The Sound and Sense of Rainer Maria Rilke. A Poetry Lover's Selection for Reading Aloud and Repeated Reflection - Thomas Anthony Pisano

In celebration of the centennial of the poet's death, The Sound and Sense of Rainer Maria Rilke offers active readers an altogether new and unparalleled mix of German poems, meticulously rhymed and metered poetic renderings, literal translations for full transparency, and much, much more. Still, its poetic renderings alone are an unstinting offering in honor of the poet. They are the outcome of leisure hours lavished on the challenge of changing Rilke's rich and unforgettable German into moving and memorable English.

Though focused on sixty-two poems, Pisano's thought-provoking Preface, thorough Introduction, informative notes, connective comments, and engaging appendices will enable readers to appreciate more fully their crafted sound, their often elusive sense, and the unconventional religiosity of the poet who wrote them. Pisano not only connects these poems to prose writings, personal correspondence, and other poems of the poet, but he also-and quite interestingly- explicates them in terms of texts by such seminal thinkers as José Ortega y Gasset, Martin Buber, and Mircea Eliade. Thus, even those long familiar with Rilke will find in this volume a valuable resource for relating his voice to others in the wider domains of biblical and Western literature, upon which he so liberally drew.