Introduction

Summary

THE STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY at Yale owns twenty-one separate English translations of Rilke's Duineser Elegien, and the author of the present introduction has four more in his personal library. The popularity of the Elegies with translators stems not only from their centrality in a statement of Rilke's worldview, but also because, on a more mundane level, they are relatively easy to translate. They are not rhymed and are couched in an irregular, iambic and dactylic meter. On the other hand, Neue Gedichte has attracted few translators because of the technical difficulties its poems present; with only a few exceptions, they are rhymed, and are in regular stanzaic forms, in particular, the sonnet or variations of that form. To date there have been four translations of Neue Gedichte into English, the earliest by J. B. Leishman (1964), the next by Stephen Cohn (1992), a rich selection by Edward Snow (2001), and the most recent by Joseph Cadora (2014). These four are now joined by Len Krisak's translation. All five of these translations are to be praised for their palpable energy and the bravery with which they address the manifold difficulties of the poems, but Krisak's translation, it seems to me, comes closest to replicating Rilke's poems’ vitality and their subtleties of diction and form.

The most famous lines in the double cycle are probably the opening of the sonnet “Der Panther,” “Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe / so müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält.” Leishman has “His gaze those bars keep passing is so misted / with tiredness, it can take in nothing more”; Cohn, “The bars which pass and strike across his gaze / have stunned his sight: the eyes have lost their hold”; Snow, “His gaze has from the passing of the bars / grown so tired, that it holds nothing anymore”; and Cadora, “From endless passing of the bars, his gaze / has wearied—there is no more it can hold.” And finally, Krisak has “Scanning the bars, his gaze is grown so numb / that there is nothing left that it can hold.” Rilke's linguistic discipline has infused all his translators. But it seems that Krisak has the advantage in the naturalness of his diction and the vitality of his verse.