, The Olive Garden is an intensely human interpretation of Jesus s agony in Gethsemane, Many others are from GrecoRoman mythology such as “Leda” imagining the lure of being a swan for the rapist god Jupiter, and the long poems based on Euripidess Alcestis and Orpheus, which are reinterpreted from different viewpoint.


This reader is grateful for the readability of Rilkes poems with its rich reference to classic texts and symbols.
In some ways, Rilke reminded me of Cavafy's use of Homeric themes,

This collection is very enjoyable,

Por qué me empeño en leer poesía traducida This is a book I need to buy in order to read it many times over the course of many years.
I appreciated Robert Hass' foreword, and his advice for nonGerman speakers to read multiple translations of Rilke in order to understand his poetry.
This edition presents the poem in the original German with the rhyme scheme in the margin, and Joseph Cadora's rhymed English translation on the facing page, along with extensive notes in fact, there is a footnote to every poem.
Cadora must have spent an enormous amount of time with Rilke's poetry and correspondence in order to give us this book.
I expect my three star rating would go up with subsequent readings,

Here are a couple of the poems from the book:

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We could not ever know his wondrous head,
with eyes like apples that are ripening.

But the lamp of his torso is still glowing,
although it is turned down low, to spread

his glance, which abides and glimmers within.

Else the curve of the breast could not dazzle you,
not, in turning, could a smile play through
those loins to the center

of procreation.


Else this stone would seem stunted and defiled
and could not shimmer so, like a wild
beast's fur beneath the shoulder's sheer surface,

and it would not burst from its bounds, so rife
with light and starlike, for there is no place
that does not see you.
You must change your life,


The Death of the Beloved

Of death he knew only what all understand:
that it strikes us dumb and snatches us hence.

But as she, not ripped away from his hand,
no, but released so softly from his glance,

crossed to that place of unknown shadow,
and as he sensed that those on the other side
possessed the moon of her maiden smile now
and felt its ways and were gratified,

then the dead wore a familiar face,
so he felt as if related through her
to them all he let those others chatter

but did not heed them, and named that place
a land well located, a country most sweet.

And searched its many pathways for her feet,




A scrupulously translated and welledited collection of Rilke's New Poems, the most intensely creative period of the poet's life before the sonnets and the elegies.
I only took away one star because no GermanEnglish translation of this author's poetry will ever top the Stephen Mitchell translation for me.
We stand in awe when we look at Rilke's arta sentiment he echoes in his own work,

From "Archaic Torso of Apollo"

We could not ever know his wondrous head,
with eyes like apples that are ripening.

But the lamp of the torso is still glowing,
although it's turned down low, . .

.

and it would not burst from its bounds, so rife
with life and starlike, for there is no place
that does not see you.
You must change your life, I was struck by how much this poetry insists upon the gaze, the eye, and the way that the object demands the gaze or interrupts it.
Some of the poems were not so good, too complex and heavy, or too abstract some of that may be the act of translation, of course, but it is hard to know, and Rilke is of course famous both for his complexity and his abstraction.
But the majority of them were very good, and I must read it again in a few years to see what I make of it them they do have the weight of objects, as he wished, poems as created things with concrete reality to them despite being only in words.
.