Rainer Maria Rilke
The Testament

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Testament opens with the outbreak of WWI, a devastating world event that prevents the poet from returning to the “incomparable city of Paris,” and which is entwined with his own debilitating crises.

Composed in the third person, The Testament is a kind of auto-da-fé and intimate account of the poet’s failure and achievement. With insights into what he called his peculiar fate, the poet forges a kind of will and testament, which he says “will be his Last, even if his heart still faces the task of many years.” Is this the final word on his struggle between love in life and love transformed into the mosaic of art?

Made up of journal entries, lyrical “draft letters,” and prose poems, these writings speak to the powers of destruction and creation and the very crisis of creativity. Written while unable to continue work on his Elegies and just before he and Merline Klossowska discover the Chateau de Muzot, which would become a fertile sanctuary for the nomadic poet, Rilke turns to translation as a pontifex to carry him through the muteness of his crises.

Long secret, this enigmatic and enthralling mosaic of experimental prose is a record of the close of a remarkable winter, the description of a failure, a horrible and distressing loss. A central poetic document in its own right, Rilke’s Testament constitutes the mortal risk of not going beyond love and the experience of creative crisis.