Although one strives to escape one's self as if wrapped in some loathsome pit, it is actually one of the world's great wonders: I sense it: ALL LIFE WILL BE LIVED. Who lives it, then? In The Voices, Rilke presents a series of portraits of pariahs, outcasts, the down-and-outs, turning his often inward gaze toward The Other in a way that pleasantly undermines our notions of his poetic interests. In this new translation, Kristofor Minta breathes new life into these poems, which exude a kind of heat, if only enough to warm your hands by. Includes the original German on facing pages. This book was produced in collaboration with Lamplight Editions. Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and died of leukemia in Switzerland in 1926. Never in doubt about his vocation as poet, his work was the product of a tireless growth—work which may accurately be seen as the bridge leading from fin de siècle literature into Modernism. Kristofor Minta is a poet and translator. He has twice been a finalist in the National Poetry Series, is a graduate of Syracuse University's Creative Writing program, and was lucky enough to study with poet Philip Levine as an undergraduate. His translations (with Herbert Pföstl) of Hans Jürgen von der Wense have been published asA Shelter for Bells (Epidote Press, 2020).
Author
A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923). People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language. His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety—themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets. His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.
