(I do have a CD of the elegies read by Jürgen Goslar so I can at least hear the rhythm of the German.) What is the real Rilke? I'll never know, since I don't know German. It's beautiful but, to me, never hits as hard as the MacIntyre did. The Stephen Mitchell has since become the standard translation. Since then I've acquired and read translations by Miranda (forgettable), Bly (which reminded me of a line from an old television show, Room 222, in which someone is complaining about the trend to update literature to suit the modern reader, that's like twisting Poe to "The raven said, 'No way, man'"), and Mitchell. I was ripe for a line like "for when we feel we evaporate" from the second elegy. At that time I was exploring the Tao and Buddhism, wandering around the north woods of Minnesota imagining myself merging with nature. It was around 1982-83 that I stumbled on the MacIntyre translation of the Duino Elegies. I wanted to learn everything, whether through experience or literature. I graduated from the somnolent state known as high school in 1975.
With their symbolic landscapes, prophetic proclamations, and unsettling intensity, these complex and haunting poems rank among the outstanding visionary works of the century. Written in a period of spiritual crisis between 19, the poems that compose the Duino Elegies are the ones most frequently identified with the Rilkean sensibility. In his translations, Snow adheres faithfully to the intent of Rilke's German while constructing nuanced, colloquial poems in English. Over the last fifteen years, in his two volumes of New Poems as well as in T he Book of Images and Uncollected Poems, Edward Snow has emerged as one of Rainer Maria Rilke's most able English-language interpreters. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure, and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains to destroy us.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
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