Duino Elegies, Deluxe Edition: The original English translation of Rilke's landmark poetry cycle, by Vita and Edward Sackville-West - reissued for the first time in 90 years

by Rainer Maria Rilke, Vita Sackville-West (Translator), Edward Sackville-West (Translator), Lesley Chamberlain (Introduction), Vita Sackville-West (Afterword)

Overview

The first-ever English translation of Rilke’s landmark poetry cycle, by Vita and Edward Sackville-West ­– reissued for the first time in 90 years

In 1931, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published a small run of a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, in English translation by the writers Vita and Edward Sackville-West. This marked the English debut of Rilke’s masterpiece, which would eventually be rendered in English over 20 times, influencing countless poets, musicians and artists across the English-speaking world.

Published for the first time in 90 years, the Sackville-Wests’ translation is both a fascinating historical document and a magnificent blank-verse rendering of Rilke’s poetry cycle. Featuring a new introduction from critic Lesley Chamberlain, this reissue casts one of European literature’s great masterpieces in fresh light.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782277866
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	02/22/2022
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	364 KB

About the Author

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), considered one of the greatest German-language writers, published his first collection of verse in 1894, while he was still at school, and continued to write poetry and prose throughout his life, becoming a master of both. Rilke died in Switzerland in 1926. Vita Sackville-West was an English novelist, poet and garden designer. Born to an artistocratic family, she became a prolific and successful author, publishing many novels and a dozen volumes of poetry. Sackville-West had a long, intense relationship with Virginia Woolf, and was the main inspiration for the titular character in Woolf's Orlando. Edward Sackville-West was an English novelist and music critic who, in his later years, became a member of the British House of Lords.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION
When he died in 1926 Rainer Maria Rilke was the greatest
poet in German. His reinvention of the lyric language
had made the age-old themes of love, death and solitude
strange and enchanting, and brought him readers all over
Europe and across the United States. His translators into
English met him, and his translator into Polish corresponded
with him personally. Publishers clamoured to
bring out his work, including the Duino Elegies, which was
one of two final collections he published in his lifetime.
Born in Prague, then still part of the Austrian Empire,
in 1875, Rilke led a difficult life. From 1901 he was married,
with a child, but for the rest of his career he moved
from rented address to address for the sake of his work.
He was slight, mostly very short of money and worried
about his health. On and off for many years he lived in
Paris, but when that city exhausted him he travelled to
quiet spots elsewhere in Europe. Once he went to Egypt.
Invitations from wealthy well-wishers to stay in gentler
circumstances were always welcome, and one of those refuges
offered to him was the castle at Duino, on the Italian
Adriatic coast near Trieste.
It belonged to the princely German Thurn und Taxis
family, and after Christmas 1911 they left Rilke in solitude
to practise his art in their bleak fortress, with just a couple
of servants in tow. Filling his first days alone with correspondence
and walks—he wrote many letters, which have
also become part of his legacy—he suddenly found his
mark, and by mid-February 1912 the first two of the ten
Duino Elegies were written, and a third begun. It is because
Rilke didn’t complete the cycle until 1922 (by which time
he was staying in another castle) that the Elegies have come
to be thought of as a late work and the culmination of
his career. But they weave and develop many themes that
preoccupied him for more than twenty years.

The opening lines are famous:
Who would give ear, among the angelic host,
Were I to cry aloud? And even if one
Amongst them took me swiftly to his heart,
I should dissolve before his strength of being.
For beauty’s nothing but the birth of terror,
Which we endure but barely, and, enduring,
Must wonder at it, in that it disdains
To compass our destruction. Every angel

Is terrible.
Yet these well-known lines are relatively unfamiliar in the
1931 version by Edward and Vita Sackville-West. Though
the Sackville-Wests were the first to publish a complete
English translation,1 their book soon disappeared from
currency, which the evident quality on display here shows
to have been a mistake.