Rilke at The Nation

At The Nation, Ange Mlinko reviews the new Edward Snow edition of The Poems of Rilke, 'But one must be careful not to let the controversy obscure something important: if English translations of Duino Elegies remain contested, it's because Rilke has become indispensable. We read Rilke for the figures: "And all things were her sleep," he says of the girl who makes a bed in his ear; that would also be the same sleep from his epitaph: "no one's sleep under so many / eyelids." We read Rilke for a vocabulary that transcends our little, individual languages to a universal (and premodern) figural vocabulary of the lyric. If it is an illusion, it is an optimistically American one — and still generative.'

I reviewed this volume myself at The Critical Flame.