But this account, despite Freedman's heroic attempt to weave a narrative out of the voluminous material on Rilke, is pretty dismaying. So we can't really blame Ralph Freedman, Rilke's latest biographer, for writing about his subject as if Rilke were just another infuriating narcissist who kept turning up at parties. We go back and try to relish modernism's extremist nose-thumbing at a depersonalizing modernity, and soon we feel as though we were celebrating the most disturbing qualities of contemporary life. Lawrence) private aesthetic pleasure as the highest value (Woolf) an ironic nihilism (Mann). We hear modernist leitmotifs casually whistled down all the highways and byways of everyday life: the defiant exaltation of violence (a theme of Gide and Malraux) salvation through sex (D.

Once, the modernists deployed dark energies of nihilism and unreason against the hated bourgeoisie now those same energies galvanize a commercial civilization that is voraciously accommodating to nihilism and unreason. Seventy years after Rilke's death, from leukemia in Switzerland, hastened when he pricked his finger on one of his beloved roses, we live in modernism's plastic aftermath. But his poetry is troubling (that last verse is a good example), and it's troubling to us in ways that a literary modernist like Rilke would not have counted on. My stab at translation yields up, I hope, a little of Rilke's muscular delicacy, his quality of being at the same time supple and ethereal, of molding abstract ideas palpably, like clay. These verses are from his late masterpiece, the Duino Elegies, which Rilke completed in 1922, the literary annus mirabilis that saw the publication of Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land. Isn't it time to free ourselves, with love, -from the one we love, and, trembling, endure. Don't lovers constantly tread over each other's boundaries, after mumbled vows about space,sustenance, and home?

when you raise yourselves and press your mouths together-drink upon drink: strange how each of you drinks your way past the other.īut whenever we mean one thing, wholeheartedly, another is right there, tugging on ourfeelings.

Rilke duino elegies deutsch