Rilke, With Martyn Crucefix

This is a new, major – 200 page – selection and translation of Rilke’s poetry from 1899 through to 1926 from Pushkin Press.

As translator, Martyn Crucefix has commented: ‘This selection of Rilke’s poetry has been made with regard to three criteria: those poems a new (or more experienced) reader might reasonably expect to find in such a book, plus those poems that I felt were important to a rich and comprehensive view of Rilke’s poetic achievements, plus those individual poems that I felt especially in tune with.

These three criteria were bounded (as they must always be) by the particular translator’s competence and confidence in their ability to bring Rilke’s German over into English. Given these restraints, I trust this final selection succeeds in including a generous choice of his ‘early’ poems from 1899-1906, through the artistic breakthrough of the New Poems (1907/1908), his ‘Requiem for a Friend’ for Paula Modersohn-Becker (1909), and the not-so-fallow years of 1910 to 1921, a publishing hiatus spectacularly broken in 1922 by the storm of inspiration that completed the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. The selection also includes a number of the jewel-like, haiku-like poems Rilke wrote in French in his more settled, brief, final years before his death in 1926′.

Martyn works as poet, teacher, reviewer, critic and translator. He is a tutor with the Poetry School in London. His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies was published by Enitharmon, being shortlisted for the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation  His more recent translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus was also published by Enitharmon.