Description

A FINALIST FOR THE PEN/WEST TRANSLATION AWARD

The 100th Anniversary Edition of a global classic, containing beautiful translations along with the original German text.

While visiting Russia in his twenties, Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, was moved by a spirituality he encountered there. Inspired, Rilke returned to Germany and put down on paper what he felt were spontaneously received prayers. Rilke's Book of Hours is the invigorating vision of spiritual practice for the secular world, and a work that seems remarkably prescient today, one hundred years after it was written.

Rilke's Book of Hours shares with the reader a new kind of intimacy with God, or the divine—a reciprocal relationship between the divine and the ordinary in which God needs us as much as we need God. Rilke influenced generations of writers with his Letters to a Young Poet, and now Rilke's Book of Hours tells us that our role in the world is to love it and thereby love God into being. These fresh translations rendered by Joanna Macy, a mystic and spiritual teacher, and Anita Barrows, a skilled poet, capture Rilke's spirit as no one has done before.

About the Author

A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poetRainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and includeThe Book of Hours(1905) andThe Duino Elegies(1923).People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.His two most famous sequences include theSonnets to Orpheus, and his most famous prose works include theLetters to a Young Poetand the semi-autobiographicalThe Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.