Reborn as René: The Interplay of Self and Language in a Selection of Rilke’s Late French and German Poems

Abstract

We rarely think of Rainer Maria Rilke as anything other than a great German poet. As a result, there has been a critical tendency to overlook the fact that Rilke is a great German poet who also wrote no less than four hundred and fifty poems in French, a language he only mastered in his twenties.1 In his monograph The Translingual Imagination, Steven Kellman speaks of such writers as ‘translingual’: “A majority of the world’s population is at least bilingual. Fortunately, few speakers are