Sonnets to Orpheus - by Rainer Maria Rilke (Paperback)

About the Book

"On the centennial of the first appearance (1923) of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, award-winning translator Mark Burrows reveals their depth and meaning with a brilliant new introduction and translation. This new translation captures the lyric beauty of Rilke's poems, honoring their syntactic peculiarities and grammatical complexities as few translators have dared to do. Burrows' versions maintain the essential strangeness of language and abruptness of metaphor by which the sonnets attain their distinctive character in German. Burrows' approach replicates what one reviewer describes as the poems' "dazzling obscurity," refusing to resolve the deliberate difficulties Rilke's formulations present. The effect invites readers to linger with these sonnets, allowing themselves to be shaped in their encounter with them"--

Book Synopsis

"Rilke's voice from the last tumultuous young century reaches tenderly into ours. But his lush German is a language of its own. Mark Burrows has a rare gift to coax it faithfully into English. I am delighted, and so very grateful for this book." -Krista Tippett, host of "On Being"

On the centennial of the first appearance (1923) of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, award-winning translator Mark Burrows reveals their depth and meaning with a brilliant new introduction and translation.

This new translation captures the lyric beauty of Rilke's poems, honoring their syntactic peculiarities and grammatical complexities as few translators have dared to do. Burrows' versions maintain the essential strangeness of language and abruptness of metaphor by which the sonnets attain their distinctive character in German. Burrows' approach replicates what one reviewer describes as the poems' "dazzling obscurity," refusing to resolve the deliberate difficulties Rilke's formulations present. The effect invites readers to linger with these sonnets, allowing themselves to be shaped in their encounter with them.

Review Quotes

"In Mark Burrows' translation of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, we find a unique blend of scholarship and tenderness, music and sophistication. "A breath of nothing. A blowing in god. A wind." (I.3) The sonnets themselves are famously obscure, and this new translation does not try to expose that which was meant to be hidden or domesticate the difficult. 'Hardly anyone helped those who were the first riskers, ' Burrows renders II.24, and in so doing, brings his readers into the original risk of Rilke's voice, given anew-fresh and strange--for readers today. We hear the original music in these resonant translations, and the music reaches in and makes new music within the reader." --Páaacute;draig Ó Tuama, poet, peace activist, and host of "Poetry Unbound"

"Mark S. Burrows displays a double fidelity to Rilke's poetic genius and inimitable mystical depth in this remarkable rendition of the Sonnets. His deft attention to the secret music of Orpheus has created a gem of auditory imagination." --Richard Kearney, philosopher and author of Poetics of Imagining and the novel Salvage

"'Our life goes forth with transformation' this phrase is the watchword for Mark Burrows' fresh translation of Rilke's great poetic cycle, the Sonnets to Orpheus. With remarkable precision, Burrows renders the sense and feel of the original, its urgent language and shape-shifting metaphors. He brings to life again Rilke's endeavor to show how poetry is a way of living more fully the complexities and questions of our time on earth. In the revealing Introduction and Afterword that accompany the poems, he suggests how these sonnets seize us with language before we understand them, reminding us of Rilke's remarkable--and ceaseless to the point of obsessive--revisiting of the theme of transformation and the presence of now." --Hilary Davies, poet, essayist, and literary critic, and author of Exile and the Kingdom

"This is the translation of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus I have been waiting for. Finally, the poetry sings in English through the many finely tuned phrases and nuanced lines of another poet. That said, Mark Burrows is not afraid to let the unaccommodated strangeness of the original German darkly shine through his translations: those moments where Rilke pushes his language to the limit are captured in all their dazzling obscurity. No difficulties are easily resolved here, as so often in other translations, and the reader is thus allowed to read her way to a response and to be shaped in the precious moment of her uncertainty. As much as these versions register the lyrical beauty of the originals, they are also receptive to their dark and open spaces. They put themselves in danger there and in that place 'a temple is built in [our English] hearing.' In this way these translations initiate us into the mystery of Rilke's poems: they touch the hem of God's obscure presence in them. In fact, the German work finds itself here 'more truly and more strange, ' like Wallace Stevens' Hoon. For it is at the turning point of change--in 'the flame / in which what's taken from [us] brims with transformations'--that we see 'the shaping spirit' of the poetry at work. Burrows has, for English speakers, allowed the sonnets to be 'a ringing glass that shattered sounding forth.' These versions resound with 'unending praise' that completes the eternal moment of creation: the earth made invisible fo

About the Author

Mark S. Burrows is a Rilke scholar, award-winning translator, and poet, and his academic and popular writing explores the intersection of spirituality and the arts. A winner of the Witter Bynner Prize in Poetry, his poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in the US and abroad. Known internationally for his work on Rilke, he is the translator of Rilke's Prayers of a Young Poet, which includes many of Rilke's best-loved poems that later appeared in The Book of Hours. He has also co-authored three volumes of poems inspired by Meister Eckhart, most recently Meister Eckhart's Book of Darkness and Light. www.soul-in-sight.org