Book Review

Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke: A 150th Anniversary Reader. Translated by Donald Mace Williams

The sesquicentennial of Rainer Maria Rilke’s birth in 1875 has inspired several new translations and critical re-evaluations of his work, a fitting testament to his enduring stature as one of the defining lyric poets of European modernism. Donald Mace Williams’s Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke: A 150th Anniversary Reader positions itself within this moment of commemoration. The volume offers a curated selection of poems from The Book of Hours, The Book of Pictures, the two volumes of New Poems, a range of uncollected works, and The Sonnets to Orpheus. It aims, in the translator’s own words, to bring to Anglophone readers “some of the best” of Rilke’s shorter lyric poems, which, even when overshadowed by the monumental Duino Elegies, remain central to his artistic legacy.

This collection is significant for several reasons. First, it marks an anniversary edition designed not for the specialist alone but for a wider audience of readers who may be encountering Rilke for the first time or returning to him with fresh eyes. Unlike comprehensive translations such as Edward Snow’s The Poetry of Rilke or J. B. Leishman’s earlier bilingual volumes, Williams’s Reader is selective. Its strength lies in emphasising Rilke’s lyric breadth across genres and stages of his career, from mystical prayer-poems to crystalline object-poems, from meditations on love and death to studies of art and myth.

Second, the inclusion of both canonical texts—“The Panther,” “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” “Autumn Day”—and lesser-known pieces such as “Song of the Orphan” or “From a Childhood” demonstrates an editorial intention to juxtapose Rilke’s iconic and intimate registers. This gives the reader a sense of the poet’s stylistic range while still highlighting recurring motifs of solitude, transformation, mortality, and art’s redemptive power. Williams’s choice of English titles sometimes diverges from precedent in telling ways: for example, his “Song of the Orphan” renders Das Lied der Waise more plainly than Snow’s “The Orphan Girl’s Song.” The shift from “girl” to the more generic “orphan” subtly alters the poem’s affective centre. Similarly, Williams translates Das Lied des Trinkers as “The Toper’s Song,” a rare Anglicism that differs from Snow’s familiar “The Drunkard’s Song.” These lexical inflections are more than quirks; they reveal Williams’s commitment to refreshing Rilke’s idiom in English even at the risk of strangeness.

Williams’s preface is candid about the challenges he faced: he is not a native German speaker and acknowledges the risk of grammatical missteps, though he subjected his work to comparison with other translations, especially Snow’s. What distinguishes his approach, however, is his insistence on preserving Rilke’s metrical and musical qualities. As he argues, “to ignore the meter in translating is like ignoring the tune of a song” (p. xiii). Unlike many translators who opt for prose renderings or loosely structured free verse in English, Williams retains metrical patterns and, wherever possible, rhyme schemes. This emphasis on music shapes both his diction and his lineation. The volume repeatedly opts for slant rhymes and rhythmic cadences that echo, without fully replicating, the acoustic texture of Rilke’s German.

This fidelity to musicality is one of the book’s major contributions. The translations often read with a clarity and rhythm that convey the incantatory character of Rilke’s German originals. For example, in “I live out my life in widening rings” (Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen), Williams maintains the circular cadence through his balanced rhymes and measured line breaks. Similarly, his version of “The Panther” succeeds in evoking both the hypnotic repetition of the imprisoned animal’s pacing and the sudden intensity of vision that Rilke condenses in his final stanza. The results are particularly striking when set beside Mitchell’s freer renderings, which privilege fluid readability, or Snow’s highly literal translations, which often keep the German syntactic structure even at the expense of rhythm.

Yet this strategy is not without compromise. Williams openly admits to employing slant rhymes where exact rhymes would distort meaning. Purists might object to these deviations, but they demonstrate a pragmatic attempt to balance sense and sound—a negotiation intrinsic to the art of translation itself. The resulting verse, while sometimes plain in comparison to Rilke’s density, achieves a singable quality that justifies his approach.

Placed alongside major collections such as Snow’s The Poetry of Rilke or Stephen Mitchell’s Ahead of All Parting, Williams’s Reader distinguishes itself less by comprehensiveness than by intimacy. Snow’s versions are authoritative in their accuracy and philological grounding, Mitchell’s in their fluidity and accessibility. Williams, by contrast, situates himself as a poet-translator deeply invested in rhythm and song. This makes his translations especially suited for oral reading, for hearing Rilke’s verse as music rather than treating it purely as textual artefact.

The selection also differs in scope: while Snow offers virtually the entire corpus of Rilke’s poetry, Williams chooses representative works from six key groupings, including a notable emphasis on uncollected poems. The latter, often overlooked, enrich the English-language reader’s understanding of Rilke as an experimental poet whose output was not confined to his major published volumes. Here too, Williams diverges from his predecessors. Leishman’s mid-twentieth-century volumes (Poems 1906–1926) remain monumental for their breadth, but they focus almost exclusively on Rilke’s published works. Mitchell’s anthology offers selections weighted toward the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. Williams, in contrast, devotes considerable space to short, fragmentary, and often untitled lyrics, signalling an editorial vision that sees Rilke’s corpus not as a canon of monuments but as a field of moments, moods, and lyrical flashes.

This editorial ethos is reinforced by the visible paratextual choices of the book. Many poems are presented as “Untitled,” with the translator’s provisional title supplied in square brackets. This practice foregrounds the fragmentary quality of Rilke’s shorter lyrics, refusing to smooth over the fact that several of them circulated without stable titles. Snow, by contrast, generally adopts fixed English titles, and Mitchell consistently opts for fluid English headings. Williams’s willingness to leave the poems untitled—with English descriptors only as guides—creates a different readerly experience: one is invited to hear these lyrics as moments of emergence rather than as canonical artefacts.

Among the improvements this edition offers is the deliberate pairing of German originals with English translations on facing pages. This bilingual format encourages active engagement, allowing readers with some German to test Williams’s interpretive decisions and giving all readers a sense of the original’s cadence and imagery. The clarity of the design, aided by Vivian Freeman Chaffin’s layout, makes the book visually inviting. Here Williams aligns with Snow’s bilingual practice but differs from Mitchell, whose Ahead of All Parting is largely monolingual. In this way, Williams positions his Reader at the intersection of accessibility and seriousness: approachable for new readers, yet retaining the German text for those who wish to probe further.

Williams’s translations often display a concise lyricism that avoids the overly ornate diction occasionally found in Mitchell’s versions. For instance, his rendering of “Autumn” (Herbst) captures the stark simplicity of Rilke’s falling leaves without diluting their existential resonance. Similarly, “Autumn Day” (Herbsttag) emerges with a poignant urgency that resists sentimentality. At the same time, some renderings reveal the risks of plainness. “In the Deep Nights” (In tiefen Nächten) spreads Rilke’s compressed imagery into a looser English rhythm, and the last stanza feels flatter than in Snow’s more literal but denser phrasing. Likewise, “The Angels” (Die Engel), while graceful, loses some of the “mysterious gravity” that other translators capture, especially in handling the phrase “wie viele, viele Intervalle / in seiner Macht und Melodie.”

Moreover, Williams’s candid admission of his limited German grammar raises questions of authority. While his reliance on Snow’s translations as a check adds reliability, the occasional errors he himself acknowledges suggest that readers should treat his work as interpretive rather than definitive. For academic scholarship, Snow remains indispensable. Still, Williams offers something unique: his translations are not designed as philological reference points but as living poems for the ear.

Another limitation lies in the absence of substantial critical apparatus. Beyond the brief introduction, the volume offers no detailed commentary, notes, or contextualisation. While this keeps the text accessible, it risks under-serving advanced readers who may wish for interpretive guidance on Rilke’s philosophical, theological, or art-historical allusions. By contrast, Snow provides extensive notes and commentary, and Mitchell, though lighter in apparatus, often frames his selections with contextual introductions. Future editions might expand on this foundation by including an extended critical introduction situating Rilke within broader literary modernism, as well as notes elucidating difficult passages. Williams’s own reflections as a poet-translator could also enrich the reader’s appreciation of the translation process. Given the volume’s anniversary context, some commentary on Rilke’s continued relevance in the 21st century—his influence on poets, artists, and thinkers—would strengthen its cultural resonance.

Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke: A 150th Anniversary Reader is a valuable addition to the ever-growing library of Rilke in English. While it cannot rival the scholarly comprehensiveness of Snow or the lyrical renown of Mitchell, it distinguishes itself through its commitment to rhythm, rhyme, and musicality, and through its thoughtful curation of canonical and lesser-known works. Its shortcomings—occasional plainness, lack of annotation, and minor linguistic uncertainties—do not undermine its central achievement: bringing Rilke’s lyric intensity to life in English verse that is both faithful and singable.

In pedagogical terms, this volume is likely to be useful in classrooms. Its manageable size and selection, combined with the musicality of the translations, make it a strong candidate for introducing Rilke to undergraduates or general readers. Its presentation of untitled fragments, its emphasis on musicality, and its occasionally unconventional English choices also encourage discussion of the complexities of translation itself, opening classroom space for students to compare versions and reflect on what is at stake in rendering Rilke into English.

As such, this Reader deserves to be read alongside existing translations, not only as a commemoration of Rilke’s 150th anniversary but as an experiment in the ongoing art of poetic translation. It reminds us that Rilke’s poems, endlessly retranslated, continue to demand and reward fresh attempts to catch their elusive music in another tongue.

Additional Information:

Title: Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke: A 150th Anniversary Reader.

Translated by Donald Mace Williams.

Stoney Creek Publishing. Wimberley Texas, 2025. ISBN 978-1-965766-34-7.

Donald Mace Williams is a retired newspaper writer and editor with a Ph.D. in Beowulfian prosody. His poems, some of them collected in The Nectar Dancer, have appeared in five dozen magazines. Wolfe, his epic adaptation of Beowulf, set in the  Old West, was released, along  with his prose memoir, in Wolfe and Being Ninety. Williams is ninety-five and still writing. He lives in Austin, Texas.