Rilke’s Testament opens with the outbreak of WWI, a devastating world event that prevents the poet from returning to the “incomparable city of Paris,” and which is entwined with his own debilitating crises.
In this decisive period, before which recovery or death waits, Rilke undergoes a kind of auto-da-fé and gives us a record of his failure and achievement. With insights into what he called his peculiar fate, the poet forges a will and testament, which he says “will remain his last, even if his heart still faced many years of challenges ahead.” Is this the final word on his struggle between love in life and love transformed into the mosaic of art?
Written while suffering an impasse with the Duino Elegies and just before he and Merline Klossowska discover the Chateau de Muzot, which would become a fertile sanctuary for the nomadic poet, Rilke turns to translation as a pontifex to carry him through the muteness of his crises. Having at last opened some free associative realm, he begins sketching terse reflections, lyrical draft letters, and dense, wistful prose, fragmentary writings that speak to the powers of destruction and creation.
Long secret, this enigmatic and charged series of experimental texts is the record of the close of a remarkable winter, wherein the work of poetry, the artist’s struggle with life, is tested in the crucible of solitude and the sinister expanse of blank pages. An illuminating ars poetica, Rilke’s Testament constitutes the mortal risk of not going beyond love, and the risk of the potential death of the artist, where the silencing of the logos puts creative potency under threat.
This world premiere English translation also includes essays on politics, poetry, sound, the sacred and sexuality, and the complete poem sequence “From the Literary Estate of Count C.W.," all works dating from the 'testament years.' The Testament (& Other Texts) documents a creative interregnum and is the dark passageway between the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus.
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