Who, if I screamed out, would hear me among the hierarchies But then you open an English version of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (say, for example, the one translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann): You assume that you are uniquely troubled. And yet, inexplicably, you harbor a weird affection for life in the abstract-a blue flame of gratitude for your place in the world-even when your insurance provider keeps you on hold for over an hour. Your job has recently siphoned off your last kilowatt of youth, Janet from Human Resources hasn’t replied to your Facebook missive, the bars in Flagstaff or Buffalo play the same three inane songs, and existence itself has begun to feel like a passive-aggressive feud.
Pretend, for a moment, that you are having a garden-variety emotional crisis. Along with Neruda, the Chilean bard, and Rumi, the Sufi mystic, Rilke is one of the few foreign poets to have made it big in America. Anyone who has scanned the poetry shelves of a well-stocked Barnes and Noble will have seen the name of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
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