Monday 29 September 2014

Between the Pages

I was given this 1943 bilingual edition (translated by J-F Angelloz) of Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus by a generous bookseller a few years back.

I like these bilingual editions because, certainly with Rilke, the language is often too dense and deep for my limited knowledge of German.

I did not open the book immediately as one is not always in the mood to read Rilke.

Recently though I have been, and found these flowers in two places in the second and fifth Elegies, and in various sonnets.



My next task will be to try to identify the flowers to establish when in the year they were picked. Dating them would be more problematic but not impossible, though costly no doubt.

Then I can let my imagination run wild and tell the story of how they came to be there.


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