The Book of Hours

A gorgeous new translation of the first significant book of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century

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, where first-person poetry discovers its full lyric possibility. In these audacious poems, a devout but intimately candid speaker addresses an ultimately unknowable deity. “What will you do, God, when I die?” Rilke’s speaker asks, 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, The Washington Post), makes Rilke’s achievement accessible as never before in English. Snow combines striking fidelity to the German text with an uncanny ability to convey not just its tones and cadences but the captivating psychological presence that animates Rilke’s best poems. Mystical and moving, The Book of Hours retains its power to astonish.

Review

For those like me, who have only been able to read Rilke in translation, what a gift Edward Snow has been over the years. His lucid, sharp and musical versions are a joy to read and reread, and constantly seem to propose the idea that these poems are as close to Rilke's astonishing originals as English readers are likely to get. --P. J. Harvey

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

"Rilke's best contemporary translator."
-- Brian Phillips, New Republic

"Snow transfers the complexities of Rilke's story and language out of the German and into moving and readable English."
-- Warren Frye, New Criterion

 

About the Author

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), the author of Sonnets to Orpheus, Duino Elegies, and Letters to a Young Poet, was one of the greatest poets of the German language.

Edward Snow twice received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for his Rilke translations. A professor at Rice University, he lives in Houston, Texas.