There are many translations of Sonnets to Orpheus, the great work of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), first written in German in 1922 when the poet was 46 years old. This new translation by Mark S. Burrows, who has translated many books and poets from German to English, captures the mystical intensity of the original better than anyone has done to date.
These are sonnets — fourteen lines each — and such attention to form was not always Rilke’s way. He said that these came to him as “a gift” and an “inner surge,” as explained by Burrows in a thorough biographical and literary introduction.
We know Mark Burrows most of all, recently, for his award-winning renderings of Meister Eckhart poems. His linking of themes now familiar in Eckhart, also found in Rilke, as a continuous thread of mystical teaching captured our attention most.
Burrows writes personally in the introduction about his own learning from Rilke’s sonnets and the sense of “the Whole” that they promise to the reader: “That sense of 'the Whole' woven through the Sonnets began to open me to an unexpected wisdom, one capable of embracing death as part of life with all the anguish and delight they hold. I began to realize that living into the abundances of this life, of which death is a part, had more to do with trust than certainty.”
Abundant in these sonnets is a sense of enchantment and wonder, despite the world’s weariness. For example, in this section from Part Two: "But being-here is still enchanted for us; in a hundred / places it is still a source. A playing of pure / powers that no one touches who does not kneel and marvel."
Paying attention is also essential to these poems, as in all of Rilke’s writing. As he expresses in a sonnet from Part One: “the lingering / … consecrates us.” And that is what you will want to do with this book — which also includes related samples in translation from Rilke’s Duino Elegies and a substantive afterword that is theologically rich.
In one of the Sonnets Rilke offers, “With words and gestures, little by little, / we make the world our own.” He demonstrates the same, with mystical longing — which is why so many readers have turned to him for more than a century.
