Product Description
by Rainer Maria Rilke (Author), Edward Snow (Translator)
Long hailed as a masterwork of modern German literature, The Book of Hours (1905) marks the origin of Rainer Maria Rilke's distinctive voice and vision--where clarity of diction meets unexpected imagery and first-person poetry discovers its full lyric possibility. In these audacious poems, a devout but candid speaker addresses an ultimately unknowable deity, passing through love, fear, guilt, anger, bewilderment, loneliness, tenderness, and exaltation in his search for meaning.
In this dual-language edition, Edward Snow, "the most trustworthy and exhilarating of Rilke's contemporary translators" (Michael Dirda, Washington Post), makes Rilke's achievement accessible as never before in English. Snow retains a striking fidelity to the German text while also conveying the captivating psychological presence that animates Rilke's best poems.
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Praise for Edward Snow
"Robert Lowell once wrote that it was hard to imagine Rilke first written in English, that the poems were sealed in German. Snow is unsealing them."
-- Robert Phillips, Houston Chronicle
"Rilke's best contemporary translator."
-- Brian Phillips, New Republic
"Snow transfers the complexities of Rilke's story and language out of the German and into moving and readable English."
-- Warren Frye, New Criterion
