Ruth Speirs

Who was Ruth Speirs, and why, given the superabundance of Rilke translations available, are we being offered “her” Rilke? It is not easy to find an answer to the first question, and the editors of this volume give only scant detail (we’re told more about them). The little they slip in is intriguing enough: she was born in Latvia in 1916, married the medieval historian John Speirs, spent the Second World War in Cairo – where she knew Bernard Spencer, Lawrence Durrell and other writers associated with the journal Personal Landscape, in which her Rilke translations first began to appear – and died in Highgate in 2000. Her papers were left to the University of Reading, where rather incongruously they occupy two boxes in the Museum of English Rural Life. From these her translations of Rilke have been meticulously extracted by John Pilling and Peter Robinson.