Overview

Long hailed as a masterwork of modern German literature, The Book of Hours (1905) marks the origin of Rainer Maria Rilke's distinctive voice and vision-where clarity of diction meets unexpected imagery and first-person poetry discovers its full lyric possibility. In these audacious poems, a devout but candid speaker addresses an ultimately unknowable deity, passing through love, fear, guilt, anger, bewilderment, loneliness, tenderness, and exaltation in his search for meaning. In this dual-language edition, Edward Snow, ""the most trustworthy and exhilarating of Rilke's contemporary translators"" (Michael Dirda, Washington Post), makes Rilke's achievement accessible as never before in English. Snow retains a striking fidelity to the German text while also conveying the captivating psychological presence that animates Rilke's best poems.

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9781324123460

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Reviews

""For those like me, who have only been able to read Rilke in translation, what a gift Edward Snow has been over the years. His lucid, sharp and musical versions are a joy to read and reread, and constantly seem to propose the idea that these poems are as close to Rilke's astonishing originals as English readers are likely to get."" -- P.J. Harvey

Author Information

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), the author of Sonnets to Orpheus, Duino Elegies, and Letters to a Young Poet, was one of the greatest poets of the German language. Edward Snow has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for his Rilke translations. A professor at Rice University, he lives in Houston, Texas.

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