Orphic listening: Rilke's sonnets to Orpheus: a new.
Written in three weeks of creative inspiration, Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (1923) is well known for its enigmatic power and lyrical intensity. The essays in this volume forge a new path in illuminating the philosophical significance of this late masterpiece.
Among English-language readers, his best-known works include the poetry collections Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge), and a collection of ten letters that was published after his death under the title Letters to a Young Poet.
All the cycle of the 55 Sonnets to Orpheus was written by Rainer Maria Rilke in a rapture of inspiration in February, 1922, some days after having finished his famous Duino Elegies. What stimulated.
In Don Paterson’s Orpheus, translation records an almost unprecedented triumph, because Orpheus is identified by a note on the back cover as “A version of Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus”, but the original author’s name, absent from the front cover, is demoted to third position on the title page.
Sonnets to Orpheus is Rainer Maria Rilke’s first and only sonnet sequence. It is an undisputed masterpiece by one of the greatest modern poets, translated here by a master of translation, David Young. Rilke revived and transformed the traditional sonnet sequence in the Sonnets. Instead of centering on love for a particular person, as has many.
LIMITED FIRST EDITION OF RILKE’S DIE SONETTE AN ORPHEUS, ONE OF ONLY 300 COPIES, PRESENTATION COPY, WONDERFULLY INSCRIBED BY RILKE TO JEAN POZZI. RILKE, Rainer Maria. Die Sonette an Orpheus. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1923. Octavo, publisher’s full green calf gilt, gilt-ruled covers, raised bands, patterned endpapers, top edge gilt, uncut and unopened.
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