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    Sonnets to Orpheus
    Sonnets to Orpheus
    Sonnets to Orpheus
    Ebook148 pages1 hour

    Sonnets to Orpheus

    By Rainer Maria Rilke

    4.5/5

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    COMPOSED IN A BURST of inspiration near the end of the poet's life, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus represents the consummation of the writer's career, distilling the essence of his poetic wisdom in a gem-like sequence. This new translation--with the original German on facing pages--offers a clear window into the world of this endlessly scintillating cycle of poems.

    "Daniel Polikoff's English version of Rilke's last sonnet sequence, perhaps his greatest work, is wholly admirable. Rilke's late work is extremely difficult to penetrate. Both its conceptual nature and Rilke's unique use of the German language tend to resist interpretation. Astonishingly, Polikoff has found ways of rendering Rilke's complexities into English and also preserving his metrical and rhyme schemes. Such an accomplishment is possible only with a deep understanding of Rilke's vision and a knowledge of the root structure of German. Daniel Polikoff gives us Rilke in word and spirit in these splendid Sonnets."--LISEL MUELLER, National Book Award for Poetry (1981) for The Need to Hold Still; Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1997) for Alive Together: New & Selected Poems

    "Daniel Polikoff is the first to achieve the unimaginable: an English translation which brings the form and content of these Sonnets together into an organic confluence. These new translations lift our understanding of Rilke's spiritual and aesthetic inspiration up to a whole different level, one accessible for the first time to the English reader. As a professor of German literature who has taught these sonnets for over thirty years, I can only thank Daniel Polikoff for this phenomenal accomplishment. His version should serve as the new standard for Rilke translations and belongs on the bookshelves of every poetry lover."--LUDWIG MAX FISCHER, author of Seasons of the Soul: The Poetic Guidance of Herman Hesse

    "This is a uniquely faithful, skillful, and eloquent translation of one of the greatest poems of the 20th century. I salute Daniel Polikoff and recommend his wonderful work to all seekers and lovers of poetry."--ANDREW HARVEY, author of Teachings of Rumi
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAngelico Press
    Release dateFeb 28, 2015
    ISBN9781621381174
    Sonnets to Orpheus
    Author

    Rainer Maria Rilke

    Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and traveled throughout Europe for much of his adult life, returning frequently to Paris. There he came under the influence of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and produced much of his finest verse, most notably the two volumes of New Poems as well as the great modernist novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Among his other books of poems are The Book of Images and The Book of Hours. He lived the last years of his life in Switzerland, where he completed his two poetic masterworks, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukemia in December 1926.

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    Reviews for Sonnets to Orpheus

    4.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Probably the most infuriating book of poetry I've ever read, perhaps will ever read. The highs and lows are so dizzyingly high and so mind-numbingly, banally low that I couldn't always keep pace. The first and tenth elegies were high, the other elegies interesting and beautiful, if you can stomach the whole whiney little boy thing he falls into occasionally, and his affection for idiot-metaphysics ('Sein Aufgang ist Dasein' and so forth). Many of the sonnets, however, are appalling. Once Rilke ditches the generally critical stance of the elegies (complaints on injustice, suffering etc...) the idiot-metaphysics becomes overwhelming:

      "Be - and at the same time know the implication of non-being...
      to nature's whole supply of speechless, dumb,
      and also used up things, the unspeakable sums,
      rejoicing, add yourself and nullify the count."

      Not to say there aren't great sonnets in there too, but my overall impression was one of disgust at this wonderful poet - what's more human than poetry? - wanting to become an object, thrilling in a mysticism of death. Add this to the apparent desire for a god to save us from the injustice and suffering so perfectly evoked in the elegies (uh... couldn't we save ourselves?), and my brain explodes. Because the whole thing is so beautiful, and at once so horrible, that there's nothing else for my brain to do.
    • 4/5
      Rilke, in this comprehensive translation of two major works, crafts powerful yet elegant poetic odes to the majesty of the human experience and its relationship to the external world. A realm in which the human being exists in quandary and struggle. The translation is quite readable and often beautiful, but sometimes a little uneven. I would like to compare it to other translations.
    • 5/5
      For my taste this is not the best translation, but I do like certain parts. These are two of Rilke's major works (The third being the Book of Hours). I would not use this as my primary translation, but if you are looking for a second copy, this is more than adequate.
    • 4/5
      Obviously we should all read all of Rilke's poems... but the Sonnets to Orpheus would be the second work I would buy, right after the Book of Hours. I like having the parallel translations--I can sound out just enough German to appreciate some of the sonic work.

    Book preview

    Sonnets to Orpheus - Rainer Maria Rilke

    Sonnets to Orpheus

    Sonnets

    to

    Orpheus

    Rainer Maria Rilke

    Translated & Introduced by

    Daniel Joseph Polikoff

    First published in the USA

    by Angelico Press

    Translation and Introduction

    © Daniel J. Polikoff 2015

    All rights reserved

    No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission.

    For information, address:

    Angelico Press, Ltd.

    4709 Briar Knoll Dr. Kettering, OH 45429

    www.angelicopress.com

    Paperback: 978-1-62138-116-7

    Ebook: 978-1-62138-117-4

    Cover image: Orpheus

    Cima da Conegliano, Giovanni Battista (c. 1459–1517)

    Cover design: Michael Schrauzer

    CONTENTS

    Introduction

    Acknowledgments

    Sonnets to Orpheus

    First Part

    Second Part

    Notes

    Introduction

    THE GENESIS of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus is ineluctably tied to the travail involved in the writing of the poet’s other late masterpiece, the Duino Elegies. Sojourning at Duino Castle near Trieste in January of 1912, Rilke—deliberating a difficult business letter he’d just received—paced to and fro atop the limestone cliffs that buttress the castle high above the blue Adriatic. Suddenly, out of the stiff north wind, the voice of inspiration spoke to him: "Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungnen? (Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?"). By the end of that fateful day, the entire First Elegy had been completed, and the Second followed, with relative ease, shortly thereafter. Fragments of other elegies also materialized, along with a definite vision of the shape of the whole (there were to be ten elegies; no more, no less). Thus did the poet conceive of the work he consciously identified as his magnum opus, the great work that would fulfill his high poetic calling.

    Their auspicious beginning notwithstanding, completion of the Elegies proved fraught with delay and uncertainty. Rilke did manage to finish the Third Elegy in 1913 and—despite the chaos that gripped Europe in the form of the First World War—composed the Fourth in just two days in Münich in November of 1915. Nonetheless, the unrelenting violence of the war rent the poet’s inner as well as outer world; despite persistent efforts to make headway on the Elegies during and—especially—after the conflict, it was more than six long, conscience-ridden years before Rilke would be able to make further progress on the cycle.

    The advent of 1922 found the poet living (alone, more or less) in the Châteaux Muzot—a sort of miniature castle—in the bucolic Rhone Valley in the Swiss Valais. It was there, in the month of February, that Rilke would be destined, at long last, to accomplish his poetic mission. Yet as perhaps could have been expected, the long-sought consummation hardly proved a predictable affair. To the poet’s own astonishment, work on the Elegies was both preceded and succeeded by bursts of creative inspiration that birthed another, wholly unanticipated magnum opus. This unlooked-for gift of the gods was Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, an utterly remarkable poetic cycle that—still more than the heralded Elegies—culminates the poet’s fertile and varied literary career.

    The decisive creative storm commenced on February 2, at which time Rilke unexpectedly began writing sonnets. Still more unexpectedly, he did not stop for three days. That initial, dam-busting flood of poetic energy engendered twenty-five of the twenty-six sonnets that comprise the first part of Rilke’s two-part sonnet cycle. Then, on February 7, the poet turned with renewed energy back to the dormant Elegies. Rilke completed the cycle in the course of a week, writing several from whole cloth, and finishing (the greater part of) others. That was still not all, however; the poet’s muse had not yet sung her fill. In the course of another week—between February 15 and 23—Rilke composed the twenty-nine sonnets that comprise the second part of that miraculous, gem-like distillation of his life’s work, Sonnets to Orpheus.

    If unanticipated, the writing of the Sonnets was hardly unprepared. For well over a decade, the poet had been seriously interested in Petrarch, the originator of the sonnet form Rilke adopted (and, to some degree, transformed) in his cycle. In fact, shortly before conception of his Sonnets, Rilke had been preparing to translate Petrarch’s account of his historic ascent of Mt. Ventoux (an excursion often regarded as the symbolic beginning of the Renaissance). Relatedly, Rilke had long been involved in translating Michelangelo’s own Petrarchan sonnets.¹ The poet himself stated that work on those translations constituted the most regular part my occupation² during and immediately after World War I. It could hardly have been sheer coincidence that Rilke finished that translation project a little more than a month before his own Sonnets to Orpheus so suddenly arrived.

    As far as Orpheus himself is concerned, Baladine Klossowska, Rilke’s lover, played a leading role in making that mythic figure vividly present to the poet in the period leading up to composition of the Sonnets. While staying at the Schloß Berg near Zürich in the first half of 1921 (striving, unsuccessfully, to reignite work on the Elegies), Rilke read the French translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis Baladine (or, as the poet preferred to call her, Merline) had gifted him for Christmas. In the fall of that same year, Merline provided another crucial Orphic prop. On an excursion to Sion, the couple happened across a postcard reproduction of a drawing of Orpheus by the Renaissance artist Cima

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