Duino Elegies

Long dissatisfied with the highly romantic and often obscure translations in English of Rilke’s great poem cycle, brother and sister Willam and Mary Crichton determined to work toward a translation that would be as straightforward and transparent, yet as lyrically beautiful as Rilke’s German original. Working over the years, the Crichtons have produced a work in English worthy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, written at Duino near Trieste beginning in 1912 and completed in Switzerland in 1922. Rilke considered this one of his greatest achievements. William Crichton lives in Toronto; Mary Crichton lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.