The Book of Hours - Paperback

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.

Back Jacket

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

"Great poets demand great translators, and Edward Snow's sensitive translations of Rilke set the standard in our time, capturing both the exquisite mystery and the clarity of these amazing poems."
-- Phillip Lopate, author of A Year and a Day