The fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus were written by Rilke in February 1922, in less than two weeks. Their central themes are Orpheus and his song of praise; what is sung is “Dasein”, “being- here”, the presence in the world. Rilke considered as a betrayal of his poetry any translation that would not reproduce, together with his thinking, his internal movement, his rhythm, his rhymes, his music. The goal of the translator has been to make that orchestration “heard” as much as possible, to try and reproduce the structure, rhyme and rhythm, of Rilke’s Sonnets, in order for these translations to sound as echoes of the originals.
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Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist. He is recognised as one of the greatest German-language poets of the 20th century. His publications included one novel, several collections of poetry and a number volumes of correspondence which aid in elucidating the somewhat mystical bent of his poetry. He occupies a somewhat transitional position between the fin-de-siecle movements and 20th century modernism. While Rilke is most known for his writing in German, he also composed over 400 poems in French. His best-known works are the poetry collections Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge), and a collection of ten letters that was published posthumously as Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter).
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