Poetry. Translated from the German by Burton Pike. One of the most influential poets of the 20th century, Rainer Maria Rilke has left an indelible mark on world literature. In this groundbreaking bilingual edition, award-winning translator Burton Pike captures the music, power, and unerring precision of some of Rilke's best-known poems. These renderings offer bold new insights that redefine our understanding of one of modern literature's most celebrated voices. "With these beautifully inventive and sensitive versions of some of Rilke's most complex and important poems, Burton Pike has given us a very special gift."—Breon Mitchell "Burton Pike captures the sonorousness, lyricism, and expressive intensity of Rilke's verse with astonishing facility, while preserving the succession of ideas and images and rendering the rhythm, tone, and diction with mastery and ingenuity."—Ross Benjamin
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.
