Orpheus: A Version of Raine Maria Rilke

Description

Rainer Maria Rilke was one of the twentieth century's great lyric poets. Born in Prague in 1875, he was educated in Germany and later in his life moved to Switzerland, where he wrote his two last works, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, both published in 1923. The fifty-nine Sonnets to Orpheus were completed in less than a month, and famously described by the poet as 'perhaps the most mysterious - in the way they arrived and entrusted themselves to me - the most enigmatic dictation I have ever received'. For poets, Orpheus represents the ultimate journey into life and death - the mythical poet who could enchant any living thing - even the beasts and the trees. In this, his fifth collection of poems, Don Paterson, himself a master of the sonnet form, offers a radiant and at times distressing version of the great work. His translation is an act of intense and sustained attention, which has in turn yielded new poems of striking authority, independence and lyric grace.

Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. He works as a musician and editor, and has written four collections of poems, Nil Nil (1993), God's Gift to Women (1997) - winner of both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, The Eyes (1999) and Landing Light, which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. He lives in Kirriemuir, Angus.