Rainer Maria Rilkes the Book of Hours : A New Translation with Commentary

English

Series: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture Ser.

Volume: Volume 19

ISBN: 157113543X

EAN: 9781571135438

Category: Poetry / General

Publisher: Camden House

Release Date: 07/31/2012

Synopsis: 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 Book of Hours, written in three bursts between 1899 and 1903, is Rilkes most formative work, covering a crucial period in his rapid ascent from fin-de-si?cle epigone to distinctive modern voice. The poems document Rilkes tour of Russia with Lou Andreas-Salom?, 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 Ransons 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 translators note treating the technical problems of rhythm, meter, and rhyme that the translator of Rilke faces completes the volume. Susan Ranson has published her own poems as well as translations of Rilke and of the Minnes?nger. Ben Hutchinson is Lecturer in German at the University of Kent in Canterbury.

Rainer Maria Rilkes the Book of Hours : A New Translation with Commentary

Illustrated: No

Format: Paperback

Height: 0.64 inches

Width: 6.0 inches

Length: 9.0 inches

Weight: 15.06 oz

Pages: 284