'Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the orders of angels?' Ten elegies begun on a cliff above the Adriatic in 1912 and finished ten years later in a few weeks.
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This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. Duino Elegies’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
Ten long poems about being human, mortal, loving and unfinished, spoken toward angels who are too much for us. They are among the most read and least understood poems of the twentieth century. They are in the press now, starting with the First Elegy. Nothing is readable yet, and a gift from you would help us begin.
Rilke was staying at Duino Castle near Trieste as the guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis when, in January 1912, the first line came to him, he said, out of the wind as he walked along the cliffs. He wrote two elegies that winter and then stalled for a decade, through the war. In February 1922, at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland, he finished the rest in a few weeks. The book came out in 1923 and is in the public domain in the United States.
Rilke's German builds words English does not have and hangs whole sentences on small particles like denn, doch and noch. 'Every angel is terrifying,' he writes, and his word for terrifying, schrecklich, is the ordinary one a German speaker uses for bad weather. With the German under your eye, you can see how plain most of his words are, and how he bends the grammar around them.
Making an interlinear Duino Elegies is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, The First Elegy gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
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