Sonnets to Orpheus

A New Translation (Bilingual Edition)

Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Mark S. Burrows

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9781958972397
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June 2024

“Rilke's voice from the last tumultuous young century reaches tenderly into ours. But his lush German is a language of its own. Mark Burrows has a rare gift to coax it faithfully into English. I am delighted, and so very grateful for this book.” —Krista Tippett, host of “On Being”

On the centennial of the first appearance (1923) of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, award-winning translator Mark Burrows reveals their depth and meaning with a brilliant new introduction and translation.

This new translation captures the lyric beauty of Rilke's poems, honoring their syntactic peculiarities and grammatical complexities as few translators have dared to do. Burrows’ versions maintain the essential strangeness of language and abruptness of metaphor by which the sonnets attain their distinctive character in German. Burrows' approach replicates what one reviewer describes as the poems’ “dazzling obscurity,” refusing to resolve the deliberate difficulties Rilke’s formulations present. The effect invites readers to linger with these sonnets, allowing themselves to be shaped in their encounter with them.

Mark S. Burrows is a Rilke scholar, award-winning translator, and poet, and his academic and popular writing explores the intersection of spirituality and the arts. A winner of the Witter Bynner Prize in Poetry, his poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in the US and abroad. Known internationally for his work on Rilke, he is the translator of Rilke’s Prayers of a Young Poet, which includes many of Rilke’s best-loved poems that later appeared in The Book of Hours. He has also co-authored three volumes of poems inspired by Meister Eckhart, most recently Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light. www.soul-in-sight.org

“In Mark Burrows’ translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, we find a unique blend of scholarship and tenderness, music and sophistication. “A breath of nothing. A blowing in god. A wind.” (I.3) The sonnets themselves are famously obscure, and this new translation does not try to expose that which was meant to be hidden or domesticate the difficult. ‘Hardly anyone helped those who were the first riskers,’ Burrows renders II.24, and in so doing, brings his readers into the original risk of Rilke’s voice, given anew—fresh and strange—for readers today. We hear the original music in these resonant translations, and the music reaches in and makes new music within the reader.” —Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet, peace activist, and host of “Poetry Unbound”

“Mark S. Burrows displays a double fidelity to Rilke's poetic genius and inimitable mystical depth in this remarkable rendition of the Sonnets. His deft attention to the secret music of Orpheus has created a gem of auditory imagination.” —Richard Kearney, philosopher and author of Poetics of Imagining and the novel Salvage 

“‘Our life goes forth with transformation’: this phrase is the watchword for Mark Burrows’ fresh translation of Rilke’s great poetic cycle, the Sonnets to Orpheus. With remarkable precision, Burrows renders the sense and feel of the original, its urgent language and shape-shifting metaphors. He brings to life again Rilke’s endeavor to show how poetry is a way of living more fully the complexities and questions of our time on earth. In the revealing Introduction and Afterword that accompany the poems, he suggests how these sonnets seize us with language before we understand them, reminding us of Rilke’s remarkable—and ceaseless to the point of obsessive—revisiting of the theme of transformation and the presence of now.” —Hilary Davies, poet, essayist, and literary critic, and author of Exile and the Kingdom

“This is the translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus I have been waiting for. Finally, the poetry sings in English through the many finely tuned phrases and nuanced lines of another poet. That said, Mark Burrows is not afraid to let the unaccommodated strangeness of the original German darkly shine through his translations: those moments where Rilke pushes his language to the limit are captured in all their dazzling obscurity. No difficulties are easily resolved here, as so often in other translations, and the reader is thus allowed to read her way to a response and to be shaped in the precious moment of her uncertainty. As much as these versions register the lyrical beauty of the originals, they are also receptive to their dark and open spaces. They put themselves in danger there and in that place ‘a temple is built in [our English] hearing.’ In this way these translations initiate us into the mystery of Rilke’s poems: they touch the hem of God’s obscure presence in them. In fact, the German work finds itself here ‘more truly and more strange,’ like Wallace Stevens’ Hoon. For it is at the turning point of change—in ‘the flame / in which what’s taken from [us] brims with transformations’—that we see ‘the shaping spirit’ of the poetry at work. Burrows has, for English speakers, allowed the sonnets to be ‘a ringing glass that shattered sounding forth.’ These versions resound with ‘unending praise’ that completes the eternal moment of creation: the earth made invisible for us by Rilke. We ‘recognize the image’ as it is reflected in this translation: ‘the mouth opened once more / that already knew what it meant to keep still.’ I have never lingered so much over an English version of Rilke apart from Mark’s translations of Rilke’s Book of Hours (in Prayers of a Young Poet). Again, I find myself at the threshold of the invisible, and alive in these versions of The Sonnets to Orpheus to the mystery.” —Edward Clarke, professor of English, Oxford University, and author of The Secret Mind of Art

“Mark Burrows’ new translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus comes to us at the most urgent of times, when, more than ever, the dehumanized and violent in our societies ‘wants now to be praised.’ Rilke, who experienced the First World War, knew intimately the cost of such moral defeat. And yet, as is ever our task, Rilke’s Sonnets instead call upon us as readers to embrace the complexity and beauty of the world beyond our understanding. ‘We, violent ones, we last longer. / But when, in which of all lives, / will we finally be open and receivers?’ In these beautiful, daring translations, Burrows returns to us the power and mystery of Rilke’s original—the ‘unknowing’ qualities that drive his verse. And in Burrows’ rendering, the Sonnets to Orpheus become for us guide and warning: a deep source to draw on as we face the shadow of our own spiritual and physical destruction.” —Ellen Hinsey, poet and author, most recently, of The Invisible Fugue (2023)

“In this exceptionally sensual, boldly fresh translation of Rilke’s famed Sonnets to Orpheus, we hear what Burrows describes as ‘a voice resonant with a hope that does not look away from life.’ Ours is an age of cynicism and weariness. Hope freed from any hint of sentimentality is more than precious. It takes a rare—and true—poet to achieve that. It takes an equally rare translator to be the messenger we can trust as these songs to the ‘singing god’ Orpheus turn us inward…at the same time looking outward to ‘find ourselves in the world’s embrace—not in spite of our vulnerabilities, but precisely in the midst of them.’ Rilke is a startling poet, breaking through timidity and conformity to make a more passionate, engaged and delighted response seem inevitable. One of less than a handful of poets who is widely read, quoted, learned by heart, Rilke has found, in this volume, a translator worthy of the raw aliveness of his poetry—and the wholeness of the poet. As a poet, Burrows shows himself, again in this book, to be truly the bilingual translator Rilke readers in English have long been waiting for. It is not the words only of these magnificent Sonnets that he renders so brilliantly. It is something more closely aligned to a soul-sense beyond words—yet glimpsed through them. My own understanding of Rilke—and of myself—deepened with every phrase. Burrows’ beautiful introduction, too, is a treat, making it possible to perceive, and receive, the gifts that Rilke is offering to Orpheus, yes, but also to each of us as readers.” —Dr. Stephanie Dowrick, PhD. author of In the Company of Rilke and Your Name Is Not Anxious

“Everyone gives up on love, like poetry, and has to be reminded of its power and promise. This new translation of Rilke is such a reminding. Burrows translates what can’t be translated: the English alembic for Rilke’s Germanic soul. This translator possesses both lands and ferries the reader where prose alone cannot go: to the Underworld. Along with Rilke, Burrows daringly brings the objects back. You need, in his adept rendering, ‘the right tension,’ and he shares that ‘right tension’ with us, his readers. ‘Let him praise finger-ring, necklace, and jug.’ Praise for the objects dying around us, not scorning their flight, living aside Orpheus, ‘deep in the doors of the dead,’ but still carrying ‘praiseworthy fruit.’ Burrows’ rendering travels through and finally beyond language, not simply to negation, but to the heart of objects themselves.” —Bradford Manderfield, professor of theology at the Athenaeum of Ohio

“Rilke's voice from the last tumultuous young century reaches tenderly into ours. But his lush German is a language of its own. Mark Burrows has a rare gift to coax it faithfully into English. I am delighted, and so very grateful for this book.” —Krista Tippett, host of “On Being”

“There are many strong translations of the sonnets, and of Rilke’s 1923 Duino Elegies (excerpted in the latter half of this book); Burrows’ stand apart because he leans into the strangeness of the original German, leaving an English translation that’s brilliantly haunted by the concepts that animated the original creative reverie. A startling and impressive Rilke interpretation.” —Kirkus Reviews