From Notebooks and Personal Papers

<p>Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is recognized as one of the great poets of 20th century European modernism. From 1921-1926 he lived in southern Switzerland in a region called the Valais. Following the completion of the <em>Duino Elegies</em> and <em>Sonnets to Orpheus</em> Rilke began to work in both French and German. A collection of French poems addressed to the landscape of Valais <em>Quatrains Valaisans</em> was published in 1926. In May of that same year Rilke sent his publishers an arrangement of German language poems as a possible manuscript; the bulk of these date to 1924 but the collection included both material culled from a recently recovered 1906 daybook and a final set of poems written over the last two years of his life. Rilke sent the last of these in August 1926; he would die of complications from leukaemia just four months later.<br />      This volume is the first English translation of these poems in the arrangement Rilke had set down in 1926. The arrangement translated here has only appeared in German as <em>Aus Taschen-Büchern und Merk-Blättern</em> (Insel-Verlag 1950).<br /> </p>