Rainer Maria Rilke is arguably the most important
modern German-language poet. His New Poems, Duino
Elegies, and Sonnets to Orpheus are pillars of
20th-century poetry. Yet his earlier verse is less
known. The Book of Hours, written in three bursts
between 1899 and 1903, is Rilke's most formative work,
covering a crucial period in his rapid ascent from
fin-de-siècle epigone to distinctive modern voice. The
poems document Rilke's tour of Russia with Lou
Andreas-Salomé, his hasty marriage and fathering of a
child in Worpswede, and his turn toward the urban
modernity of Paris. He assumes the persona of an
artist-monk undertaking the Romantics' journey into the
self, speaking to God as part transcendent deity, part
needy neighbor. The poems can be read simply for their
luminous lyricism, captured in Susan Ranson's superb new
translation, which reproduces the music of the original
German with impressive fluidity. An in-depth
introduction explains the context of the work and
elucidates its major themes, while the poem-by-poem
commentary is helpful to the student and the general
reader. A translator's note treating the technical
problems of rhythm, meter, and rhyme that the translator
of Rilke faces completes the volume. Susan Ranson is the
co-translator, with Marielle Sutherland, of Rainer Maria
Rilke, Selected Poems (Oxford World's Classics, 2011).
Ben Hutchinson is Reader in Modern German at the
University of Kent, UK.
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