I am aware that in today's climate of deconstructionism it is controversial to assert that a poem has any substantial meaning behind it, let alone a message. Above all, I wanted the message of the Elegies to be formulated as clearly as possible. I wanted to re-create the atmosphere of the Elegies, the urgency, the passion, the despair, the playfulness, the peculiarities of the language, the ambiguity, the ambivalence, the denseness, and yes, at least some of the beauty as well.

My overall criterion was a subjective one: I wanted the poems in English to affect me as strongly as they do in German. My goal has been to create one that preserves it. I miss this sensitivity to the reality of the psyche in the various English translations of the Duino Elegies that I have seen. Rilke's mastery in this area is unsurpassed by any other modern poet known to me, and nowhere is this mastery more beautifully or more comprehensively displayed than in his Duino Elegies, a work that he struggled with for more than ten years and which he considered to be the greatest task of his life. What I admire most in Rilke's poetry is that his carefully crafted language, particularly in his later works, manages to convey the movements of this otherwise 'unsayable' realm and often addresses the issues of finding the proper relationship to it. A Jungian approach understands them to be self-expressions of the inner world in symbolic form, and learning to understand this symbol language brings the realization that the images express inner reality more precisely, subtly and directly than spoken or written language can. A person's dreams serve as the instrumental guide to this process of becoming conscious. Making people conscious of their own psychic reality, of their inner world, is a fundamental aspect of my work, which is the healing of mental suffering. Rilke's poetry, at least in German, shows an unusual sensitivity to inner experience and to the symbolic processes of the psyche, two things that are important to me in my work as a Jungian analyst. Since a number of English translations already exist (I have read seven of them), the reader deserves a justification for being confronted with yet another one. Duino Elegies by Rainer-Maria Rilke - IntroductionĪ few words of introduction seem appropriate for a new English translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duineser Elegien, this short sequence of ten poems widely considered to be the century's masterpiece of German lyric poetry.

Rilke elegies duino