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A review by msand3
New Poems: A Revised Bilingual Edition by Rainer Maria Rilke
5.0
This collection on Goodreads gathers two volumes translated by Snow: New Poems, 1907 and New Poems: The Other Part, 1908, both published in the 1980s. The collection is abridged, so I suggest tracking down each individual volume for the best translation of both complete books. I also recommend the Joseph Cadora translation (also with complete poems from both volumes) for the wonderful footnotes. I will review both Snow volumes individually after I read each one.
New Poems, 1907:
Rilke’s first collection of New Poems, published in 1907, contains what might be called poetic still lifes. Influenced by the sculpture of Rodin, he attempts to infuse the everyday materiality of still objects -- roses, a cathedral, bodies in a morgue, a courtesan, a gazelle, a man in prison, etc. -- with a life that is at once separate from the observer but also inside each of us. The subjects become universal markers to which each reader can relate not in our (or the poet’s) visual connection to the object itself, but in how we are moved by the shared experience as seen through the poet’s eye. And so the “movement” in the still life (i.e, the poetic image) occurs not from without (in the object itself, or in its ekphrastic description), but from within the poet -- and likewise, from within the reader.
Like Buddha in the first poem of the same title, the world of experience is simultaneously something distant, but also hovering and ever-present. He is not “a star,” but “Star” -- the central, guiding force around which all other stars gather. (“O, he is everything,” Rilke writes, not in wonder, but almost as a casual aside, as if intoning, “O, that’s just the air that we breathe…” His presence, like that of the world of experience, is so ever-present as to be a given.)
And it is the poet’s job to remind us of the extraordinary in the ordinary objects around us. As the Angel of one poem reaches out and beckons to us from Eternity, so too does the poet, showing us through his art a world without limits (“With a slight nod he dismisses forever / all that sets limits and obliges”), if only we take the time to silently reflect -- experiencing in our own stillness the rapid and continuous transmutation taking place within.
New Poems: The Other Part, 1908:
Published only one year after the first collection of New Poems, these feel much less intense and personal. Only a handful of poems, including the last one, "Buddha in Glory," gave me the same sublime sense of oneness with the poet as I felt when reading the first volume. Indeed, that final Buddha poem felt like it was meant to be not only a companion verse to the Buddha poems in the first volume, but also the lynchpin of both volumes. Overall, I would only recommend reading this second volume along with (and after) reading the first.
New Poems, 1907:
Rilke’s first collection of New Poems, published in 1907, contains what might be called poetic still lifes. Influenced by the sculpture of Rodin, he attempts to infuse the everyday materiality of still objects -- roses, a cathedral, bodies in a morgue, a courtesan, a gazelle, a man in prison, etc. -- with a life that is at once separate from the observer but also inside each of us. The subjects become universal markers to which each reader can relate not in our (or the poet’s) visual connection to the object itself, but in how we are moved by the shared experience as seen through the poet’s eye. And so the “movement” in the still life (i.e, the poetic image) occurs not from without (in the object itself, or in its ekphrastic description), but from within the poet -- and likewise, from within the reader.
Like Buddha in the first poem of the same title, the world of experience is simultaneously something distant, but also hovering and ever-present. He is not “a star,” but “Star” -- the central, guiding force around which all other stars gather. (“O, he is everything,” Rilke writes, not in wonder, but almost as a casual aside, as if intoning, “O, that’s just the air that we breathe…” His presence, like that of the world of experience, is so ever-present as to be a given.)
And it is the poet’s job to remind us of the extraordinary in the ordinary objects around us. As the Angel of one poem reaches out and beckons to us from Eternity, so too does the poet, showing us through his art a world without limits (“With a slight nod he dismisses forever / all that sets limits and obliges”), if only we take the time to silently reflect -- experiencing in our own stillness the rapid and continuous transmutation taking place within.
New Poems: The Other Part, 1908:
Published only one year after the first collection of New Poems, these feel much less intense and personal. Only a handful of poems, including the last one, "Buddha in Glory," gave me the same sublime sense of oneness with the poet as I felt when reading the first volume. Indeed, that final Buddha poem felt like it was meant to be not only a companion verse to the Buddha poems in the first volume, but also the lynchpin of both volumes. Overall, I would only recommend reading this second volume along with (and after) reading the first.