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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.
