Translated from German by David Need. Bilingual edition.
Published 2018. Paperback, 244pp, 9 x 6 ins, £14.95
ISBN 9781848616028 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is recognised as one of the great poets of 20 th century European modernism. He is best known for a range of works including Letters to a Young Poet , The Book of Hours , New Poems (Rilke’s response to early Modernist plastic and visual arts), and the two collections that are considered his masterworks, The Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus , completed toward the end of his life, in 1922.

From 1921-1926, Rilke lived in southern Switzerland, in a region called the Valais that constitutes the upper Rhone Valley and its surroundings. Following the completion of the Elegies and Sonnets , Rilke began to work in both French and German. A collection of French poems addressed to the landscape of Valais, Quatrains Valaisans , was published in 1926. In May of that same year, Rilke sent his publishers an arrangement of German language poems as a possible manuscript; the bulk of these date to 1924, but the collection included both material culled from a recently recovered 1906 daybook and a final set of poems written over the last two years of his life. Rilke sent the last of these in August 1926; he would die of complications from leukemia just four months later.

This volume is the first English translation of these poems in the arrangement Rilke had set down in 1926. A number of the poems have been included in various volumes of selected late poems and all were translated by Leishman (1957) in his running translation of uncollected poems and fragments according to the sequence of these in Insel’s 1955 Complete Works. The arrangement translated here has only appeared in German as Aus Taschen-Büchern und Merk-Blättern , (Insel-Verlag, 1950).

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