Toward Praise: Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus
translated by Erik Bendix
*Available for pre-order.*
Orison Books
Bilingual Edition
paper / $26.00
Print ISBN: 978-1-949039-78-8
E-book ISBN: 978-1-949039-79-5Publication Date: February 2, 2027
ABOUT THE BOOK
The work of over three decades, Erik Bendix's patient translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's masterpieces, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, preserve the rhyme and metrical characteristics of the originals. With close attention to both precision of meaning and musicality, Bendix's translations are revelatory. Readers have the additional opportunity to experience the poems aloud in the dual-language audiobook narrated by the translator, available wherever audiobooks are sold.
PRAISE
"Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus honor the mythical Greek poet who created the world in song. Erik Bendix has somehow managed to bring the full melody and rhythm of Rilke’s sonnets, the songs of Orpheus, into the English language. In the same volume he brings us a new translation of the Duino Elegies that makes good sense of Rilke’s difficult but rewarding existential masterpiece—a major achievement in the art of translation."
—Joseph Cadora, translator of Rilke's New Poems
“Rilke’s masterpiece, Duino Elegies, is a profound and visionary work, fraught with the depth and complexity characteristic of the soul of the modern human being. To translate it requires understanding and art up to the task. In reading Erik Bendix’s fine translation, we feel we are breathing the air of the original. Precise in meaning, fluid in rhythm, the long lines bear us along in the wake of Rilke’s angel. It’s a terrible and beautiful place to be."
—Daniel Joseph Polikoff, author of In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke, A Soul History
“These poems, these translations, are beautiful beyond compare. While reading them, I’ve been stunned into silence over and over; and again, each time I revisit them. And this beauty is here for the taking, for the asking, for the reading! Erik Bendix has extended a writer's steady, sure hand to Rainer Maria Rilke, and I am quite certain that the hand, somewhere, somehow, has been clasped.”
—Polly Gannon, translator of Andrei Bitov, Ludmila Ulitskaya, and Guzel Yakhina
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erik Bendix grew up in Berkeley, California as the son of a sociologist who had escaped Nazi Berlin and an artist who had helped restore ancient pueblo pottery traditions to the American Southwest. As a boy Erik attended the Ecole d'Humanité, a progressive school high in the Swiss Alps. He earned philosophy degrees from Oxford and Princeton. He then worked in alternative education before moving with his wife to a homestead in the Blue Ridge Mountains to raise and homeschool their two children in a log house he designed. Bendix travels the world teaching movement arts, including folkdance from many cultures, movement development from infancy, Alexander Technique, and Body-Mind Centering®. He recently published a book and film about his own approach to finding courage while learning to ski. His translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus have appeared in Metamorphoses and Asheville Poetry Review. His own poems have appeared in numerous literary journals.