Uncollected Poems : Bilingual Edition

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Translation!
Review: A beautiful translation as usual from Edward Snow. One of my more favorite books in my Rilke collection. Retains the beauty of the german to a high degree. Poems you may not see anywhere else anytime soon, and some fragments which are absolutely lovely.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful, and some people might know what this is about.
Review: This book contains my favorite poem, but explaining it could be like trying to contend that 2001 is a really great year because it might help ordinary people realize how elements of life might be like understanding the line, "until suddenly out of spitefully chewed fruit." For me, this is the kind of poetry that Harold Bloom was trying to explain in his book, THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE/A THEORY OF POETRY, though Bloom's ideas ranged from Milton, with the question, "Why call Satan a modern poet?" (Bloom, p. 20) to more modern poets without suggesting that Rilke might have topped them all in approaching the capability suggested in Bloom's quotation from Kierkegaard, "What inwardness he might have attained!" (Bloom, p. 76). My favorite poem by Rilke starts with the line, "Long you must suffer, knowing not what," and ends with the assertion, "No one will ever talk you out of it." This poem explains as much about how an individual can feel, when utterly singled out by perception, as any of the puzzles that philosophy typically gropes its way through in its efforts to find a world that any one person can understand. And the other poems in this book are also outstanding attempts to deserve the honor of being considered great poetry on a very personal level. Among the host of contenders, the one which is easiest to find begins with the German word, "Aber," so it appears first in the German index. The English translation seems to be suggesting something. "But if you'd try this: to be hand in my hand / as in the wineglass the wine is wine. / If you'd try this."