Inner Sky @ World Literature Today

We're absolutely thrilled that World Literature Today made Inner Sky, our new translation of Rilke's selected poetry and prose, an Editor's Choice. “[Translator] Damion Searls admits that his selection of previously uncollected Rilke texts might seem like ‘a grab-bag of scraps’ (many of which were never published by Rilke himself), but his translator’s afterword casts a retrospective unity onto what might appear at first as a heterogeneous assemblage of texts. Searls calls his translation ‘a throwing of something over a wall or across a gap’ after Rilke’s notion of Hinüberwerfung, and argues that the poet’s creativity is itself a type of translation, ‘a gift from something external to where we are, something eternal.’ The Inner Sky is such a gift, and a tantalizing summons into the inner Rilke, ‘one last listening in / on the lost world we once lived within.’”