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"The Duino Elegies of Rainer Maria Rilke". Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. Translated by Gass, William H. New York: A. A. Knopf. 1999.
The Duino Elegies (German: Duineser Elegien) are a collection of ten elegies written by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.He was then "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", [1] and began the elegies in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis at Duino Castle on the Adriatic Sea.
An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, and sometimes strictly as a ...
Although the poem (given Cornelia's connection to Augustus' family) was most likely an imperial commission, its dignity, nobility, and pathos have led critics to call it the "queen of the elegies", and it is commonly considered the best in the collection.
"Eclogue 5" thus became a model for elegies for public figures and for Christian celebrations of death and resurrection. [8] Some say the best known elegy in English is "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," by Thomas Gray, a well-known English poet. This elegy discusses the actual condition of death, not just the death of a single individual.
The moving elegies and enigmatic riddles are the most famous of the Exeter Book texts. [11] The elegies primarily explore the themes of alienation, loss, the passage of time, desolation, and death, and deal with subjects including the sorrows of exile, the ruination of the past, and the long separation of lovers.
The elegiac couplet is presumed to be the oldest Greek form of epodic poetry (a form where a later verse is sung in response or comment to a previous one). Scholars, who even in the past did not know who created it, [3] theorize the form was originally used in Ionian dirges, with the name "elegy" derived from the Greek ε, λεγε ε, λεγε—"Woe, cry woe, cry!"
Through most of the 1910s, Rilke had suffered from a severe depression that had kept him from writing. He had begun his Duino Elegies in 1912, and completed parts of it in 1913 and 1915 before being rendered silent by a psychological crisis caused by the events of World War I and his brief conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army. [5]