Poems to Night, Rainer Rilke [classic book list .txt] 📗

twelve years saw Rilke travelling not only widely within Germany and Austria but also making protracted visits to Italy, France, Spain and Egypt. The experiences drawn from these destinations fed into his evolving poetry. In 1905 The Book of Hours was published, followed in 1907 by New Poems, and finally, after six years of labour, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in 1910, the great prose work which gave full expression to the poet’s spiritual struggle to maintain a solitary existence within Baudelaire’s “fourmillante cité”. Rilke would continue to travel throughout his lifetime; most extensively to Italy, Spain and Egypt, but Paris was always the endlessly giving refuge of his life, the engine house and hub from which all else radiated and the required place where the trials enacted with his inner self served to engender a new style of lyrical poetry. But when war broke out in 1914, Rilke was obliged to abandon the French capital for Munich. His possessions were later confiscated from his apartment on the rue Campagne Première by the French authorities; valuable manuscripts and books were never recovered. Moving between Berlin, Vienna and Munich, Rilke suffered the dismal upheaval of war, and the severance of his concentration. But in 1915 he managed to write the fourth Duino elegy and published Die Fünf Gesänge (Five Songs). In 1916 Rilke worked as a clerk in the war archive and performed military service in Vienna. In this year midway through the war, he presented Rudolf Kassner with the notebook containing the twenty-two poems of the Poems to Night. At the midpoint of 1919 Rilke was living in Munich and left the city for a tour of Swiss cities and the alpine region of the Engadine. The next two years saw the poet exploring Bern, Geneva, Locarno, Basel and finally Sion and Sierre. The still-undiscovered canton of Valais captured his heart; it recalled Provence. Seeking a safe harbour, from July 1921 he took up residence in his final refuge, the medieval tower of Château de Muzot above Sierre. 1922 proved an industrious year. Rilke finished the long-running Duino Elegies and created in a matter of weeks the Sonnets to Orpheus. He completed his translations of Valéry’s poems and also wrote Brief des jungen Arbeiters (Letter to a Young Labourer), whose “Monsieur V” clearly refers to the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916). At the end of 1923 Rilke, suffering an unnamed malady, visited the sanatorium of Val-Mont sur Territet for the first of several residences. In 1924 he produced a wealth of poems in French, including the sequences Vergers (Orchards), Les Quatrains Valaisans (The Valais Quatrains) and Les Roses (The Roses). In 1925 Rilke was back for a long residence in Paris, but by the end of the year he was ominously reinstalled in Val-Mont. Diagnosed with incurable leukaemia, Rilke, refusing all palliative care, died “his own death” at the sanatorium on 29th December 1926. On 2nd January 1927, Rilke was buried at his own request in the nearby churchyard of Raron. His chosen epitaph reads: “Rose, oh pure contradiction, to be no one’s sleep under so many lids.”

Will Stone

Will Stone is a writer, poet and literary translator of Franco-Belgian, French and German literature. His first poetry collection, Glaciation (Salt, 2007), won the International Glen Dimplex Award for poetry in 2008. Shearsman Books published his most recent collection, The Sleepwalkers, in 2016 and will publish his fourth collection in 2020. Will’s translations include Les Chimères by Gérard de Nerval (Menard, 1999), To the Silenced: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl (Arc, 2005), Emile Verhaeren: Poems (Arc, 2013), Georges Rodenbach: Poems (Arc, 2017) and Friedrich Hölderlin’s Life, Poetry and Madness by Wilhelm Waiblinger (Hesperus, 2018). His translations of Stefan Zweig with Pushkin Press include Montaigne (2015) and Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink (2016). Pushkin also published his translation of The Art of the City: Rome, Florence, Venice by Georg Simmel (2018) and Surrender to Night: Collected Poems of Georg Trakl (2019), as well as producing new editions of Journeys by Stefan Zweig (2019), Rilke in Paris, including Rilke’s “Notes on the Melody of Things”, by Maurice Betz/Rainer Maria Rilke (2019) and On the End of the World by Joseph Roth (2019). Autumn 2020 saw the publication of Encounters and Destinies: A Farewell to Europe by Stefan Zweig and a new edition of Zweig’s Nietzsche.

Will has contributed poems, translations, essays and reviews to a range of publications including the London Magazine, the TLS, the Spectator, Apollo magazine, RA Magazine, The White Review, Poetry Review, Agenda and Modern Poetry in Translation. His essay on the Belgian painter Léon Spilliaert as illustrator appeared in the catalogue to the exhibition “Léon Spilliaert”, at the Royal Academy, London in February 2020. A French translation was included in the catalogue for the same exhibition held at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris from October 2020.

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English translation © Will Stone, 2020

First published by Pushkin Press in 2020

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ISBN 13: 978–1–78227–553–4

eISBN 978–1–78227–554–1

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