Research Catalog

Title

Inner sky : poems, notes, dreams / by Rainer Maria Rilke ; translated by Damion Searls.

Author

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875-1926

Publication

Boston : David R. Godine, Publisher, 2010.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

Searls, Damion

Description

190 p.; 22 cm.

Summary

• Damion Searls's translations of Rilke are wonderfully fresh and concentrated, and catch superbly that intent, listening quality which is perhaps the essential characteristic of this great poet's work. Rilke continues to fascinate, and in Searls we have a fascinating new interpreter. John Banville.
• Reading these pages is like pulling out your pockets expecting to find nothing but lining, and discovering instead a neglected roll of bills. Pieces of Rilke's œuvre have been led out of the shadows by Damion Searls's original and revelatory translation to alter our understanding of the whole. William Gass.
• Damion Searls wipes clean the often-foggy lens through which non-German readers of Rilke have hitherto experienced him, and the result feels like a dream in which you can understand perfectly a language you didn't think you knew. Rilke's thrilling precision and disorientations and purposefulness are all suddenly there in English. This book is a great way to embark or re-embark on the adventure of reading him. Jonathan Franzen.
• No matter their level of familiarity with Rilke, The Inner Sky belongs on the bookshelf of any literature lover, thanks largely to Searls's deft translation and grouping of Rilke's work. This nontraditional collection predates prose poetry and short-short fiction, yet speaks to these contemporary styles of new craft. Rachel Mennies, ForeWord Magazine.
• The Inner Sky is a new bilingual selection of Rainer Maria Rilke's poems and prose pieces, many of them little known and never before translated into English. These translations, by the NEA-and PEN-award-winning Damion Searls, present a significant new voice for Rilke, one more intimate than oracular. Here is Rilke, not in his usual role of channeling the gods, but looking up from a book, musing about the girls of his Czech homeland, sharing his hallucinatory dreams and the olfactory pleasures of keeping lemons on his writing desk in winter.
• Searls's selection of texts clusters around a handful of related images and ideas - birds and trees, giving and receiving, working and waiting, girlhood and gardens - and explores how we relate to both the outer world and the inner world of the imagination. Both general readers and students of Rilke will benefit from the German and French originals opposite the translations. An annotated chronology and an afterword on the art of translation complete this rich new volume, a necessary addition to even the most complete Rilke library and the perfect introduction for those just getting to know this perennial master.
• We are right at the start, do you see. As though before everything. With a thousand and one dreams behind us and no act.
• I can imagine no knowledge holier than this: that you must become a beginner. Someone who writes the first word after a centuries-long dash. --Book Jacket.

Uniform Title

Works. Selections. German & English. 2010

Alternative Title

Works. 2010

Subject

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875-1926 > Translations into English

Genre/Form

Translations

Note

• "A bilingual edition" with German (and occasionally French) and English on facing pages.
• Includes indexes.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

"As long as you catch what you've thrown yourself" -- Pregnant Woman -- Interiors -- Young Girl -- The Lady and the Unicorn -- On Completing the Circle (I-II) -- Dedication -- Vitali Awoke -- Notes on the Melody of Things -- Haiku (I-II) -- Poems from the Graveyard (I-V) -- On the Poet's Material -- Marriage -- In His Thirty-Eighth Year -- From Testament -- "Come then, come, you last thing I have learned" -- On Shawls and Lemons (I-IV) -- "There is total silence..." -- From the Notebooks (Naples-Capri-Paris) -- Night Songs (I-II) -- Note on Birds -- Spring Songs (I-II) -- "It's not that now that we're (suddenly) grown up" -- When Death Came with the Morning -- "Looking up from the book, from the near and countable lines" -- Dream (Fragment) -- The Origin of the Chimera -- From the Dream-Book (The Seventh, Eleventh, and Twenty-Sixth Dreams) -- Morning Prayer -- "What birds hurtle through is not the familiar sky".

ISBN

• 9781567923889
• 1567923887

LCCN

^^2009022393

OCLC

• 373474932
• SCSB-10573630

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library