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.

Author: Ernst Jandl
Translator: Joshua Weiner
Booklet, 52 pp, 7 x 5.25 in
Language: English / German
ISBN: 979-8-9991646-8-1
Released: December 8, 2025
Publisher: The Economy Press

$20

︎︎︎Catalog