Professor Martin Bidney

Rilke's Art of Metric Melody, Volume I Professor Martin Bidney

INthis volume you'll find, form-faithfully translated, New Poems I and II (1907-1908), containing 179 works by lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). An innovative feature is the pairing of each lyric with a "reply" poem by the translator, or translated by him from another poet writing on a related theme. The result is a richly diverse book-length dialogue or symposium, a pioneering colloquy on comparative literature. Rilke's interests-in mythology, history, religion, travel-range widely, and the manifold dialogue extends them further. To a startling degree, every Rilke lyric is like "The Panther" or "Archaic Torso of Apollo," the two exemplary poems treated in the "Introduction." Each is a matter of being and becoming, dream and reality, space and time, life and death. Rilke is the foremost ontological poet. Because this dimension of his thought and feeling is at once so wide in implication and so intently focused on the concrete existence of a thing or creature as we watch it develop from within, he will often approach the limit of what can be sung in language. The means of expression he employs to do this are so intricate and subtle that we must empathetically follow the windings of his syntax as well as the rhythm and harmony of his words. Together they provide the means whereby music can aid speech in winging the distance from heart-thought to expression.