A superb new (and complete) translation of Rilke's luminously lyrical
early book of poems, with scholarly introduction and commentary.
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 Bookof
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'stour 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.
