Back into the routine this week – 7am at my desk, entering into that place between dreams and waking where the writing seems to live. I watch the burnt orange sunrise and the jackdaws returning like a song, a score, streaming in single file to the beech trees outside my window. Then my second cup of coffee in the big mug with the speckled glaze, a chapter of my book (Samuel Pepy’s 1663 diaries right now) and a walk out with the dog, whatever the weather. This is what it is to be alive in the winter, not powering into resolutions, but, for me, it is about searching for that mid-winter peace. So often I have gotten lost in the cold and the dark of January. So often I have found myself winter-sick and waiting daily for spring. This year I decide to bed into…

What better way to start the 2023 than with a drop in by a poet who cares deeply about protection of the environment, Peter Clive.

As I write this, while recovering from the hangover I inflicted on myself at a New Year’s party celebrating the start of 2023, Europe is experiencing temperature anomalies that are alarming meteorologists and climate scientists. Records are falling across the continent as temperatures that exceed the average for this time of year by 15 Celsius degrees or more are measured. Although we are still in the depths of winter, the weather is unseasonally warm. And if we were to add these increments of 15 Celsius degree or more to the temperatures we expect for summer, the result is deeply unsettling. The party’s over, and has been for some time, and the longer we delude ourselves and remain indifferent to the consequences of our recklessness…

NB This review first appeared in a shortened form on the Agenda Magazine website.

Rilke in Paris, Rainer Maria Rilke & Maurice Betz, tr. Will Stone (French original 1941; Pushkin Press, 2019).

The argument of Maurice Betz’s memoir on Rilke’s various residencies in Paris between 1902 and 1914 is that the young poet’s experience of the French capital is what turned him into a great poet. Betz worked closely with Rilke on French translations of his work (particularly his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)). Will Stone’s excellent translation of Betz’s 1941 book, Rilke a Paris, elegantly encompasses its wide range of tones from biographical precision, to gossipy excitement and critical analysis. The book particularly focuses on Rilke’s struggle over a period of eight years to complete the novel which is autobiographical in so many ways, as Betz puts it “in effect a transcription of his…

Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. Matthew Barton (Shoestring Press, 2019).

Matthew Barton himself raises the question as to whether anything could “possibly justify yet another English version” of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1922). As someone who has contributed his own translation of the work (published by Enitharmon Press in 2006), I know the feeling of throwing a pebble into a landslide. But – as Barton also argues – it is at least our own pebble and Rilke’s work both allows and demands further translation and discussion; it is without doubt complex, profound and obscure enough. Perhaps the question for the would-be translator is more about the time and energy spent on such a widely available text when other works by other poets languish untranslated. But for Barton – as I guess it was for me – it is a personal issue and we are assuredly thankful to those…

Idris Parry writes in the current PN Review (March/April 2015) comparing Rilke’s Duino Elegies with the Sonnets to Orpheus. The poet always spoke of the sonnets as subsidiary to the elegies, but Parry argues that while the elegies “talk about” the poet’s task, the sonnets perform it. I’d agree and, in translating both in the last 20 years or so, I have come to prefer the vivid enactments of the sonnets. Parry explores Rilke’s response to Rodin in Paris in 1902. What struck Rilke was Rodin’s “dark patience which makes him [as creative artist] almost anonymous”. What the young poet learned was to pursue an “unhurried and uncommitted exposure to experience” (Parry’s words). This is opposed to impatience which is (contra-Keats) an irritable reaching after clarity: “making up your mind before the event instead of letting the event shape your mind” (Parry again).

Rilke’s “praise” is just this acceptance…