Duino Elegies

Poetry. Translated from the German by Gary Miranda. Begun in 1912, interrupted by the Great War, and completed early in 1922, the ten meditations on love and death in Rilke's DUINO ELEGIES are perhaps the twentieth century's most sustained outpouring of lyricism. Abstract, allusive, and rich with imagery, this sequence has been attempted by many translators. Gary Miranda's 1981 version, reprinted here in a revised and expanded edition, is unsurpassed in rendering the challenging German text as a lucid and elegant poem in English.

"Rilke speaks through Gary Miranda as through a microphone, with an unprecedented combination of utterly transfixing clarity, propulsive urgency, and emotive concentration. Nowhere else in English nowhere else have the Elegies achieved such unrelenting, enveloping intensity. This is a mind- and life-altering book. Much more than a translation, this is a work of total reincarnation." Malachi Black