NEW POEMS.

Rainer Maria Rilke, the most famous (and important) German language poet of the twentieth century - a master to be ranked with Goethe and Heine - wrote the New Poems of 1907 and 1908 in transition from his late-nineteenth-century style. They mark his appearance as a lyrical, metaphysical poet of the modernist sensibility, often using traditional forms like the sonnet to explore the inner essence, the deep heart, of things - often, quite literally, things. Influenced by his time spent as Rodin's secretary, Rilke turned to quotidian life and sought to artistically redeem it in all its possibilities. His exquisite use of meter and rhyme marks him as a "formalist" and yet a contemporary of Eliot and the later Yeats, so this translation follows, as closely as English allows, the formal properties of the original poems, in a line-for-line version, while trying to capture the spare diction and direct idioms of modernism.

Len Krisak is a recipient of the Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Frost prizes in poetry. He has published more than five hundred poems, including translations from the Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and German.

Table of Contents

Translator's Preface by Len Krisak
Introduction by George C. Schoolfield
Part I. Neue Gedichte / New Poems
Part II. Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil / New Poems: The Other Part
Index of Titles and First Lines in German
Index of Titles and First Lines in English

Rainer Maria Rilke: Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the world's most beloved poets. Working at the cusp of the century, Rilke bridged the gap between traditional and modernist poetics. Born in Prague, Rilke traveled widely across Europe and Egypt, living for a substantial amount of time in Paris.
Joseph Cadora: Joseph Cadora is a guitarist, writer, and translator whose fiction and non-fiction have been published in Southern Humanities Review, The Montserrat Review, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His collection of short stories, The Millennial Fictions, won the 2009 Eisner Prize for Prose.
Poet and translator Robert Hass served as the United States Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997. He has been honored with a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, the National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Mr. Hass is a professor of English at University of California, Berkeley.