David Need, Duke Professor, offers a translation of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s French language sequences in his book Roses: From the Late French Poetry of Ranier Maria Rilke. Written over the last four years of his life, the poems were a new beginning for Rilke following the completion of the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. Less often translated than his other work and, in general brief, the work nevertheless carries forward the aesthetic project of his major work in German. The translation of the posthumously published sequence Les Roses is offered here alongside an accompanying set of pen and ink drawings by Clare Johnson. Also included is translator David Need’s essay on the motif of the rose in Rilke’s poetry, as well as a translation of numerous German language poems in which Rilke turns to and stages the figure of the rose—that thing that we are like that is both impossibly interior, and yet also thrown out into and at stake in the world.
Source: David Need, “Roses: The Late French Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke” | The Regulator Bookshop