The Ordinary Rilke

Author: Ernst Jandl

Translator: Joshua Weiner

Publisher: The Economy Press (2025)

Both homage and interrogation, Ernst Jandl’s der gewöhnliche rilke (written in the early 1980s) comically subverts the metaphysics of the great German-language poet, returning him to his ordinary existence while also acknowledging Rilke’s centrality to European modernism.

The mythic aura of Rilke is destroyed; what emerges is the Rilke of everyday life; what we discover is a new illumination, a new pathos for Rilke himself, in all the simple difficulty of being a body in space and time.

Jandl’s German original and Weiner’s English translation appear en face.