Rilke's 'left-handed lyre': Multilingualism and the Poetics of Possibility

This article traces the development of Rainer Maria Rilke's French verse in the context of his perceptions of language and translation and his emerging 'lyrische Zweisprachigkeit'. This is considered both in terms of his biographical trajectory, from the confines of the German-speaking minority in Prague, via the 'offene Welt' of Paris, to the neutral and multilingual environment of his last 'Schweizer Jahre', and in terms of an emerging 'poetics of absence' which leads to a search for new poetic possibilities and a quest for a tentative new beginning, both of which can be detected in his latest, French, poetry.