Translating Rilke

Life Member Alfred Corn has published a newtranslation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s powerful Duino Elegies. He writes:

As an undergraduate I heard the Duino Elegies mentioned but did not attempt to read them until nearly a decade after my first encounter with Rilke. Even with the SpenderLeishman translation on hand, there was the sense that I hadn’t grasped all that the Elegies contained. It was a goal that would require not only a further study of Rilke, but also the condition of being an older reader, one with more life experience. In subsequent years I read his lyrics, but also Rilke’s prose, including his Letters to a Young Poet (written 1902-08) and the astonishing Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910).

When I began publishing my own poetry, it’s likely that his example had been influential, just as it had been for contemporary American poets James Wright, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, James Merrill and Grace Schulman. Some of my own books included translations of his lyrics. But always in my mind was the sense that I should one day give the Elegies the intimate engagement that they require. I decided that the best way to know them deeply was to translate them. When asked to propose a project for my residency as a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, I instantly knew what that should be; and so the project began in 2012.

Alfred Corn, Duino Elegies: A New and Complete Translation was published by WW Norton & Co. in 2021.