Sonnets to Orpheus: A New Translation (Bilingual Edition)

＂Rilke’s voice from the last tumultuous young century reaches tenderly into ours. But his lush German is a language of its own. Mark Burrows has a rare gift to coax it faithfully into English. I am delighted, and so very grateful for this book.＂-Krista Tippett, host of ＂On Being＂

On the centennial of the first appearance (1923) of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, award-winning translator Mark Burrows reveals their depth and meaning with a brilliant new introduction and translation.

This new translation captures the lyric beauty of Rilke’s poems, honoring their syntactic peculiarities and grammatical complexities as few translators have dared to do. Burrows’ versions maintain the essential strangeness of language and abruptness of metaphor by which the sonnets attain their distinctive character in German. Burrows’ approach replicates what one reviewer describes as the poems’ ＂dazzling obscurity,＂ refusing to resolve the deliberate difficulties Rilke’s formulations present. The effect invites readers to linger with these sonnets, allowing themselves to be shaped in their encounter with them.

After a decade of university teaching in Germany, and four decades as scholar and teacher in the US and Europe, the focus of Mark S. Burrows’ work explores the intersection of spirituality and the arts, mysticism and poetics. He travels widely throughout the US, Europe, and the UK, lecturing and offering retreats and workshops.

As a poet, he writes with what Jay Parini recently described as ＂a profound awareness of nature and its spiritual resonances.＂ His recent collection, The Chance of Home: Poems, appeared in 2018. A winner of the Wytter Bynner Prize in Poetry and numerous nominations for a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in more than 30 journals in the US, Europe, Australia, and India. He also edits poetry for the academic journal Spiritus and for the professional journal ARTS.

As a translator of German writings into English, his long interest in Rainer Maria Rilke led to the publication, in 2012, of the first version of BookofHours, a collection Rilke first named simply Die Gebete, or The Prayers; Burrows published this collection, which includes many of Rilke’s best-known poems, in its first English translation as Prayers of a Young Poet (2013).

Burrows’ coauthored books of Meister Eckhart poems with Jon M. Sweeney have sold well since first appearing in 2017. The most recent of these is Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light (March 2023).