Rainer Maria Rilke

Reproduktion des Originals. Der Verlag Megali spezialisiert sich auf die Reproduktion historischer Werke in Gro druck, um Menschen mit eingeschr nkter Sehf higkeit das Lesen zu erleichtern.

Reproduktion des Originals. Der Verlag Megali spezialisiert sich auf die Reproduktion historischer Werke in Gro druck, um Menschen mit eingeschr nkter Sehf higkeit das Lesen zu erleichtern.

"Letters To A Young Poet" by Rainer Maria Rilke is a prosaic work, but it refers directly to poetry. There are ten letters written to a young man about to enter the German military. In the very beginning of the 1903, Rilke received a letter from a twenty-year old lieutenant of Austro-Hungarian army Franz Kappus. Verses were enclosed to the letter: the lieutenant turned out to be a poet. Rilke answered. Rilke wrote Franz Kappus ten letters; the last of them is dated by December 1908. After Rilke's death, the letters were published in a separate book entitled "Letters To A Young Poet". Of all Rilke's extensive correspondence, these letters won the greatest popularity. It is explained by their content: there is nothing personal or private in them; Rilke wrote about the poetry, nature of poetic works, irony, loneliness, love etc. His philosophy-aesthetic views of that time are well reflected in these letters.

For ten years, Rilke struggled to create the Duino Elegies: a cycle of ten unrhymed, free-form poems. By contrast, the fifty-five Orphic sonnets presented here were composed in just three weeks, in and as the wake of the final elegy. In this, the first sonnet-form translation to appear in print since 1960, the translator has sought to retain the musicality of the poems, to hew as closely as possible to the rigid and constricting rhythm and rhyme schemes through which Rilke proclaims the 'task of the poet': to listen to being in a most unique way, and to undertake the mystical work of inhabiting and praising the wonder of being as it saturates and transcends the here and now. The eternal questions of time, death, God and meaning are answered as they always must be: by an appeal to the ideals of beauty and love.

These letters from the poet and mystic Rainer Maria Rilke to a nineteen-year-old cadet and aspiring poet have inspired millions of readers since they were first published in English in 1934. The first and most popular translator of this work was Mary Dows Herter Norton—a polymath extraordinaire who played a crucial role in elevating Rilke’s global reputation. The Norton Centenary Edition commemorates this extraordinary woman, known as “Polly” to friends and colleagues, and celebrates the 100th anniversary of the publishing company she co-founded. With a foreword by Damion Searls and an afterword by Norton’s current president, Julia Reidhead, this handsome new edition brings Rilke’s enduring wisdom about life, love and art to a new generation.

A new translation of Rilke's great work with close readings of each of the ten elegies elucidating how their poetic attributes constitute their meaning. Rilke continues to be the most read and discussed German poet of the modern period. The Duino Elegies, together with the Sonnets to Orpheus, remain his greatest achievement. The themes of the ten elegies - and the conceptual world unique to Rilke from which they emerge - can best be understood through their poetic form: their imagery and neologistic formations, their angular syntax, their abrupt changes of tone and linguistic register, their use of multiple personae and speaking voices, and the often-ironic self-presentation of the author. Commentators, however, have often treated these features as mere formal devices that we can somehow see through to get to what really matters, that is, to what Rilke has to say about the human condition or the meaning of life, to his philosophy or worldview. On the contrary, they are constitutive of meaning in the elegies, and understanding them is crucial to our experience of reading Rilke's work. The purpose of this book is to make such features visible and to explain them to the reader as clearly as possible. This is the first full-length book in English devoted to the elegies in over thirty years. It offers an entirely new translation of each elegy, paired with the original German text, and a close reading of each.