

What struck Rilke was Rodin’s “dark patience which makes him almost anonymous”. Parry explores Rilke’s response to Rodin in Paris in 1902. I’d agree and, in translating both in the last 20 years or so, I have come to prefer the vivid enactments of the sonnets. The poet always spoke of the sonnets as subsidiary to the elegies, but Parry argues that while the elegies “talk about” the poet’s task, the sonnets perform it. ‘Croggon’s poems offer something intense, difficult and fragile, but simultaneously intimate and hugely rewarding in the reading.Idris Parry writes in the current PN Review (March/April 2015) comparing Rilke’s Duino Elegies with the Sonnets to Orpheus. ‘Alison Croggon is one of the most powerful lyric poets writing today.’ Australian Book Review Printed en face with the German text and with an afterword and notes by the translator. Croggon lives in the wild beauty of these Elegies and makes them glow in translation… This is an incendiary work.’ - John Kinsella ‘Alison Croggon’s transformative and impassioned translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies attempts the extraordinary… Signature, regret, pain, trauma, wonder, euphoria, wonder, rapture and an immersion in the senses are all contained in the crispness and experiential sensibility that guides her relationship with the original poems.

‘The poems are not about life: rather, they are a startling mimesis of its instability and transience.’

‘The turbulent currents that make the Elegies so enthralling are generated by the dynamic contradictions of a mind acutely conscious of its own movements,’ she writes in her afterword. Twenty years in the making, Alison Croggon’s inspired new translation captures the energies of Rilke’s poems with an urgent, acute clarity. He considered the Duino Elegies - a cycle of ten poems written in inspirational bursts between 19 - to be his major achievement.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the major modernist poets in the German language, notable for the lyric intensity of his work.
