Available for the first time in a single volume, Ranier Maria Rilke’s two most beloved sequences of poems rendered by his most faithful translator. Rilke is unquestionably the twentieth century’s most significant and compelling poet of romantic transformation and spiritual quest. His poems of ecstatic identification with the world exert perennial fascination. In Stephen Mitchell’s versions of Rilke’s two greatest masterpieces readers will discover an English rendering that captures the lyric intensity, fluency, and reach of his (...) poetry. Stephen Mitchell adheres impeccably to Rilke’s text, to his formal music, and to the complexity of his thought; at the same time, Mitchell’s work has authority and power as poetry in its own right. (shrink)

El presente escrito propone una interpretación filosófico-literaria de la obra de Rainer Maria Rilke, realizada, fundamentalmente, a partir de Las elegías del Duino (1923) y los Sonetos a Orfeo (1923). Se plantea que la obra rilkeana contiene una propuesta de solución al problema existencial del hombre en el mundo, en el contexto de la crisis de la modernidad. El poeta describe una vía para lograr un ‘nuevo arraigo’ humano, cuyo eje fundamental es la aceptación de la muerte, (...) que se concreta en la adquisición de conciencia respecto del propio cuerpo y su finitud, a partir de las vivencias sensibles. (shrink)

Weltinnenraum ist Rilkes poetisches Bild für den Zusammenhang aller Dinge und Ereignisse im Universum. In seinen Duineser Elegien geht es um die Vergeistigung der endlichen Welt der Dinge hinein in eine zeitfreie Gestalt. Der Bezug zur östlichen Weisheitslehre, besonders zur buddhistischen Religion, liegt auf der Hand. Michael von Brück arbeitet ihn in diesem bahnbrechenden Werk über die Verbindung von Religion und Poesie heraus. Er zeigt, dass Rilke, der von der Gestalt des Buddha zutiefst berührt war, in seiner Poesie eine (...) Erfahrung aufscheinen lässt, wonach hinter der oft leidvollen und zerrissenen Lebenswelt ein Zusammenhang erkennbar wird, der alles umfasst und dem Leben neuen Sinn gibt. (shrink)

Die Rilke-Auslegung wird in weitreichende historische Perspektiven gestellt. Seit der Renaissance lässt sich ein Autonom-werden der Kunst beobachten, das bei Hölderlin, Wagner und Nietzsche zur Erwartung eines neuen ästhetisch bestimmten Zeitalters fuhrt. Heidegger schliesst für seine Kennzeichnung der gegenwärtigen Zeit, nach dem Tode Gottes und ohne eine neue bestimmende Mitte der Kultur, als ,, dürftiger Zeit" bei Hölderlin und Nietzsche an. Rilkes Position als „Dichter in dürftiger Zeit” ist in Heideggers Texten indessen nicht eindeutig. Rilke ist schliesslich nur (...) ein Gesprächspartner in einem Gesprächskontext zwischen Philosophie und Kunst. Innerhalb dieses Kontextes werden hier zwei Gedichte und die Grabschrift Rilkes interpretiert. Adorno und Habermas werfen Husserl vor, dass er die Forderung der Phänomenologie, zu einer „Wesensschau” zu kommen, die das objektivierende Denken überwindet, nicht einlösen kann. Die These dieser Abhandlung ist, dass Rilke in einigen seiner Gedichte die „Wesensschau” auf adäquate Weise verwirklicht. Die methodische Seite, die freilich nicht von der inhaltlichen zu trennen ist, kommt in „Der Schauende”, die ganz auf das Inhaltliche gerichtete Seite in „Der Panther” mit völliger Klarheit zum Ausdruck. Was kann es bedeuten, dass Rilke das Wesen schliesslich als Un-wesen erblickt ? (shrink)

For Rilke, like Heidegeer, the being of things becomes problematic. Already in 1912, the poet wrote that, for example, things transferred their essence to the money and they disappeared then; and, after a time, the disillusioned individual notices that the money also has gone away and the essenc..

Die vorliegende Analyse setzt sich mit dem Vorwurf der gesellschaftlichen Irrelevanz von Peter Handkes Prosa auseinander. Anhand einer vergleichenden Interpretation von R. M. Rilkes Malte und P. Handkes Stunde soll die Unhaltbarkeit dieser These unter Beweis gestellt werden, insofern sich die Ich-Orientierung bei Handke im Gegensatz zu Rilkes letztlich streng solipsistischer Attitüde als eine im Gegeneffekt doch im Sozialbereich verankerte Subjektivität enthüllt.

This book is an investigation of the role of creative labor and the five senses in Rainer Maria Rilke’s prose works, including his “Primal Sound” essay, the Stories of God, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and his monograph on Auguste Rodin. It is about several protagonists’ quest to achieve creative labor by reconnecting spirit or the unconscious to the hand. There are many difficulties in the way, however, illustrated by Rilke’s essays, tales, and monographs. In (...) the process of overcoming these impediments, the five senses are expanded and refined. Rilke’s characters undergo a transformation that not only allows them to do true creative labor, but also brings them into a new relationship with themselves, the world around them and other people. (shrink)

Mit dem Werk des österreichischen Dichters kam Witold Hulewicz ziemlich früh in Berührung. Fasziniert von dessen Dichtkunst, nahm er mit Rilke Briefkontakte auf. Die Korrespondenz belebte sich wesentlich, als Hulewicz an den ersten Üb ertragungen ins Polnische arbeitete. Im vorliegenden Artikel bemüht sich die Autorin nicht nur die freundschaftlichen Kontakte darzustellen, sondern auf die Rolle Hulewiczs als Übersetzer und Verbreiter des Rilkschen Werkes in Polen hinzu weisen.

Artykuł dotyczy dwóch bardzo mało znanych utworów słynnych twórców literatury niemieckiej. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, twórca Fausta, ma w swym dorobku moralizatorski wiersz pt. Dziennik. Jednak z obawy o posądzenie go o niemoralne treści, nigdy za życia poety utwór ten nie został opublikowany. Również Siedem wierszy Rainera Marii Rilkego jest bardzo rzadko drukowanych. Mimo, iż Rilke długo wzbraniał się przed lekturą utworów niemieckiego wieszcza, to jednak Dziennik stanowił wyjątek. Wiersz Goethego poświęcony jest kryzysowi seksualnemu i twórczemu bohatera, za którym (...) kryje się sam poeta. Wiersze Rilkego stanowią cykl poświęcony aktowi miłosnemu dwojga kochanków. Artykuł stara się przeanalizować wzajemne związki obu tych tak różnych dzieł i odpowiedzieć na pytanie, czy R. M. Rilke wzorował się na twórczości J. W. Goethego. (shrink)

Este artículo toma como punto de partida la colaboración artística entre Rainer Maria Rilke y Balthazar Klossowski –Balthus– que vio la luz en la publicación del libro titulado Mitsou. Historia de un gato, con ilustraciones del joven pintor y prólogo del poeta. Este caso de estudio sirve como hilo conductor de un análisis de mayor calado sobre el problema de lo “Abierto”, concepto de orden nouménico que Rilke acuña en su intercambio creativo con Balthus, y que (...) fue motivo concreto de reflexión por parte de Martin Heidegger. El presente trabajo pretende abordar las implicaciones de afinidad y enfrentamiento entre Rilke y Heidegger, y profundizar en la figura del gato como imagen metafórica de la animalidad presente en el develamiento que acontece en el Da-sein. Para ello será necesario considerar aportaciones teóricas clave de Ortega y Gasset y Schopenhauer, así como posturas críticas de Giorgio Agamben y Jacques Derrida, específicamente relevantes en este debate, que se inclinan hacia una ontología animal de la alétheia. (shrink)

Este artículo toma como punto de partida la colaboración artística entre Rainer Maria Rilke y Balthazar Klossowski –Balthus– que vio la luz en la publicación del libro titulado Mitsou. Historia de un gato, con ilustraciones del joven pintor y prólogo del poeta. Este caso de estudio sirve como hilo conductor de un análisis de mayor calado sobre el problema de lo “Abierto”, concepto de orden nouménico que Rilke acuña en su intercambio creativo con Balthus, y que (...) fue motivo concreto de reflexión por parte de Martin Heidegger. El presente trabajo pretende abordar las implicaciones de afinidad y enfrentamiento entre Rilke y Heidegger, y profundizar en la figura del gato como imagen metafórica de la animalidad presente en el develamiento que acontece en el Da-sein. Para ello será necesario considerar aportaciones teóricas clave de Ortega y Gasset y Schopenhauer, así como posturas críticas de Giorgio Agamben y Jacques Derrida, específicamente relevantes en este debate, que se inclinan hacia una ontología animal de la alétheia. (shrink)

In his _Duino Elegies,_ Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges—what Eric Santner calls the _creaturely_—have (...) a biopolitical aspect: they are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, _On Creaturely Life_ is also a significant contribution to critical theory. (shrink)

In his _Duino Elegies,_ Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges—what Eric Santner calls the _creaturely_—have (...) a biopolitical aspect: they are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, _On Creaturely Life_ is also a significant contribution to critical theory. (shrink)

Der Berg, a poem written between 1906 and 1907, is perhaps one of the most emblematic places to approach the relationship between Rainer Maria Rilke and the East. The mountain we are speaking of is Fujiyama, to which the celebrated Japanese painter Katsushika Hokusai dedicated two woodcut cycles. Presumably, Rilke came into contact with Japanese art through Edmond Goncourt, who had devoted precisely to Hokusai a major critical study in 1908. Another version of the story sees (...) Rilke as having read the monograph on Hokusai by Friedrich Perzynski, published in 1904 in the same series where Rilke’s Worpswede was issued. But let us read the text first:On several occasions, the artist tried to capture the.. (shrink)

The present study of the philosophical orientation within the poetics of Rilke and Stevens aims to show that in the context of modern poetry, transcendence, or “crossing beyond,” must be understood in two distinct senses, as vertical and horizontal projections. The usurpation of one by the other or the transfer between them distinguishes the poetry of Rilke and Stevens and makes a comparative reading particularly illuminating. The fact that Rilke and Stevens are two of the most widely (...) invoked poets in the phenomenological tradition will help to establish a modern sense of transcendence distinct from a traditional or Romantic longing for a realm above and beyond earthly existence. This would be an “immanent” transcendence, a crossing of horizons between perception and imagination or imagination and reality, by the disclosures and inventions of which, it is argued here, the more traditional notion of transcendence is usurped in distinct ways. (shrink)

Franz Xaver Kappus foi um aspirante à poeta que pediu conselhos e sugestões ao renomado escritor Rainer Maria Rilke. Estes pedidos se deram por meio de cartas ao qual Kappus não recebe nenhuma sugestão quanto à estilística, métrica ou composição de poemas, mas sim, vários conselhos na perspectiva de construção de uma obra através das experiências mais singelas da vida. Após o falecimento de Rilke a coleção destas epistolas direcionadas a Kappus foi compilada em um livro, (...) com o sugestivo nome de “Cartas a um Jovem Poeta”. Desde então tem servido para muitos leitores como um livro basal ao entendimento pessoal, que versa sobre o pertencimento e de qual é o nosso lugar de atuação no mundo. Essa comunicação tange ao conteúdo dessas cartas, de que cunho são tais conselhos e o fundo filosófico que estes contém; com isso realiza-se uma analise desta emblemática obra do século XX. (shrink)

The present article utilizes the Nietzschean “poetics” distilled from Nietzsche’s Gay Science as an interpretive strategy for considering Deleuze’s essay “Literature and Life” in Essays Critical and Clinical. The first section considers Deleuze’s overarching project in that essay, and then repositions his thought from literature in general to “poetry” in particular, indicating both resonances between Deleuze’s understanding of “literature” and Nietzsche’s understanding of “poetry” as well as their dissonances. The second section focuses on the places in Deleuze’s analyses where he (...) excludes poetry, and suggests that this exclusion is related to Nietzsche’s claim that lyric poetry is the birthplace of philosophy. Put differently, the being of lyric poetry threatens to disrupt Deleuze’s distinction between the respective roles and powers of philosophy and art, and thereby to disclose poets as, at least potentially, philosophers, and vice versa. And the final section offers one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus as an exemplar of poetry’s philosophical potential, before concluding that a Nietzschean conception of poetry constitutes the “dark precursor” of “Literature in Life,” Essays Critical and Clinical, and Deleuze’s work in general. (shrink)

L'éthique n'a pas que des sources philosophiques ou religieuses-spirituelles. Elle peut aussi se nourrir des questionnements inscrits dans des oeuvres littéraires. La littérature est peut-être même le lieu privilégié où se donnent à voir et à comprendre doutes existentiels, dilemmes moraux, intuitions philosophiques. Si l'éthique consiste bien dans l'approfondissement de notre connaissance de la dimension morale de la conscience de soi, de la conscience du monde et de la conscience d'exister, elle trouvera dans l'oeuvre de l'écrivain un matériau riche et (...) complexe qui ouvrira la voie à son propre déploiement. C'est ce que propose cet ouvrage en puisant à l'oeuvre de cinq romanciers de la modernité classique allemande du début du vingtième siècle, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil et Stefan Zweig. (shrink)

Introduction: Morality in Modern and Postmodern Perspective Shattered beings are best represented by bits and pieces. Rainer Maria Rilke As signalled in its ...

Rainer Maria Rilke points to it in the opening lines of the first Duino elegy (published in 1923) when he writes that “beauty is nothing but / the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bea...

Aus den Briefen Rainer Maria Rilkes.- Aus den Briefen Hugo von Hofmannsthals.- Gratulationen und Widmungen.- Deutungen und Würdigungen des Werkes und der Persönlichkeit.- Aus den Gesprächen mit Rudolf Kassner, von A. C. Kensik.- Aus den Briefen Rudolf Kassners.- Verzeichnis der Werke Rudolf Kassners (p. 243-248).

Der Mensch als Übender, als sich durch Übungen selbst erzeugendes Wesen - Rainer Maria Rilke hat den Antrieb zu solchen Exerzitien zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts in die Form gefaßt: "Du mußt dein Leben ändern." In seinem Plädoyer für die Ausweitung der Übungszone des einzelnen wie der Gesellschaft entwirft Peter Sloterdijk eine grundlegende und grundlegend neue Anthropologie. Den Kern seiner Wissenschaft vom Menschen bildet die Einsicht von der Selbstbildung alles Humanen. Seine Aktivitäten wirken unablässig auf ihn zurück: (...) die Arbeit auf den Arbeiter, die Kommunikation auf den Kommunizierenden, die Gefühle auf den Fühlenden. Es sind die ausdrücklich übenden Menschen, die diese Existenzweise am deutlichsten verkörpern: Bauern, Arbeiter, Krieger, Schreiber, Yogi, Rhetoren, Instrumentalvirtuosen oder Models. Ihre Trainingspläne und Höchstleistungen versammelt dieses Buch zu einer vergnüglich-instruktiven Lektüre von den Übungen, die erforderlich sind, ein Mensch zu sein. (shrink)

Called “the most important critic of his time” by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has only become more influential over the years, as his work has assumed a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning. A “natural and extraordinary talent for letter writing was one of the most captivating facets of his nature,” writes Gershom Scholem in his Foreword to this volume; and Benjamin's correspondence reveals the evolution of some of his most powerful ideas, while (...) also offering an intimate picture of Benjamin himself and the times in which he lived. Writing at length to Scholem and Theodor Adorno, and exchanging letters with Rainer Maria Rilke, Hannah Arendt, Max Brod, and Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin elaborates on his ideas about metaphor and language. He reflects on literary figures from Kafka to Karl Kraus, and expounds his personal attitudes toward such subjects as Marxism and French national character. Providing an indispensable tool for any scholar wrestling with Benjamin’s work, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 is a revelatory look at the man behind much of the twentieth century’s most significant criticism. (shrink)

"The king is dead. Long live the king!" In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign—and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In The Royal Remains, Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of the structures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new location—the life of the people—where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and (...) measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious—which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways—are really the uncanny second life of these "royal remains," now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. Pairing Freud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal,and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, The Royal Remains locates much of modernity—from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments—in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship. This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature. (shrink)