and Rilke asserted that great lovers are able to recognize all three (life, love, and death) as part of a unity. In a 1923 letter to Nanny von Escher, Rilke confided: Two inmost experiences were decisive for their [i.e., The Sonnets to Orpheus and The Duino Elegies] production: The resolve that grew up more and more in my spirit to hold life open toward death,and on the other side, the spiritual need to situate the transformation of love in this wider whole differently than was possible in the narrower orbit of life (which simply shut out death as the other). The Fifth Elegy is largely inspired by Pablo Picasso's 1905 Rose Period painting Les Saltimbanques ("The Acrobats", also known as "The Family of Saltimbanques"), in which Picasso depicts six figures pictured "in the middle of a desert landscape and it is impossible to say whether they are arriving or departing, beginning or ending their performance". Rilke depicted the six artists about to begin their performance, and that they were used as a symbol of "human activity ... always travelling and with no fixed abode, they are even a shade more fleeting than the rest of us, whose fleetingness was lamented". Further, Rilke in the poem described these figures as standing on a "threadbare carpet" to suggest "the ultimate loneliness and isolation of Man in this incomprehensible world, practicing their profession from childhood to death as playthings of an unknown will ... before their 'pure too-little' had passed into 'empty too-much. Because of the profound impact that the war had on him, Rilke expressed hope that the task of the intellectual in a post-war world would be to render the world right, preparing people for those gentle transformations that lead to a more serene future. He envisioned the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus as part of his contribution. Influence The earliest published translation of the Duino Elegies was by Edward and Vita Sackville-West It was published in 1931 by Hogarth Press in England, and titled Duineser Elegien: Elegies from the Castle of Duino. As of 2014, at least 24 English-language translations had been published. Rilke is often seen as a spiritual guide in popular culture. In the United States, his poetry has been read as wisdom literature, and has been compared to the thirteenth-century Sufi (Muslim) mystic Rumi (1207–1273), and 20th century Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931). In popular