The Book of Images: Poems / Revised Bilingual Edition

Now substantially revised by Edward Snow, whom Denise Levertov once called far and away Rilke's best translator, this bilingual edition ofThe Book of Imagescontains a number of the great poet's previously untranslated pieces. Also included are several of Rilke's best-loved lyrics, such as Autumn, Childhood, Lament, Evening, and Entrance.

Edward Snowhas received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for his many renderings of Rilke. The author ofA Study of VermeerandInside Breughel,he teaches at Rice University.

Snow, who so insightfully translated the two volumes of Rilke'sNew Poems, has now turned toThe Book of Images, one of the poet's most startling and diverse masterworks. Snow has rendered with great skill and accuracy a work both familiar and unknown, more complicated and more immediate than many have suspected, at once grave, mysterious, and beautiful. Edward Hirsch

How much setting straight Snow's new translation ofThe Book of Imagesaccomplishes! With these sorrowing and luminous poems to lead up to Snow's two volumes of theNew Poems, it is possible to gain, for the first time in English, a consistent perspective of Rilke's difficult canon, here restored and disclosed to stunning effect. Richard Howard