Product Description

Translated by Edward Snow In 1984, Edward Snow won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for the first volume of translations of Rilke's watershed work, New Poems [1907]. His work was praised for the resonance of the English and its faithfulness to the density and meaning of the German.

Rilke's association with Rodin in 1902 inspired in him a new poetic method. "Somehow," he wrote, "I too must come to make things... realities that emerge from handiwork. Somehow I too must discover the smallest basic element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of representation for everything." Until this work, Rilke's voice had come from the interior, expressing feelings and moods. New Poems represented a turning point, an intoxication with the materiality of the world.

New Poems [1908] contains such famous works as "Archaic Torso of Apollo," "Corpse Washing," "Buddha in Glory," and "Late Autumn in Venice."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1099463 in Books
• Published on: 1990-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
"What a satisfaction to have the entire series of the New Poems, the second set rendered with the same exemplary-and explanatory-dedication as the first." -- Richard Howard

About the Author
Edward Snow has translated Rilke's The Book of Images and the two volumes of Rilke's New Poems, for which he won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award given by the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of Inside Bruegel and the acclaimed A Study of Vermeer. He is a professor of English at Rice University.

Customer Reviews

you must change your life.
I really shouldn't talk about Rilke. I don't know anything about him and I don't think there's anything I can say that could give you that feeling of tenuous teetering warm fragile life that reading Rilke gives me. New Poems, 1908: The Other Part is the dark partner to his New Poems of 1907. It contains, in my entirely uneducated opinion, his best and his worst work. Reading some of the stuff in there makes me think about how important it is to breathe and to be grateful that, for the moment at least, I am permitted to do so.