Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus: A Translation in Sonnet Form

For ten years, Rilke struggled to create the Duino Elegies: a cycle of ten unrhymed, free-form poems. By contrast, the fifty-five Orphic sonnets presented here were composed in just three weeks, in and as the wake of the final elegy. In this, the first sonnet-form translation to appear in print since 1960, the translator has sought to retain the musicality of the poems, to hew as closely as possible to the rigid and constricting rhythm and rhyme schemes through which Rilke proclaims the 'task of the poet': to listen to being in a most unique way, and to undertake the mystical work of inhabiting and praising the wonder of being as it saturates and transcends the here and now. The eternal questions of time, death, God and meaning are answered as they always must be: by an appeal to the ideals of beauty and love.

Author: Rainer Maria Rilke, Nancy Billias

Publisher: Dream Abbey Llc

Publication Date: Aug 01, 2023

Number of Pages: 162 pages

Language: English

Binding: Paperback

ISBN-10: 1951105087

ISBN-13: 9781951105082