Lewis Hyde

Rainer Maria Rilke

Charlie Louth

Presents a series of inspiring letters written in the early twentieth century by the renowned German poet to a young military officer, offering advice on writing and physical and emotional relationships and the very nature of advice itself. 25,000 first printing.

Letters to a Young Poet

Patrick McGuinness

C. H. Sisson

Mcguinness Louth

C. H. Sisson Reader

Friedrich Holderlin's translations have long been seen as some of the most fascinating ever made, so radical and unconventional that they have altered our ideas of what translation is. Based on a close study of the versions of Pindar and Sophocles, and placing Holderlin's practice in its 18th-century context, this book explores the meaning of translation for Holderlin's work as a whole, devoting particular attention to the poetry. The author draws links between translations, individual poems, essays and Holderlin'a working techniques, and suggests that translation, both as figure and practice, is at the centre of Holderlin's imaginative world.

Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation

The life of Rilke's work is in its words, and this book attends closely to the development of that life as it unfolds over Rilke's career. What is a poem, and how does it act upon us when we read? This is a question of the greatest interest to Rilke, who addresses it in several poems and for whom the experience of reading affords an interaction with the world, a recalibration of our ways of attending to it, which set it apart from other kinds of experience. Rilke's work is often approached in periods—he is the author of the Neue Gedichte, or of Malte, or of the Duino Elegies, or of the Sonette an Orpheus—as if the different phases of his work had little to do with one another, but in fact it is a concentrated and evolving exploration of the possibilities of poetic language, a working of the life of words into precise and exacting forms in dialogue with the texture of the world. This book traces that trajectory in a series of close readings that do not neglect the lesser-known, uncollected poems and the poems in French, as well as Rilke's activity as a translator of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Barrett Browning, Mallarmé, and Valéry, among many others. These encounters were part of Rilke's engagement with the world, his way of extending the reach of his language to get it ever closer to the ungraspable movements, the risk and promise, of life itself. One of his best-known poems ends with the words 'You must change your life', an injunction that can be seen to animate the whole of his work.

The Life of the Work

Rilke

A full-length study of the work of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) that studies the breadth of his work, including the translations and the late poems written in French.

Charlie Louth

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