Notre travail rend compte de la double articulation d’analyse d’Antoine Berman dans Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne. La méthode bermanienne intègre tant une histoire, événementielle et individuelle, des traductions qu’une analyse des textes à la lumière de leurs entours (paratextes, projets de traduction, etc.). Dans une première partie, nous tenterons de décrire à l’aide d’un panorama historique l’importation de la poésie de Rilke en traduction française, des premières versions du début du XXe siècle aux dernières traductions des Élégies de Duino. Nous nous attacherons à l’identité des différents (re-)traducteurs et à l’horizon général de leur travail. Dans une seconde partie, nous comparerons plusieurs versions françaises de la première Élégie de Duino, oeuvre poétique de Rilke la plus retraduite en français. A travers différents critères touchant à la forme et au sens, nous saisirons l’apport de ces traductions et le lien qui les unit, afin de constater in fine si les comportements socio-culturels observés dans la première partie se matérialisent aussi dans la pratique des (re-)traducteurs duinésiens / This dissertation rests on the double articulation of Antoine Berman’s analysis of translation in Toward a translation criticism: John Donne. Indeed, Berman’s method integrates as well a macroscopic and individual history of translations as an analysis of texts, considering their peripheral features (paratexts, translation projects, etc.). In the first part, we will depict through a historical panorama the import of Rilke’s poetry in French, from the first versions of the early 20th century to the latest translations of the Duino Elegies. We will thereby give heed to the identity of the different (re-)translators and to the general horizon of their translations. In the second part, we will compare several French versions of the first Duino Elegy, Rilke’s most retranslated poetical opus in French. Through various criteria dealing with form and sense, it will be a question of comprehending what these translations bring and the kind of bond holding them together. We intend eventually to find out whether the sociocultural behaviors we noticed in the first part are also observable in the practices of the Duinesian (re-)translators.

Part 1: ‘True Receivers': Rilke and the Contemporary Poetics of Listening In this part of this thesis I argue that a contemporary ‘poetics of listening' has emerged in the UK, and explore the writing of three of our most significant poets - John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson - to find out why they have become interested in the idea of the poet as a ‘listener'. I suggest that the appeal of this listening stance accounts for their engagement with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, who thought of himself as a listening ‘receiver'; it is proposed that Rilke's notion of ‘receivership' and the way his poems relate to the earthly (or the ‘non-human') also account for the general ‘intensification' of interest in his work. An exploration of the shifting status of listening provides context for this study, and I pay particular attention to the way innovations in audio and communications technology influenced Rilke's late sequences the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. A connection is made between Rilke's ‘listening poetics' and the ‘listening' stance of Ted Hughes and Edward Thomas; this establishes a ‘listening lineage' for the contemporary poets considered in the thesis. I also suggest that there are intriguing similarities between the ideas of listening that are emerging in contemporary poetics and Hélène Cixous' concept of ‘écriture féminine'. Exploring these similarities helps us to understand the implications of the stance of the poet-listener, which is a counter to the idea that as a writer you must ‘find your voice'. Finally, it is proposed that ‘a poetics of listening' would benefit from an enriched taxonomy. Part 2 of the thesis is a collection of my poems entitled ‘Small Weather'.