Prayers of a Young Poet
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This volume marks the first translation of these prayer-poems into English. Originally written in 1899, Rilke wrote them upon returning to Germany from his first trip to Russia. His experience of the East shaped him profoundly. He found himself entranced by Orthodox churches and monasteries, above all by the icons that seemed to him like flames glowing in dark spaces. He intended these poems as icons of sorts, gestures that could illumine a way for seekers in the darkness. As Rilke here writes, "I love the dark hours of my being, for they deepen my senses." Translated by Mark S. Burrows.
Mark S Burrows
Translated by
Mark S. Burrows is an award-winning translator, poet, and scholar. Known internationally for his academic and popular work on Rilke, he is the translator of a collection of his early poems, Prayers of a Young Poet, which includes many of Rilke's best-loved poems that later appeared in The Book of Hours. His forthcoming bilingual edition of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (Monkfish, 2024) has been praised as "beautiful, daring translations that return to us the power and mystery of the original 'unknowing' qualities that drive Rilke's verse" (Ellen Hinsey). Winner of the Wytter Bynner Prize in Poetry, a collection of his recent poems, The Chance of Home, appeared in 2018. During the last decade he has also published a volume of poems-in-translation by the distinguished Iranian-German poet SAID, 99 Psalms (2013), the first English translation of poems by the celebrated German-Jewish poet Hilde Domin, The Wandering Radiance. Selected Poems of Hilde Domin (2023), and three volumes of poems, co-written with Jon M. Sweeney, inspired by the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart (most recently, Meister Eckhart's Book of Darkness and Light. Meditations on the Path of the Wayless Way; 2023). He lives and writes in Camden, ME. https: //soul-in-sight.org
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