![]() ![]() ![]() The original elegies were in German hexameter, but as Vita and Edward observed in their note at the end of the volume, this was not a form into which the English language could meld itself with any elegance or grace. And with this revival, has come a renewed appreciation for what the translators had done. Last year, in time for the centenary of the publication of Rilke’s original, Pushkin Press brought back the Sackville-Wests’ translation. And then the translation disappeared from view - there was some blowback with the approach the Sackville-Wests had taken, translating Rilke’s poems into blank verse in English and this meant the work languished away from the reading public for over 90 years. And it was Hogarth Press, run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, that published a few hundred copies of the translation. That first translation was done by two cousins, Vita and Edward Sackville-West, who were themselves stars of the English literary scene in the early decades of the 20th century. Rilke, by the time of his passing, was regarded as the greatest poet in the German language and yet, it would be another nine years before an English translation of the Duino Elegies would be published. He’d begun it almost a decade before, in 1911, while staying in the castle at Duino, near Trieste in Italy. In 1922, four years before his death, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke finished his 10 poem cycle, Duino Elegies. ![]()
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