A FINALIST FOR THE PEN/WEST TRANSLATION AWARD

The 100th Anniversary Edition of a global classic, containing beautiful translations along with the original German text.

While visiting Russia in his twenties, Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, was moved by a spirituality he encountered there. Inspired, Rilke returned to Germany and put down on paper what he felt were spontaneously received prayers. Rilke's Book of Hours is the invigorating vision of spiritual practice for the secular world, and a work that seems remarkably prescient today, one hundred years after it was written.

Rilke's Book of Hours shares with the reader a new kind of intimacy with God, or the divine--a reciprocal relationship between the divine and the ordinary in which God needs us as much as we need God. Rilke influenced generations of writers with his Letters to a Young Poet, and now Rilke's Book of Hours tells us that our role in the world is to love it and thereby love God into being. These fresh translations rendered by Joanna Macy, a mystic and spiritual teacher, and Anita Barrows, a skilled poet, capture Rilke's spirit as no one has done before.

Long hailed as a masterwork of modern German literature, The Book of Hours (1905) marks the origin of Rainer Maria Rilke's distinctive voice and vision--where clarity of diction meets unexpected imagery and first-person poetry discovers its full lyric possibility. In these audacious poems, a devout but candid speaker addresses an ultimately unknowable deity, passing through love, fear, guilt, anger, bewilderment, loneliness, tenderness, and exaltation in his search for meaning.

In this dual-language edition, Edward Snow, the most trustworthy and exhilarating of Rilke's contemporary translators (Michael Dirda, Washington Post), makes Rilke's achievement accessible as never before in English. Snow retains a striking fidelity to the German text while also conveying the captivating psychological presence that animates Rilke's best poems.

Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997 is the definitive, complete collection of poetry by Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska.

Described by Robert Hass as unquestionably one of the great living European poets and by Charles Simic as one of the finest poets living today, Szymborska mesmerizes her readers with poetry that captivates their minds and captures their hearts.

This is the book that her many fans have been anxiously awaiting, including 164 poems in all, as well as the full text of her Nobel acceptance speech of December 7, 1996, in Stockholm. Beautifully translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, who won a 1996 PEN Translation Prize for their work, this volume is a must-have for all readers of poetry.

Crucefix's translation will have, and keep, a place on my shelves where all the poetry lives. - Philip Pullman

A new selection and translation, by an acclaimed poet, of Rilke's most essential work - the perfect gift for the poetry lover in your life

In dazzling new translations of 142 poems by the acclaimed Martyn Crucefix, Rilke beguiles with fresh insight and mystery.

Rainer Maria Rilke developed one of the most singular poetic styles of the twentieth century. Visionary yet always anchored in the real world, his poems give profound expression to fundamental questions of love and death, of the chaos of the modern world as well as the spiritual consolation of art and nature.

Change Your Life draws from across Rilke's career to offer a comprehensive view of his most essential poetry, featuring major selections from the great Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus alongside less frequently anthologised work.

Available for the first time in a single volume, Ranier Maria Rilke's two most beloved sequences of poems rendered by his most faithful translator. Rilke is unquestionably the twentieth century's most significant and compelling poet of romantic transformation and spiritual quest. His poems of ecstatic identification with the world exert perennial fascination. In Stephen Mitchell's versions of Rilke's two greatest masterpieces readers will discover an English rendering that captures the lyric intensity, fluency, and reach of his poetry. Stephen Mitchell adheres impeccably to Rilke's text, to his formal music, and to the complexity of his thought; at the same time, Mitchell's work has authority and power as poetry in its own right.

A delectable and profound collection of poems from Nobel Prize-winner Szymborska (Booklist).

When Here was published in Poland, reviewers marveled, How is it that she keeps getting better?

These twenty-seven poems, as rendered by prize-winning translators Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, are among her greatest ever. Whether writing about her teenage self, microscopic creatures, or the upsides to living on Earth, she remains a virtuoso of form, line, and thought.

From the title poem:

I can't speak for elsewhere,
but here on Earth we've got a fair supply of everything.
Here we manufacture chairs and sorrows,
scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins, teacups, dams, and quips. . .

Like nowhere else, or almost nowhere,
you're given your own torso here,
equipped with the accessories required
for adding your own children to the rest.
Not to mention arms, legs, and astonished head.

" This miracle of a book, perhaps the most beautiful group of poetic translations this century has ever produced, " (Chicago Tribune) should stand as the definitive English language version.

For poetry lovers and students of literature and literary criticism, Robert Bly, the National Book Award-winning poet, brings his prowess as a translator and critic to bear on the work of one of the major German poets of the century.

Both plain-spoken and luminous . . . [Szymborska's] is the best of the Western mind--free, restless, questioning. -- New York Times Book Review

A New York Times Editors' Choice

Vast, intimate, and charged with the warmth of a life fully imagined to the end. There's no better place for those unfamiliar with her work to begin.
-- Vogue

One of Europe's greatest poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. If you want the world in a nutshell, a Polish critic remarked, try Szymborska. But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.

​Edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, Map traces Szymborska's work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred fifty poems included here, nearly forty are newly translated; thirteen represent the entirety of the poet's last Polish collection, Enough, never before published in English. Map offers Szymborska's devoted readers a welcome return to her ironic elegance (TheNew Yorker).

Her poems offer a restorative wit as playful as it is steely and as humble as it is wise . . . Her wry acceptance of life's folly remain[s] her strongest weapon against tyranny and bad taste.
-- Los Angeles Times Book Review

The first-ever English translation of Rilke's landmark poetry cycle, by Vita and Edward Sackville-West ­- reissued for the first time in 90 years

In 1931, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press published a small run of a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, in English translation by the writers Vita and Edward Sackville-West. This marked the English debut of Rilke's masterpiece, which would eventually be rendered in English over 20 times, influencing countless poets, musicians and artists across the English-speaking world.

Published for the first time in 90 years, the Sackville-Wests' translation is both a fascinating historical document and a magnificent blank-verse rendering of Rilke's poetry cycle. Featuring a new introduction from critic Lesley Chamberlain, this reissue casts one of European literature's great masterpieces in fresh light.

A collection of haunting, mystical poems of the night by the great Rainer Maria Rilke - most of which have never before been translated into English

One night I held between my hands
your face. The moon fell upon it.

In 1916, Rainer Maria Rilke presented the writer Rudolf Kassner with a notebook, containing twenty-two poems, meticulously copied out in his own hand, which bore the title Poems to Night. This cycle of poems which came about in an almost clandestine manner, are now thought to represent one of the key stages of this master poet's development.

Never before translated into English, this collection brings together all Rilke's significant night poems in one volume.

For the past twenty-five years, North Point Press has been working with Edward Snow, Rilke's best contemporary translator (Brian Phillips, The New Republic), to bring into English Rilke's major poetic works. The Poetry of Rilke--the single most comprehensive volume of Rilke's German poetry ever to be published in English--is the culmination of this effort. With more than two hundred and fifty selected poems by Rilke, including complete translations of the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies, The Poetry of Rilke spans the arc of Rilke's work, from the breakthrough poems of The Book of Hours to the visionary masterpieces written only weeks before his death. This landmark bilingual edition also contains all of Snow's commentaries on Rilke, as well as an important new introduction by the award-winning poet Adam Zagajewski. The Poetry of Rilke will stand as the authoritative single-volume translation of Rilke into English for years to come.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic
orders? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure,
and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.
-from The First Elegy

Over the last fifteen years, in his two volumes of New Poems as well as in The Book of Images and Uncollected Poems, Edward Snow has emerged as one of Rainer Maria Rilke's most able English-language interpreters. In his translations, Snow adheres faithfully to the intent of Rilke's German while constructing nuanced, colloquial poems in English.

Written in a period of spiritual crisis between 1912 and 1922, the poems that compose the Duino Elegies are the ones most frequently identified with the Rilkean sensibility. With their symbolic landscapes, prophetic proclamations, and unsettling intensity, these complex and haunting poems rank among the outstanding visionary works of the century.

Darkness Spoken is the most complete volume of Ingeborg Bachmann's poetry in English and German. Considered one of the premiere poets of her generation, Bachmann's various awards include the Georg Büchner Prize, the Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award, and the Austrian State Prize for literature. Darkness Spoken collects her two celebrated books of poetry, as well as the early and late poems not collected in book form. First published by Zephyr Press in 2006, the volume also contains 129 poems released from Bachmann's archives that had never been translated before. Twenty-five of them also appeared in German for the first time.

Continued research by Peter Fikins on Bachmann's writing since 2006 as well as his current work on Bachmann's biography (forthcoming in 2026 from Yale University Press), has drawn him even closer to Bachmann's poems and deepened his understanding of their context and meaning. For this second revised edition, roughly a quarter of the poems have benefitted from revisions in word choice for the purposes of greater clarity, better syntax or rhythm, or in a few instances, corrections in punctuation and of interpretive errors. Eight poems from Bachmann's youth have also been added that did not appear in the first edition. A few lacunae in the German have also been corrected, allowing this volume to remain the most complete edition of Bachmann's poetry.

Although he is best known in the United States for his theater works, Bertolt Brecht is considered one of the greatest of modern German poets. He is supreme among modern poets in any language for his simple, direct, powerful style, which combines poetic sensibility and social consciousness. After a period of expressionistic writing in the 1920's Brecht reacted against the tradition of romantic individualism and set out to strip poetry of ornamentation and sentimentality. He wrote poems that were spare, functional, shaped to teach a lesson -- poems intended to be understood by ordinary people. His most popular poems are his ballads (which he composed to the accompaniment of a guitar), a poetic form that he could transform into a cry of protest, a marching song, or an instrument of satire.

Memory Rose into Threshold Speech gathers the poet Paul Celan's first four books, written between 1952 and 1963, which established his reputation as a major post-World War II German-language poet.

Celan, a Bukovinian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, created work that displays both great lyric power and an uncanny ability to pinpoint totalitarian cultural and political tendencies. His quest, however, is not only reflective: there is in Celan's writing a profound need and desire to create a new, inhabitable world and a new language for it. In Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, Celan's reader witnesses his poetry, which starts lush with surrealistic imagery, become gradually pared down; its syntax tightens and his trademark neologisms and word formations increase toward a polysemic language of great accuracy that tries, in the poet's own words, to measure the area of the given and the possible.

Translated by the prize-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris, this bilingual edition follows the 2014 publication of Breathturn into Timestead, Celan's collected later poetry. All nine volumes of Celan's poetry are now available in Joris's carefully crafted translations, accompanied here by a new introduction, as well as extensive commentary by Joris and Barbara Wiedemann. The four volumes in this edition show the flowering of one of the major literary figures of the last century.

This volume collects Celan's first four books: Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (Threshold to Threshold), Sprachgitter (Speechgrille), and Die Niemandsrose (NoOnesRose).

The greatest of the heroic epics to emerge from medieval Germany, the Nibelungenlied is a revenge saga of sweeping dimensions. It tells of the dragon-slayer Sivrit, the mysterious kingdom of the Nibelungs, a priceless treasure guarded by dwarves and giants, an Amazonian queen, fortune-telling water-sprites, and a cloak of invisibility. Driven by the conflict between Kriemhilt, the innocent maiden turned she-devil, and her antagonist, the stoic, indomitable Hagen, the story is one of love, jealousy, murder, and revenge, ending in slaughter on a horrific scale. Since its rediscovery in the eighteenth century, the Nibelungenlied has come to be regarded as the national epic of the Germans, and has inspired countless adaptations, including Richard Wagner's Ring cycle. Cyril Edwards' prose translation, the first in forty years, is more accurate and accessible and captures the poem's epic qualities. Edwards also provides an introduction that discusses the poem's historical background and its status as German national epic. The volume includes an up-to-date bibliography, invaluable notes, a map, and a list of people and places.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This volume marks the first translation of these prayer-poems into English. Originally written in 1899, Rilke wrote them upon returning to Germany from his first trip to Russia. His experience of the East shaped him profoundly. He found himself entranced by Orthodox churches and monasteries, above all by the icons that seemed to him like flames glowing in dark spaces. He intended these poems as icons of sorts, gestures that could illumine a way for seekers in the darkness. As Rilke here writes, I love the dark hours of my being, for they deepen my senses. Translated by Mark S. Burrows.

Friedrich H lderlin (1770-1843) is now recognized as one of Europe's supreme poets. He first found his true voice in the epigrams and odes he wrote when transfigured by his love for the wife of a rich banker. He later embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious sequence of hymns exploring cosmology and history, from mythological times to the discovery of America and his own era. The 'Canticles of Night', by contrast, include enigmatic fragments in an unprecedented style, which anticipates the Symbolists and Surrealists. Together the works collected here show H lderlin's use of Classical and Christian imagery and his exploration of cosmology and history in an attempt to find meaning in an uncertain world.

German poet Rainer Maria Rilke(1875-1926) enjoys ever-increasing popularity. His Duino Elegies is considered on of the greatest long poems of the twentieth century. Yet translations from his native German have always presented challenges: the elusiveness of Rilke's imagery, the playful way he both distorts and subverts his own language, and the depth and complexity of his poetry make it difficult for translators to preserve the beauty and meaning of the original text. In his stunning bilingual selection that includes the entire Duino Elegies as well as a number of favorite and less familiar shorter poems, Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann manage to retain power and grace of Rilke's words. Throughout his poetry, Rilke addresses questions of how to live in and relate to a world in a voice that is simultaneoulsy prophetic and intensely personel. These translations offer new insight into this enigmatic German poet whose work will continue to be read and admired throughout the world.