An accomplished poet\'s first and only sonnet sequence.
Rilke died in 1926..
In addition to Sonnets to Orpheus , Rilke\'s works include the Duino Elegies, The Book of Pictures, Poems from the Book of Hours, New Poems, and The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge.
After a motley education at military and business schools and at Prague\'s Charles University, he traveled in Europe, Russia, Egypt, and Tunsinia.
About author(s): RAINER Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875.
He captures Rilke\'s simple, concrete, and colloquial language, writing with a precision close to the original.
David Young\'s is the first most sensitive of the translations of this work, superior to other translations in sound and sense.
These ecstatic and meditative lyric poems are a kind of manual on how to approach the world - how to understand and love it.
Many of the Sonnets are addressed to two recurrent figures: the god Orpheus (prototype of the poet) and a young dancer, whose death is treated elegiacally.
Instead of centering on love for a particular person, as has many other sonneteers, he wrote an extended love poem to the world, celebrating such diverse things as mirrors, dogs, fruit, breathing, and childhood.
Rilke revived and transformed the traditional sonnet sequence in the Sonnets.
It is an undisputed masterpiece by one of the greatest modern poets, translated here by a master of translation, David Young.
Sonnets to Orpheus is Rainer Maria Rilke \'s first and only sonnet sequence.
An accomplished poet\'s first and only sonnet sequence
