READING AND CONVERSATION | Rainer Maria Rilke, The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams
An Evening with Editor and Translator Damion Searls.
The Austrian Cultural Forum New York presents The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, a recently published selection of pieces by Bohemian-Austrian author Rainer Maria Rilke and winner of the 2007 National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Grant in Translation. Editor and translator Damion Searls will discuss various issues of translation and read excerpts from the book.
This is not just another Rilke volume. This selection of shorter works – many of them prose, the majority of which have never before been translated into English – reveals exciting new facets of the great poet’s creativity. With The Inner Sky, Rilke is not playing his usual role of channeling the gods, but looks up from a book, muses about the girls of his Czech homeland, shares his hallucinatory dreams, and describes the olfactory pleasures of keeping lemons on his writing desk in winter.
In harmony with the more personal, vulnerable material, Searls’s translation gives a new voice to Rilke in English; one which is neither foggy and oracular, nor precise and narrow, but mystical via the concrete, as in Dickinson or Hopkins. The book also contains a detailed afterword on the art of translation.
“Searls wipes clean the often-foggy lens through which non-German readers of Rilke have hitherto experienced him, and the result feels like a dream in which you can understand perfectly a language you didn’t think you knew. Rilke’s thrilling precision and disorientations and purposefulness are all suddenly there in English.”
– Jonathan Franzen
“Reading these pages is like pulling out your pockets expecting to find nothing but lining, and discovering instead a neglected roll of bills. Pieces of Rilke’s oeuvre have been led out of the shadows [in an] original and revelatory translation to alter our understanding of the whole.”
– William H. Gass
Rainer Maria Rilke was a Bohemian-Austrian writer. After an unhappy childhood and an ill-planned preparatory education, Rilke began a life of wandering that took him across Europe. His visits to Russia inspired his first serious work, the long poem cycle The Book of Hours (1905). For 12 years his
center was Paris, where he did some research on Rodin and developed a new style of lyrical poetry that attempted to capture the plastic essence of a physical object. Duino Elegies (1923) and Sonnets to Orpheus (1923) brought him international fame.
Damion Searls is a writer, editor, and translator. He has translated Marcel Proust, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann and Nobel Prize winners Andre Gide and J.M.G. Le Clezio; his most recent translation from German was Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key, which Francine Prose praised on the front page of the New York Times Book Review as a “masterpiece” in an “eloquent translation.”
Moderator: Esther Allen is a translator and one of America’s leading champions of translation. She has directed the PEN Translation Fund since it was founded in 2003, was the first Executive Director of the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia when it was founded in 2005, and co-founded, with Salman Rushdie and Michael Roberts, the PEN World Voices festival of international literature in 2004. In 2006, she was named a “Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des letters” in recognition of her work to promote a culture of translation in the United States.
VENUE
ACFNY