In 1922, annus mirabilis for literature, R. M. Rilke completes the "Duino Elegies," one of the greatest poetic compositions of the 20th century: The metaphysics of falling and rising of man through the allegorical images of the acrobat who wants to ascend and the angel descending to earth, to continue a performance with marionettes. And still, the metaphysics of death: the inevitable journey to the place of grief in ten elegiac images for the sorrow after the end of the First World War, when no one suspects the monstrosity that will follow two decades later.

In 1966, hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic in Paris, P. Celan attempts to rewrite the "Elegies of Rilke" under the new grief of loss and the survivor's remorse (losses include the mistreatment of the German mother tongue). He designs hundreds of poems and isolates eleven of them, perhaps eleven fragmentary elegies, or a fragmented eleventh one, with the significant title "Eingedunkelt" (Immersed in the Night). Dark poems, closed, with anxious breath, almost untranslatable. Immersed - after the Holocaust - is the power of the "keys," of salvation, promised by Jesus to Peter (Matthew 16:19).

This book presents in an introductory study the "dialogue" of the two greatest poets of the 20th century on the metaphysics and ontology of death. Following in a bilingual edition are the "Duino Elegies" by Rilke, while the introductory study includes excerpts (in both languages) from Celan's planned response, from the eleven poems of the cycle "Eingedunkelt."