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 transparency, and much, much more. Still, his 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. Here is his 'Archaic Torso of Apollo':We did not know his all-unheard-of head,wherein the eyes grew ripe for sight. Still, though,his torso, like a street lamp, sheds a glowin which his looking, only dimmed and spread,holds on and shines. Or else no breast so curvedcould dazzle you, and in the loins’ slight turninga smile could not move toward, or form concerning,that center that begetting bore and served.Or else this stone would stand disfigured, small,beneath the shoulders’ sharp transparent fall,not shimmer so like coat of preying beast;nor would it burst from all its edges, rifewith starlike light: for no spot, not the leastthere, fails to see you.You must change your life.Though focused on only 62 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 un-conventional 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.
