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Sonnets to Orpheus Bilingual Edition [Paperback]

Rainer Maria Rilke (Author), C. F. MacIntyre (Translator)
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

Price: $15.95 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
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Book Description

April 2, 2001
Written with astonishing rapidity in two weeks of February 1922, when Rilke was finally completing the Duino Elegies that had occupied him intermittently for a decade, Sonnets to Orpheus is a series of fifty-five brilliant and affirmative songs. It is in a sense a spontaneous creative dividend generated by a larger work. Because the sonnets were written only four years before Rilke's death, they belong properly to his final and philosophic period, and offer a sharp and striking contrast to the less mystical Das Buch der Bilder and Neue Gedichte.
Rainer Maria Rilke was one of Germany's most important poets. His influences include the paintings of the Worpswedders and the French Impressionists, the sculpture of Rodin (to whom he was both friend and secretary), and the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and other symbolists. His poetry is innovative, enigmatic, and entertainingly idiosyncratic. C.F. MacIntyre's translations are both true to the original and poetic in their own right, and in each book he includes an introduction and notes. German text faces the English translation.

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Sonnets to Orpheus Bilingual Edition + Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition + The Book of Images: Poems / Revised Bilingual Edition
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Editorial Reviews

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-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

About the Author

C.F. MacIntyre (d.1967) was well known as a translator. In addition to works by Rilke, he translated Goethe's Faust and many of the French symbolists: Nerval, Baudelaire,Verlaine, Corbière, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Laforgue, and Valéry. His volumes of original poems include The Black Bull, Cafés and Cathedrals, and Poems.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 142 pages
  • Publisher: University of California Press (April 2, 2001)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0520229223
  • ISBN-13: 978-0520229228
  • Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.3 x 0.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #333,779 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Best translation of the alluring Sonnets to Orpheus, July 8, 2001
By 
Julius Kusuma (Cambridge, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sonnets to Orpheus Bilingual Edition (Paperback)
The Sonnets to Orpheus was written by Rilke over a few days' period during his winter visit to Switzerland. It came to form almost magically, "with no doubts in any of the words" in Rilke's introduction.

The Sonnets tell the classical Greek tragedy of Orpheus, who with his gift of music on the lyre charmed death to give his love back from the underworld, only to lose her forever when he broke his promise and looked back to see if she was still with him.

This work is considered an interesting development in German poetry because of its improvisational creativity of the author, and is difficult to translate because of the liberties taken in the writing. In my opinion this translation is best one to date: in contrast to the popular translation by M. D. Herter Norton, which strived for accuracy at the cost of eloquence.

Charming, entertaining, bittersweet, and always the contradiction between optimism and tragedy in a fatalistic touch, this is one of my favourite literary work to date.

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A classic work that remains vividly relevant today, August 10, 2005
Edward Snow, who has earned multiple awards for his translations, applies his gift to the original German poems written almost a century ago by master poet Rainer Maria Rilke in Sonnets To Orpheus. A bilingual German/English edition each poem in both languages on every two-page spread, Sonnets To Orpheus resonates with introspective contemplation on the finality of time, transition, change, and death; Rilke wrote it only four years before his own passing. A classic work that remains vividly relevant today. Does it really exist, Time the Destroyer? / When, on the peaceful mountain, does it crush the fortress? / And this heart, always the gods' possession, / when does the Demiurge pillage it?
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Mystic Poetry, September 21, 2010
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This review is from: Sonnets to Orpheus Bilingual Edition (Paperback)
Rilke is generally regarded as Romantic so the use of "mystic" in describing this work slightly misuses terms. But I use it to describe his "inspired" groping towards something "beyond". This specific translation may not appeal to everyone as it is firmly couched within the academic style of its period, and being thirty-eight years removed from the original publication, admirably expresses the original's language. C.F. MacIntyre's introduction is both scholarly and contextualizing, de-mystifying Rilke's prophetic-like "entrustment" of these songs by linking them up to a larger contemporary literary context.
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