Home > Poetry > Herbst
profile/rainer-maria-rilke.md
Translated from the German by David Ferry
Published: Sun Apr 15 1990
Eva Lundsager, Were now like (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
AGNI 29 and 30 Print Only

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), born to a German-speaking family in Prague, was a prolific poet, essayist, critic, and correspondent who rarely did anything but write. Well-known for his restlessness, he often became dissatisfied with his current “home,” sometimes only days after moving there with his custom-made standing desk. Among many other places, he lived in Paris, most notably in 1902–03 when he worked for Auguste Rodin. Inspired by the great sculptor, he began to look at objects with an artist’s eye, and developed a new lyrical style in his so-called Dinggedichte, “thing poems.” During the last years of his life he lived mostly in Muzot, Switzerland, where he wrote 400 poems in French. Rilke died of leukemia in December 1926. His collections include The Book of ImagesNew Poems, the Duino Elegies, and the Sonnets to Orpheus.

David Ferry (1924–2023) was a profoundly influential poet and translator whose channeling of the ancient world reanimated some of the greatest classics of Western and Middle Eastern poetry. His final book, Some Things I Said, coedited by his close friend George Kalogeris and his children, Elizabeth and Stephen Ferry, reached his hands just days before he died at ninety-nine on November 5, 2023. Late work in Ferry’s case was great work. He completed his “vigorous, intimate” (New York Times) translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in his nineties (University of Chicago Press, 2017), and published Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (Chicago, 2012) in his eighties; it won the National Book Award in Poetry. Other volumes that feature his own poems include On This Side of the River: Selected Poems (The Waywiser Press [U.K], 2012), Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Chicago, 1999), and Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (Chicago, 1993). Other volumes of translation include The Georgics of Virgil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), The Eclogues of Virgil (FSG, 2000), The Odes of Horace (FSG, 1998), and Gilgamesh (FSG, 1992). In 2011 he received the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth B. Lilly Prize “for lifetime achievement.” A beloved member of our Boston community, he published in AGNI across three decades.

Ferry’s translation The Odes of Horace was reviewed in AGNI 48 by Christopher Davis.

Back to top