Roses - 9780989640107

Poetry. Translations from the French and the German, introduction, and essays by David Need. Drawings by Clare Johnson. ROSES is a fine press, limited edition book with translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's late French language suite. The sequences, written over the last four years of his life, were a new beginning for him following the completion of theDuino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. Less often translated than his other work, and in general brief, the work nevertheless carries forward the aesthetic project of his major work in German. The translation of the posthumously published sequence Les Roses is offered here alongside an accompanying set of pen and ink drawings by Seattle artist Clare Johnson. Also included is translator David Need's essay on the motif of the rose in Rilke's poetry, as well as a translation of numerous German language poems in which Rilke turns to and stages the figure of the rose—that thing that we are like that is both impossibly interior, and yet also thrown out into and at stake in the world.