#edward snow

[mournfulroses]

Rainer Maria Rilke, transl. by Edward Snow, from The Book of Images; "Charles the 12th of Sweden Rides in the Ukraine,"

[dk-thrive]

I would like to walk for hours in the snow through the woods

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter Lou von Salome, written c. January 1912, from Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters. Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. (W. W. Norton & Company, 2006)

[luthienne]

Life is heavier / than the weight of all things.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Poetry of Rilke; "The Neighbor" (tr. from the German by Edward Snow)

[thisbrilliantsky]

The Song of the Statue

by Rainer Maria Rilke trans. by Edward Snow

Who is there who so loves me, that he will throw away his own dear life? If someone will die for me in the ocean, I will be brought back from stone into life, into life redeemed.

How I long for blood's rushing; stone is so still. I dream of life: life is good. Has no one the courage through which I might awaken?

And if I once more find myself in life, given everything most golden,—

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then I will weep alone, weep for my stone. What help will my blood be, when it ripens like wine? It cannot scream out of the ocean he who loved me most.

[bestbookcover]

round 1, poll 442

click for better quality & to see the full image. sometimes they get cut off weirdly!

which cover do you like best?

Last Day on Earth by eric puchner

Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge*

Voting ended onJan 30

*by rainer maria rilke translated by edward snow

remember, you're voting for the cover, not the author or the book!

[master-fuckup]

Rilke, Uncollected Poems.

[missedstations]

“The Man Watching” - Rainer Maria Rilke

I can see that the storms are coming by the trees, which out of stale lukewarm days beat against my anxious windows, and I can hear the distances say things one can't bear without a friend, can't love without a sister. Then the storm swirls, a rearranger, swirls through the woods and through time, and everything is as if without age: the landscape, like a verse in the psalter, is weight and ardor and eternity. How small that is, with which we wrestle, what wrestles with us, how immense; were we to let ourselves, the way things do, be conquered thus by the great storm,— we would become far-reaching and nameless. What we triumph over is the Small, and the success itself makes us petty. The Eternal and Unexampled will not be bent by us. Think of the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament: when his opponent's sinews in that contest stretch like steel, he feels them under his fingers as strings making deep melodies. Whoever was overcome by this Angel (who so often declined the fight), he strides erect and justified and great out of that hard hand which, as if sculpting, nestled round him. Winning does not tempt him. His growth is: to be the deeply defeated by ever greater things. Translated from the German by Edward Snow

[charmingpplincardigans]

Nature, the things we move among and use, are provisional and perishable; but they are, for as long as we are here, our possession and our friendship, sharers in our trouble and our happiness, just as they were once the confidants of our ancestors. Therefore it is crucial not only that we not corrupt and degrade what constitutes the here and now, but, precisely because of the provisionality it shares with us, that these appearances and objects be comprehended by us in a most fervent understanding and transformed. Transformed? Yes, for our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, “invisibly,” in us. We are the bees of the Invisible. Nous butinons éperdument le miel du visible, pour l’accumuler dans la grande ruche d’or de l’Invisible [We wildly gather the honey of the invisible, in order to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.]

-Rainer Maria Rilke to Witold von Hulewicz (Polish translator of Elegies), November 13, 1925 (from Duino Elegies, translated by Edward Snow © 2000)