Overview

Rilke's The Book of Hours is best stated by Wolfgang Leppmann in his inestimably valuable biography of Rilke, entitled Rilke: A Life (New York: Fromm International, 1984). This paragraph is quoted from page 115: ""With the New Poems, the Duino Elegies, and the Sonnets to Orpheus, the Book of Hours is one of the masterworks of modern German poetry.It's title is taken from the ""livres d'heures,"" breviaries compiled for lay worship and often ornamented with means of structuring the devotional day. Taken together, Rilke's poems do represent a spiritual journal . . . The sense of breviary is underscored by a fictional device that is followed consistently in the first book, sporadically preserved in the second, and abandoned in the third: the individual poems are in fact prayers being recorded by a Russian monk in his cell."" With this in mind, translating such a work into English is a humbling task.Although, as Leppmann posits, the quality of the lyric is masterful, and taken with Rilke's early insights into spirituality, since these were poems written when he was still a young man, aim high to articulate what is the unspoken inviolate streaming of the deep and expansive spirit, so to attempt to translate that into English is to craft, at best, as a translator, Rilke's inner angel as well as yours and mine, so the difficulty is in each detail, and angels, as we well know, love to dance on the head of a pin.

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Wally Swist's Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as co-winner in the 2011 Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Contest. He was the 2018 winner of the Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Prize, by unanimous judging, for his collection A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poetry Regarding Birds and Nature (2019). Recent books include Awakening and Visitation (2020), Evanescence: Selected Poems (2020), and Taking Residence (2021), all with Shanti Arts. His books of nonfiction include Singing for Nothing: Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir (Brooklyn, NY: The Operating System, 2018), On Beauty: Essays, Reviews, Fiction, and Plays (New York & Lisbon: Adelaide Books, 2018), and A Writer's Statements on Beauty: New and Selected Essays and Reviews (Brunswick, ME: Shanti Arts, 2022). His translation of L'Allegria by Giuseppe Ungaretti was published by Shanti Arts in 2023. Swist is a recipient of Artist's Fellowships in poetry from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts (1977 and 2003). His essays, poetry, and translations have appeared in Asymptote (Taiwan), Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation, Healing Muse, Hunger Mountain, La Piccioletta Barca (U.K.), The Montreal Review, Other Journal, Poetry London, Today's American Catholic, Transference: A Literary Journal Featuring the Art & Process of Translation, (Western Michigan Department of Languages), Vox Populi, and Your Impossible Voice. His book, Aperture, poems regarding caregiving his spouse through Alzheimer's, was published in 2025 by Kelsay Books.

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