Sonnets to Orpheus: A New Translation (Bilingual Edition) - Softcover

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Mark S. Burrows is a Rilke scholar, award-winning translator, and poet, and his academic and popular writing explores the intersection of spirituality and the arts. A winner of the Witter Bynner Prize in Poetry, his poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in the US and abroad. Known internationally for his work on Rilke, he is the translator of Rilke’s Prayers of a Young Poet, which includes many of Rilke’s best-loved poems that later appeared in The Book of Hours. He has also co-authored three volumes of poems inspired by Meister Eckhart, most recently Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light. www.soul-in-sight.org

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Why Rilke?

You, my friend, are lonely, because . . .
We make the world our own bit by bit,
with words and gestures, we who are
perhaps its weakest and most dangerous part.
—Rilke, from The Sonnets to Orpheus I. 16

In a time when many have lost faith in how to live in creative and resilient ways, Rilke’s voice offers direction, encouragement, and meaning.

The supreme poet of the inner worlds, he identified the unsettling pressures of loneliness as the gnawing malaise of modernity, voicing in The Sonnets to Orpheus the resonance of meaning and connection we long for. How are we to do this?

By learning to “make the world our own” through the “words and gestures” by means of which we come to indwell our lives in abundance and scarcity. And through living into the fulness of our embodied selves. “Dance the orange,” he cries, and means by this that we have the capacity to savor this life for all that it offers—of sweet and bitter, joy and sorrow, beauty and terror. The Sonnets to Orpheus sound this call.