Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Sonnets to Orpheus
    Sonnets to Orpheus
    Sonnets to Orpheus
    Ebook137 pages47 minutes

    Sonnets to Orpheus

    By Rainer Maria Rilke

    4.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Rainer Maria Rilke’s fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus were written over a few days in an astonishing burst of inspiration. Described by Rilke himself as “a spontaneous inner dictation,” the sequence is among the most famous works of modernist literature, and Christiane Marks’s fresh new translations succeed in evoking Rilke’s music—often sacrificed in translation—opening a new window on these poems, for old and new Rilke lovers alike. The result of nearly two decades of memorization, research, and fine-tuning, Marks’s translations, only the second by a woman and the first by a native German speaker, recapture Rilke’s astonishingly contemporary, often colloquial style.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Letter
    Release dateDec 10, 2019
    ISBN9781948830126
    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.

    Read more from Rainer Maria Rilke

    Related to Sonnets to Orpheus

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Poet’s Craft

      Jan 1, 2020

      To begin with a definition: A poem is a text structurally constrained by the repetition of any language element(s). The continuum of poetic constraint is extensive, stretching from operations that a reader will find completely imperceptible to overwh

      9 min read

    • Article

      On Louise Glück

      Dec 1, 2021

      I WAS LYING in bed late at night, woeful, confused by another death, this one the death of a close friend; the losses had been mounting steadily, a bewildering number of losses, each one specific, difficult to accept, hard to overcome, and I must hav

      12 min read

    • Article

      Poetry Rx: This Is the Year

      Jan 3, 2019

      Poetry Rx: This Is the Year
      7 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems by Sheri Benning

      Mar 9, 2021

      the baby, name lost. 1906. Spring born,almond and blackthorn in bloom. Meadowsweet,chickweed, petals of milk on her lips. Spider-silk saliva from mouth to crab apple fists,on Mother’s lap, the train from Kiev to Minskafter the last harvest in Tiegeno

      2 min read

    • Article

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      Moon river, swollen river, river of starholeand bright, harness river, lichen river,river we velvet with our filth.River of butter and river of witches, rivercracked open careful like egg, or burstapart, unleashing its violet load.River mouths, river

      2 min read

    • Article

      Clarice Lispector’s Children’s Story Taught Me to Read Her Like An Adult

      Mar 17, 2017

      Filmmaker Pedro Almodovar was asked to write an introduction to the translated edition of Clarice Lispector’s final novel Breath of Life. Instead of a formal introduction, his refusal letter was published and said this of Lispector’s work: “Each phra

      7 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Wilds Of Poetry

      Sep 1, 2018

      Ecopoetry not in the sense of poetry decorated somehow with landscape—bird or snake, river or mountain—but in the radical sense of poetry that weaves consciousness and landscape together, returning the human to “nature” and the “wild,” from which we

      11 min read

    • Article

      Where To Start With Louise Glück, Winner Of The 2020 Nobel Prize In Literature

      Oct 14, 2020

      The Swedish Academy has awarded this year's Nobel Prize in literature to Louise Gluck, a former U.S. poet laureate. The 16th woman to win the prestigious prize and the first American woman since Toni Morrison in 1993, Gluck is the author of 12 poetry

      3 min read

    • Article

      Fifteen Poets on Revision

      Feb 27, 2018

      After 17 drafts over two weeks, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” was completed on November 4, 1975. The poem began as notes, and evolved into a villanelle. She changed the title. She deleted words. She reached for possible rhymes. Brett Candlish Mil

      4 min read

    • Article

      Reconsidering Pablo Neruda in Light of ‘The Poet’s Calling’

      Jun 4, 2018

      When Pablo Neruda was expelled from France in 1952, he wrote this to his beloved countrymen in Chile: “The future of humanity may be endangered in the hands of a few evil men, but it does not belong to them. The future of man is ours, because we are

      4 min read

    • Article

      Think What a Poem Might Do: A Conversation with Jill Bialosky and Matthew Zapruder

      Aug 17, 2017

      What, if anything, do you think poetry can do for us in these difficult times? The post Think What a Poem Might Do: A Conversation with Jill Bialosky and Matthew Zapruder appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    • Article

      Ishion Hutchinson

      Jun 8, 2021

      Tremor in his hands. He turns obsoleteleaves edged with thunder since the opening scene.What he sees he reads under croton shade,out in the sun. Restless peninsula,dog-eared, melting off into the blue.The blue breaks white as hallucination,more hagga

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Sonnets to Orpheus

    4.5/5

    7 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Technically great, occasionally beautiful and thought-provoking, often silly imagery and it can be a bit of a drag. I prefer other Rilke.Regarding this edition, it features a Dutch translation & the original German right next to each other so you can fall back without having to use grab a dictionary; good presentation.
    • 3/5
      Even as the farmer labors
      there where the seed turns into summer,
      it is not his work. It is Earth who gives.

      Despite the parched ground it is but a shade of spring outside. The world appears geared to disrupt such edenic days with the distant rumble of foreign thunder and a blurred blunder on the button.

      There were flashes here which I truly admired but not others. My hazed judgement might conceal a concern or two -- perhaps it doesn't. This series didn't engender thought so I'm moving on.

    Book preview

    Sonnets to Orpheus - Rainer Maria Rilke

    TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

    Rainer Maria Rilke’s fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus, written down over a few days in an astonishing burst of inspiration, came to him in spoken form, as an interior dictation, completely spontaneous.¹ And what student of modern poetry does not recall that the beginning of the first Duino Elegy was uttered by a voice calling out of the storm as the poet walked the ramparts of Duino Castle: Who, if I cried out, would hear me from out of the ranks / of the angels? (Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen?). The mysterious words even suggest the dactylic meter used in most of the elegies. The bulk of the Sixth and Ninth Elegies was imparted to Rilke by an inner voice as he walked home from the post office one day. Both the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, composed simultaneously and considered by Rilke to be of one birth, and filled with the same essence, had their beginning in a very few weeks in February of 1922, in spoken form—as sound.²

    When the Elegies were completed, Rilke made a point of not sending them to his dear friend and benefactor, Princess Marie of Thurn and Taxis Hohenlohe, to whom they are dedicated, because he wanted her to hear them first, from his lips. Later, he wrote her that he did not recognize the full depth of his own sonnets until he had read them to her—again, experienced as sound.³ He often walked up and down, away from his stand-up desk and back, in composing his poetry, which would have encouraged rhythmic composition.⁴

    Since the sound and rhythm of his poetry were of such importance to Rilke, one of my first steps in translating them was to learn them by heart, so I would have them constantly accessible orally, even while ruminating on them away from my desk. Over the years, I spoke them to myself and occasionally to others in many different settings, open always to the mysterious message of sound and rhythm behind the meaning, grateful to have been familiar with those particular sounds and rhythms since childhood, since I share Rilke’s mother tongue. I tried to render the original not only accurately, but also in words chosen for sound, and metrically, since it is the meter which moves the poems along so beautifully. I did not have to render over-regular or mechanical-sounding meter, because Rilke uses it quite flexibly, often breaking the metric pattern to draw attention to special words and passages. However, he never wrote in free verse.

    Many of these sonnets address the reader directly, personally—as did that spontaneous, inner dictation addressed to the poet. Quite a few of them begin with a familiar du, dir or ihr (you, to you, you plural) or commands: horch, siehe, wolle (listen, look, wish for). This immediacy accounts for much of the poems’ appeal, as do the occasional colloquialisms like und ob!, dass ihrs begrifft!, wie aber, sag’ mir, soll, and wer weiss? (and how!’’; if only you could understand!; but how, tell me, can,; and who knows?") (I:3, I:5, I:16, II:20).

    Occasional particularly important words and phrases are italicized, receiving the emphasis they might in conversation, which adds to the spoken, spontaneous feel. Italicized words and phrases occur in no fewer than 18 of the sonnets. Important examples include I:8: Jubel weiss (Jubilation knows); I:12: Die Erde schenkt (they are earth’s gift); I:14: Sind sie die Herrn (Are they the masters); II:2: den wirklichen Strich (the true line); and II:2: Zwar war es nicht (True, it did not exist.) In some cases, English syntax or meter has required a slight shift of the emphasis. Sonnet II:5, a particularly intense one, contains three italicized words: so von Fülle übermannter (so completely); wieviel Welten (countless worlds); and aber wann (ah, but when). This poem was inspired by a little anemone the poet had actually seen in a garden in Rome in 1914, and strongly identified with, as J. B. Leishman relates in his valuable notes on the Sonnets.⁵ In Sonnet II:11 Rilke italicizes the whole line that sums up what he is saying about the human need to kill: Töten ist eine Gestalt unseres wandernden Trauerns (Killing is just one form of our nomadic mourning). It is simply a part of our often troubled, sometimes tragic, process of becoming. The reader/listener immediately feels involved; the poems, though cast in the traditional sonnet form, seem quite contemporary.

    Preserving this fresh, spoken, quality became another important goal for me, particularly since it helps to reflect the poems’ completely unanticipated, surprise arrival. Incidentally, Rilke had always depended

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1