SONNETS TO ORPHEUS

Rilke’s sonnets relate the myth of Orpheus with verdant natural beauty in Burrows’ new translation.

The poet famously wrote these lyrical, jazzy German-language poems in a burst of creativity at the Château de Muzot in Valais, Switzerland, in 1922, and the poems reflect on the period of tumult of the previous decade, during which World War I raged and Rilke struggled with trauma from his military service. This bilingual edition has the dedication “für Wera” in the German, memorializing the death of a young friend of Rilke’s daughter. Burrows smartly recognizes that the poems are about the complementary workings of life and death. “Erect no monuments. Just let the rose / bloom each year for his sake. / For it’s Orpheus,” observes the poet in the fifth sonnet, early in the collection; the death of the youth Orpheus leads into the birth of a flower, showing how lush nature continually reclaims life. The works also show how humanity and nature can’t be neatly separated: A speaker marvels at a tree (“There a tree arose. O pure transcending!”) before likening Orpheus’ song to “a tree in the ear,” as if the human body becomes soil from which greenery is born. These are “shape-shifting” poems, as Burrows puts it in an afterword—works in which intransitive verbs become transitive (“She slept the world”; “Dance the orange”) and in which humans metamorphose into flowers in Ovidian homage. The poems, as always, sparkle, and they offer lush imagery and lively syntax, and Burrows’ translations more than do them justice. There are many strong translations of the sonnets, and of Rilke’s 1923 Duino Elegies (excerpted in the latter half of this book); Burrows’ stand apart because he leans into the strangeness of the original German, leaving an English translation that’s brilliantly haunted by the concepts that animated the original creative reverie.

A startling and impressive Rilke interpretation.