Duineser Elegien

Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1923. First edition, ordinary issue, of Rilke's Duino Elegies. Presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title to the Swiss sculptor Hermann Haller in August 1924, with an inscription which includes an apparently unpublished, rather hermetic, two-stanza poem on the life of the artist in Rilke's hand, dated Muzot 1924, and signed in full by the poet. The poem reads: "Unser ist das Wunder vom geballten / Wasser, das der Magier vollbracht, / Welche Freude, welche Macht, / Leben, das dahinstuerzt, aufzuhalten! / Aber freilich: als bemuehteUeber / sind wir doch nicht Herren der Gewalten; / denn nun reissen sie uns dort hinueber, / und wir stuerzen still in die Gestallten." The ten Duino Elegies, along with The Sonnets to Orpheus, comprise the basis of Rilke's stature as one of the indisputably great poets of the Twentieth Century, perhaps the greatest. (T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam, and Zbigniew Herbert, would be his only rivals for this distinction, if such a distinction were verifiable, which it is not.). The story of the creation of the Elegies has long since passed into legend: The first words came to Rilke on a violent sea wind, as he walked on the cliffs near Duino Castle (where Dante, it is said, composed portions of the Commedia) one morning in January 1912; by evening he had completed the first elegy, and, within a few days, the second elegy and written fragments of four others - the third, sixth, ninth, and tenth. And that was all. The third elegy was completed in Paris in 1913, and the fourth written in Munich in 1915. (It must be said that Rilke was writing many other poems during this period.) Then, after a hiatus of more than six years, the mensis mirabilis: Within the space of a month (between the 2nd and 23rd of February 1922), while living in solitude at the small Chateau de Muzot near Sierre, Switzerland, Rilke completed not only the ten elegies, but composed all fifty-nine of the Sonette an Orpheus as well. Like all genuinely inspired artists, Rilke is at times an unnerving presence, and one does not wish to collapse into fatuous mysticism. Nevertheless this feat - surely among the most spectacular in the history of the world - has something otherworldly about it; something divine, even archangelic. The elegies themselves are an inexhaustible, hermetic world, and supremely beautiful. [Oafish bookmen, such as ourselves, hawk their wares with superlatives, and so are at a loss when confronted with the truly great; but the elegies are genuinely among the supreme achievements of world literature]. In his admirable excursus to his recent translations, Reading Rilke, William Gass put it this way: "[Rilke's] work has taught me what real art ought to be, how it can matter to a life through its lifetime; how commitment can course like blood through the body of your words until the writing stirs, rises, opens its eyes; and finally, because his work allows me to measure what we call achievement: how tall his is, how small mine. An immaculate copy, as new in the rare dust jacket and publisher's box. 8vo, original salmon boards, dust jacket, in original publisher's printed card box. An immaculate copy, as new in the rare dust jacket and publisher's box.