On "Roses: The Late French Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke"

David Need's masterful translations of Rilke's late work in French are now available in an exquisite edition from David Wofford's Horse & Buggy Press. The artist Clare Johnson has produced a series of interstitial, stand-alone ink drawings which add a whole new dimension to the poems and Need has provided a beautiful autobiographical meditation on what Rilke means to him -- and us -- as an afterword. This is one of the most sensual books, in every sense -- spiritual, erotic, and tactile -- that I've come upon in some time. I'm delighted to have been asked to contribute, along with Joe Donahue, a blurb, which you can read below. It's also a substantial contribution to the vast body of Rilke scholarship and translations in English.

"Rilke sang of actual roses, the tangible incarnadine flower, not some abstract Platonic ideal. In these intimate and luminous translations from his post-Elegies work, written in French, David Need rescues Rilke from the cult of New Age positivism, restoring his uncanny mystery, his harrowing commitment to dwell along the perilous and empowering borderline between inner necessity and a manufactured world of dead objects. The realm of Rilke’s roses is chthonic and immanent. All aperture and cusp, fold and further fold, the flesh of the rose’s petals permits both a bantering playfulness and the most profound experience of evanescence and fragility. Because they die into themselves each day, Rilke’s roses are always undergoing loss and transformation; they are his highest allegories for praise and finitude, Orpheus and Eurydice conjoined. In the classic Rilkean gesture, they are always departing, always arriving – the impossible moment of plenitude and emptiness, Celan’s niemandsrose – the poem that knows itself by knowing no one. Or as Rilke has it: 'no one’s sleep beneath so many lids…'"