Pure Contradiction: Selected Poems

Rilke, Rainer Maria

ISBN 10: 1906570221 / ISBN 13: 9781906570224

Published by ARC Publications, 2012

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 19352053-n

Bibliographic Details

Title: Pure Contradiction: Selected Poems

Publisher: ARC Publications

Publication Date: 2012

Binding: Soft cover

Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis:

Ian Crockatt was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for this translation

This bi-lingual selection gathers poems from all periods of Rilke's life and artistic development. Rilke's work spans the divide between turn-of-the-century Europe's decadence and its post First World War revolutionary modernism, always struggling to develop, to seek and reach beyond itself.

Rather than chronologically, this selection of poems places poems of similar themes and / or modes of expression close to one another, making bed-fellows of poems rarely seen together. Each poem is to a greater or lesser extent conscious of others. The aim is to illuminate the underlying themes which Rilke said he had arrived at very early in his life.

The powerful new translation, skilfully shaped into current English by Ian Crockatt succeeds in catching Rilke's blend of crafted sensuality and inward-focused spiritual searching, while his comprehensive introduction and notes to this selection are both informative and enlightening.

About the Author:

Rainer Maria Rilke was born into the German-speaking elite of Prague in 1875, and died in Switzerland in 1926. He was witness to the radical new art emerging in Paris before the First World War and was involved in reviewing exhibitions and writing articles about the new artists, as well as developing his own increasingly individual and virtuoso verse. He was secretary to the sculptor Rodin for two years, met Picasso and Tolstoy and many other giants of the artistic and intellectual community of the time. He lived a semi-nomadic life, always putting his art before his personal relationships and always aware of his own calling as a poet.

Today his reputation is as high as it was during his lifetime; his Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus and his two volumes of New Poems which sounded a new note in European poetry at the time remain landmark works. Together with his volumes of letters and his extraordinary impressionistic novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke's poetry constitutes one of the great literary achievements of any century.