Sonnets to Orpheus: A New Translation (Bilingual Edition) - Softcover

Rilke, Rainer Maria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1958972398 ISBN 13: 9781958972397

Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing, 2024

Synopsis

2025 Indie Book Awards Finalist | Poetry

“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.

About this title

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

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Why Rilke?

You, my friend, are lonely, because . . .
We make the world our own bit by bit,
with words and gestures, we who are
perhaps its weakest and most dangerous part.
—Rilke, from The Sonnets to Orpheus I. 16

In a time when many have lost faith in how to live in creative and resilient ways, Rilke’s voice offers direction, encouragement, and meaning.

The supreme poet of the inner worlds, he identified the unsettling pressures of loneliness as the gnawing malaise of modernity, voicing in The Sonnets to Orpheus the resonance of meaning and connection we long for. How are we to do this?

By learning to “make the world our own” through the “words and gestures” by means of which we come to indwell our lives in abundance and scarcity. And through living into the fulness of our embodied selves. “Dance the orange,” he cries, and means by this that we have the capacity to savor this life for all that it offers—of sweet and bitter, joy and sorrow, beauty and terror. The Sonnets to Orpheus sound this call.

Edition details

• Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1958972398
• ISBN 13: 9781958972397
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 190