North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus, is about to release a very generous selection of the poetry of Rilke, German originals with the English translations on the facing page. The translator of this volume, The Poetry of Rilke, is Edward Snow. I can’t judge him as translator — my knowledge of German is limited to what I’ve picked up in years of Wagner listening — but I think his work stands up as poetry. Here’s a passage from his version of the tenth of the Duino Elegies:

How I will cherish you then, you grief-torn nights!
Had I only received you, inconsolable sisters,
on more abject knees, only buried myself with more abandon
in your loosened hair. How we waste our afflictions!
We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance,
hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they’re really
our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one
of the seasons of the clandestine year–; not only
season –: they’re site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.

This is an especially clear and powerful statement on Rilke’s part of the central humanistic/religious impulse. This drive toward meaning, which keeps mankind going, is based on the intuition that suffering is/will be, in some dimension, transfigured and contextualized, so that we can view it with a sort of compassion and love. In the first line of this elegy, Rilke envisions this happening “one day, at the end of the nightmare of knowing.” The self-conscious intellectual may bridle at this, and take it as an admission on Rilke’s part of religious obscurantism and abdication of reason. But even here, of course, there are different kinds of knowing; it’s not illegitimate for Rilke to guess that there may be a higher form than the one we take for granted. So is this intuition true? On this, I have no more information than anyone else. But the beauty of Rilke’s phrasing is a coin of some value.