Most Popular Books by Rainer Maria Rilke

Presents Rilke''s 1922 Sonnets to Orpheus, written in a burst of inspiration, and expressing a vision of a state of being in which all the ordinary human dichotomies are reconciled in an infinite wholeness. Also included is his Letters to a young poet, an influential series of letters written to a young officer cadet on the subject of poetics.

“The ultimate expression of intergenerational literary wisdom.” —Andrew Solomon, The New Yorker A work that has inspired generations, this new edition of Letters to a Young Poet features a fresh translation of Rilke’s ten classic letters, along with the missing letters from the young poet himself. For nearly a century, eager writers and young poets, as well as those simply looking for a purpose in life, have embraced the wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, first published in 1929. Most readers and scholars have long assumed that the letters from the young poet were forever lost to posterity. Yet, shockingly, these letters were recently uncovered in Germany, and now the acclaimed translator Damion Searls has not only cast a fresh eye on Rilke’s original letters but also those of the “young poet,” Franz Xaver Kappus, an Austrian military cadet and an aspiring poet. This timeless edition, in addition to presenting their dialogue together for the first time in English, provides a new window into the workings of Rilke’s visionary poetic and philosophical mind, allowing us to reexperience the literary genius of one of the most inspiring works of twentieth-century literature.

The Duino Elegies are one of the twentieth century''s great works of art. In the space of ten elegies, presented here in a bilingual edition, an impassioned monologue struggles to find an individual answer to what it means to be human in a world torn by modern consciousness. In his introduction, David Oswald writes, "Rilke''s poetry shows an unusual sensitivity to inner experience and to the symbolic processes of the psyche, two things that are important to me in my work as a Jungian analyst. His carefully crafted language conveys the movements of this otherwise ''unsayable'' realm and addresses the issues of finding the proper relationship to it. My goal has been to create a translation that preserves this sensitivity and precision... What are we? The Elegies seek a measure of humanness that is positive in form, one that goes beyond the painful recognition that we are neither totally natural in the way that animals are, nor totally transcendent as angels are. The emphasis on ''are'' comes from the despair over the split of consciousness that hangs us ''between current and stone,'' between the flow of our inner experience and the rigidity of our interpreted world, thus making it impossible for us to be ''something one'' or something that remains constant. To be an ''I'' means to be constantly caught between the polarities of the night and the day world, of animal and angel, of man and woman, of sexuality and spirituality, of hero and lover, of inner and outer world, of life and death, and never to be at one with any of it. The Duino Elegies do not overcome or eliminate this lament, but the cycle tries to give meaning to the split by giving consciousness a direction towards ''the open.''" David Oswald (b. 1953) is finishing his training in analytical psychology at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich, Switzerland, where he has been living for the past eight years. Raised in Owatonna, Minnesota, he has degrees in German from the University of Kansas and Mathematics from the University of Minnesota. "Among the English translations of Rilke''s Duineser Elegien that I am familiar with, the one by David Oswald seems to me to be the best. Not only does it faithfully reproduce the content of the original poems - something which earlier translations have managed to do - but also, through its closely matching rhythm and its use of an often bold imagery rooted in the spirit of the English language, it conveys their poetic substance as well." - Prof. Jacob Steiner, President of the International Rilke Society

"The Book of hours, written in three bursts between 1899-1903, is Rilke''s most formative work, covering a crucial period in his rapid ascent from fin-de-siecle epigone to distinctive modern voice. The poems are crucial documents of Rilke''s development, from his tour around Russia with Lou Andreas-Salome, through his hasty marriage to Clara Westhoff in the artists'' community of Worpswede, to his turn toward the urban modernity of Paris. Rilke assumes the persona of an artist-monk undertaking the Romantics'' journey into the self, speaking to God as part transcendent deity, part needy neighbor. Echoes of his juvenile style persist, yet by the end of the book the influence of the sculptor Rodin is discernible in the distinctive idiom of urbanity, in the terminology of "things," and in Rilke''s turn to the everyday world around him."--Jacket flap.

"Translator Burton Pike captures the edgy, haunting beauty of this little-known masterpiece."—O Magazine First published in 1910, Rilke''s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is one the first great modernist novels, the account of poet-aspirant Brigge in his exploration of poetic individuality and his reflections on the experience of time as death approaches. This translation by Burton Pike is a reaction to overly stylized previous translations, and aims to capture not only the beauty but also the strangeness, the spirit, of Rilke''s German.

"Immensely readable...a significant piece of scholarship."—Fred Volkmer, New York Sun He would become one of the most important poets of the twentieth century; she a muse of Europe''s fin-de-siècle thinkers and artists. In this collection of letters, a finalist for the PEN USA translation award, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, a writer and intellectual fourteen years his senior, pen a relationship that spans thirty years and shifting boundaries: as lovers, as mentor and protégé, and as deep personal and literary allies.

Possibility of Being is a selection of poems by one of the most moving and original writers of this century, Rainer Maria Rilke (1857-l926). The title (taken from one of the Sonnets to Orpheus, ''''Ibis is the Creature") reflects the central concern of both Rilke''s life and art: the achievement of "being,” which this most spiritual yet least doctrinaire of modern German poets defined as "the experiencing of the completest possible inner intensity.'''' The eighty-four poems included in this small volume will serve as a sound and inviting introduction to Rilke''s strategies in the pursuit of "being." And just as the unicorn in "This Is the Creature" has an eternal "possibility of being" but only becomes visible in the mirror held by a virgin, so can our own possibilities become manifest in the mirror held by the sensitive artist. The poems are chosen from The Book of Hours (1899-1903), The Book of Images (1902 and 1906), New Poems (1907 and 1908), Requiem (1909), Duino Elegies (1923), Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), and the posthumous Poems 1906-26. This selection was made by Professor Theodore Ziolkowski of Princeton University, who drew from the various New Directions volumes of Rilke''s work translated by J. B. Leishman.

Rilke''s prayerful responses to the french master''s beseeching art "For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes." Virtually every day in the fall of 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke returned to a Paris gallery to view a Cezanne exhibition. Nearly as frequently, he wrote dense and joyful letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, expressing his dismay before the paintings and his ensuing revelations about art and life. Rilke was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his "New Poems," But Cezanne''s impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay. Rilke''s sense of kinship with Cezanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters -- passages from them appear verbatim in Rilke''s great modernist novel, "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge," "Letters on Cezanne" is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art.

The definitive bilingual version of Rilke''s New Poems--faithful to the original German, with insightful commentary on every poem. Essential.

An intimate glimpse into the life and letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. In July 1921, displaced European poet Rainer Maria Rilke sequestered himself in the chateau of Muzot, a thirteenth-century medieval tower perched in the vineyards above the town of Sierre in the Canton Valais, Switzerland. In this sun-flooded landscape of the Rhone Valley, he found beguiling echoes of Spain and his beloved Provence. Here, the Duino Elegies were famously completed and the Sonnets to Orpheus followed. During this time, Rilke''s correspondence also bloomed, and Letters around a Garden collects some of those letters together into English for the first time. One intriguing exchange from 1924 to 1926 was with a young aristocratic Swiss woman Antoinette de Bonstetten, a passionate horticulturist who had been recommended as a potential advisor for the redesign and upkeep of the Muzot rose garden. In twenty-two precious letters originally written in French, Rilke relishes the prospect of their elusive meeting, keenly discusses the plans for his garden, and wittily laments the trials of his plants. Beyond the encomium for Paul Valéry and poignant memory of place are passages of exquisite writing, in which Rilke evokes with trademark sensitivity the delicate relationship between the changing seasons and the natural world of his adopted region. We also witness the loving relationship evolve between these sometime-fugitive correspondents and how questions of solitariness and companionship impinge on one who faces unaccustomed challenges as his health tragically declines.

Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian poet and novelist. He is widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets. He wrote both verse and highly lyrical prose. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and anxiety. These themes position him as a transitional figure between traditional and modernist writers. 1. Poems (Translated by Jessie Lamont) 2. Auguste Rodin (Rendered into English by Jessie Lemont) 3. Letter To A Young Poet (Translated by Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil)

The Sonnets of Orpheus I by Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Joshua Jennings- A ShortWorks Publication ShortWorks is an independent publishing group that compiles short, compelling works, from arts, music and literature to social criticism and history to science and technology. www.shortworks.co

Between the New poems of 1907 and 1908 and his death in 1926, Rilke published only two major volumes of poetry, both in 1923. But during this period he wrote poetry continually, often prolifically--in letters, in guest books, in presentation copies, and chiefly in the pocket-books he always carried with him. The body of this uncollected work in German exceeds five hundred pieces. Included here are more than a hundred of them.