Damion Searls won a 2007 NEA (National Endowment for the Arts grant) for his Rilke translations and a 2008 PEN Translation Fund award for his translations of the Dutch writer Nescio. He has also translated Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse. His translation of Rilke, The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, a translation of Proust’s On Reading, an abridged edition of Thoreau’s Journal, and a first book of fiction, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, will be published in 2009.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), one of the very greatest European poets, is most well known for his Duino Elegies, New Poems, Letters to a Young Poet, and novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Notes on the Melody of Things was written in the fall of 1898, when Rilke was 22 years old, and remained unpublished in his lifetime.