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Following our translation of Rilke's Duino Elegies, and publication also of the associated line-by-line commentary entitled The Fountain of Joy, our latest online offering is a new complete translation of his Sonnets to Orpheus, which can be browsed and downloaded here, and a commentary on them entitled The Dual Realm, which can be found here. The Kindle and Printed editions are available here.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote the ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ over an intensely creative three-week period in February 1922, during which he also completed the ‘Duino Elegies’. The Sonnets were prompted by the earlier death of Wera Knoop, a childhood friend of his daughter Ruth, and in them Rilke develops the theme of the double-realm of life and death, pursuing, as in the Duino Elegies, his desire to more-closely integrate what he saw as the valid sphere of death with the claims of life.

The descent of Orpheus, the mythical poet-musician of Thrace, into the underworld in a failed attempt to reclaim his dead wife Eurydice, and his subsequent death at the hands of the Bacchantes, provided Rilke with the framework of the sonnets. Elements of the Hellenistic Orphic rites of Dionysus may also have influenced Rilke’s thinking, in which adherents of the cult sought union with the divine in order to acquire mystic knowledge.

The poems also resonate with other deaths which figure elsewhere in his work. The overall tone of the sonnets is, however, positive and life-affirming. Rilke’s poetry was not, as he himself stated, intended as death-seeking, but rather a celebration of life, and an act of praise, in which death is recognised primarily in terms of the memories of the dead recalled by the human mind, and their influence on the living. In that sense the double-realm is certainly both valid and authentic.