If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke’s Book of Hours by Wally Swist

Name: If You're the Dreamer, I'm the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke's Book of Hours by Wally Swist
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Capturing the elusive spiritual quality of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry is an ambitious poetic endeavor. In If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream, Wally Swist gifts readers of English with a transcendental bridge between languages, an artful unveiling of Rilke’s The Book of Hours in contemporary English.

Swist is no mere translator, but rather an interpreter of spiritual and poetic landscapes, embodying Rilke’s mystical search for the divine in the everyday. Whether it’s the “dark hours of my being” or the contemplation of the “great dawn,” Swist navigates Rilke’s complex imagery with a clarity that illuminates Rilke’s contemplative depth”

in them, as in old letters,

I have found my daily life already lived,

and, like a legend, far and subdued.

Swist’s engagement with Rilke’s elusive work reflects a life-long journey of existential discovery for Swist and the poet he has become. The collection reveals not only a profound respect for Rilke’s original text but an impassioned response to its timeless inquiries into life, death, and the divine:

I know: all the roads lead there

to the arsenal of all unlived things . . .

This book is a testament to the power of translation as an act of re-creation, of giving breath to another poet’s temporally bound words. Swist, with a witty blend of reverence and innovation, offers a Rilke who speaks directly to the contemporary soul, urging readers to find their own pilgrimages within these pages. If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream stands as an invitation to wander, to wonder, and to witness the transformation of language and spirit.

—David Breeden, Senior Minister, First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, whose new book, Radical Noticing, is forthcoming from Shanti Arts

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If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke’s Book of Hours

by Wally Swist

Full-length, Paper

979-8-89990-228-4

2025

Rilke’s The Book of Hours is best stated by Wolfgang Leppmann in his inestimably valuable biography of Rilke, entitled Rilke: A Life (New York: Fromm International, 1984). This paragraph is quoted from page 115:

“With the New Poems, the Duino Elegies, and the Sonnets to Orpheus, the Book of Hours is one of the masterworks of modern German poetry. It’s title is taken from the “livres d’heures,” breviaries compiled for lay worship and often ornamented with means of structuring the devotional day. Taken together, Rilke’s poems do represent a spiritual journal . . . The sense of breviary is underscored by a fictional device that is followed consistently in the first book, sporadically preserved in the second, and abandoned in the third: the individual poems are in fact prayers being recorded by a Russian monk in his cell.”

With this in mind, translating such a work into English is a humbling task. Although, as Leppmann posits, the quality of the lyric is masterful, and taken with Rilke’s early insights into spirituality, since these were poems written when he was still a young man, aim high to articulate what is the unspoken inviolate streaming of the deep and expansive spirit, so to attempt to translate that into English is to craft, at best, as a translator, Rilke’s inner angel as well as yours and mine, so the difficulty is in each detail, and angels, as we well know, love to dance on the head of a pin.

Wally Swist’s Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as co-winner in the 2011 Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Contest. He was the 2018 winner of the Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Prize, by unanimous judging, for his collection A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poetry Regarding Birds and Nature (2019). Recent books include Awakening and Visitation (2020), Evanescence: Selected Poems (2020), and Taking Residence (2021), all with Shanti Arts.

His books of nonfiction include Singing for Nothing: Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir (Brooklyn, NY: The Operating System, 2018), On Beauty: Essays, Reviews, Fiction, and Plays (New York & Lisbon: Adelaide Books, 2018), and A Writer’s Statements on Beauty: New and Selected Essays and Reviews (Brunswick, ME: Shanti Arts, 2022). His translation of L’Allegria by Giuseppe Ungaretti was published by Shanti Arts in 2023.

Swist is a recipient of Artist’s Fellowships in poetry from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts (1977 and 2003).

His essays, poetry, and translations have appeared in Asymptote (Taiwan), Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation, Healing Muse, Hunger Mountain, La Piccioletta Barca (U.K.), The Montreal Review, Other Journal, Poetry London, Today’s American Catholic, Transference: A Literary Journal Featuring the Art & Process of Translation, (Western Michigan Department of Languages), Vox Populi, and Your Impossible Voice.

His book, Aperture, poems regarding caregiving his spouse through Alzheimer’s, was published in 2025 by Kelsay Books.