The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams: A Bilingual Edition

By Rainer Maria Rilke

The Inner Sky is a selection of poems and prose by the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, set with the original text and a facing page translation, and including more than a dozen works that have never before appeared in English. The translations, by the NEA and PEN-award-winning author and translator Damion Searls, are lively, moving, and appealing, and they give a new voice for Rilke in English: mystical but concrete, like Emily Dickinson or Gerard Manley Hopkins.

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 presents a coherent vision of how we relate to the outer world and inner world of the imagination. Scholars and students of Rilke will benefit from the German and French originals opposite the translations, and two full indices of English and original titles and first lines. An annotated chronology and the translator’s afterword 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781567926361

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and traveled throughout Europe for much of his adult life, returning frequently to Paris. There he came under the influence of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and produced much of his finest verse, most notably the two volumes of New Poems as well as the great modernist novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Among his other books of poems are The Book of Images and The Book of Hours. He lived the last years of his life in Switzerland, where he completed his two poetic masterworks, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukemia in December 1926.

Reviews for The Inner Sky

[evelynnygren · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I haven't read much of Rilke's work, but after reading this collection, I think I like his poetry more than his longer, dream-like pieces. Some of those longer pieces—the letters(?), dreams, songs, etc.—sometimes became a bit tedious and boring to read. If this collection had been just dreams or just poems or songs or whatever, it would've worked better because everything would've been of the same length and tone.
Although this collection wasn't necessarily my favorite, I would definitely like to read more from Rilke in the future.