Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry sings and dances...in its original. This book is again proof that is well-nigh impossible to translate poetry and to preserve its fundamental nature. What places the finishing touches upon Rilke in his native German is his beautiful sense of linguistic balance, of metric symmetry. This translation was executed, though, with no regard to metre (the translators admit as much). While they tend to successfully encapsulate Rilke's meaning, it is rather a free-form exercise...often omitting two or three lines at a whim...would perhaps be better to view this as Anita Barrows' personal interpretation of Rilke's poetry. Poetry is extremely challenging to translate (Rilke notoriously so); this is a game effort, and an interesting approach...but it isn't really Rilke at the end of it all.

All that said, I refrain from dunning this entirely...the kernel of Rilke's meaning pokes through, but I firmly recommend reading this instead in German, ability provided. As far as suitable English translations of Rilke, the best ones available to my mind are those done by Edward Snow.

"My branches/ rest in deep silence," Rilke writes in this collection, "stirred only by the wind" (I, 3). I arrived at this translation of Rilke through Joanna Macy's recent memoir, WIDENING CIRCLES (2000), the title of which Macy took from a Rilke poem collected here: "I live my life in widening circles/ that reach out across the world./ I may not ever complete the last one,/ but I give myself to it" (I, 2). I am not a Rilke scholar, nor am I qualified to comment on the accuracy of this translation, but for me, Macy and Barrows succeed in capturing the spiritual intimacy of Rilke's verse.

Rilke (1875-1926) wrote his BOOK OF HOURS between the years 1899-1903, inspired by the spirituality he encountered while visiting Russia. He tells us things of the world have souls, giving us an opportunity for dialogue. It is possible to read this collection both as "cycle of love poems," and as "intensely inward conversations with God" (p. 24). Rilke portrays God "not with lapis or gold, but with colors made of apple bark" (I, 60). He observes that God moves quietly through our lives: "Of all who move through the quiet houses,/ you are the quietest" (I, 45). God runs "like a herd of luminous deer/ and I am dark," Rilke writes, "I am a forest" (I, 45).

"Things" teach us "to fall,/ patiently to trust our heaviness./ Even a bird has to do that/ before he can fly" (II, 16). "Now you must go out into your heart," Rilke writes in another poem, "as onto a vast plain" (II, 2). These are poems that will quietly touch your soul; they will leave you wanting to spend more than a few HOURS with Rilke. Another recommended favorite is Mitchell's SELECTED POETRY OF RAINER MARIA RILKE (1989).

G. Merritt

This book is magnificent, and my copy is dog-eared and worn from hours of loving perusal. I don't speak German, and though
I can respect the purist point of view, I nonetheless found this book to be an amazing read, which I return to time and time
again. The words draw you in and hold you, enthrall you with
their very powerful messages and images. The beauty of his poetry would be tragic to miss.

Ich lese es heraus aus deinem Wort

I read it here in your very word,
in the story of the gestures
with which your hands cupped themselves
around our becoming - limiting, warm.

You said live out loud, and die you said lightly,
and over and over again you said be.

But before the first death came murder.
A fracture broke across the rings you'd ripened.
A screaming shattered the voices

that had come together to speak you,
to make of you a bridge
over the chasm of everything.

And what they have stammered ever since
are fragments
of your ancient name.

- How can you not read this and and be moved?
How can one not read this and feel part part of
a greater whole? Awe-inspiring. Exquisite. Beautiful.
Brilliant, simply brilliant. This collection was my introduction
to the magnificent Rainer Maria Rilke, and this novice will forever and ever be grateful to Barrows and Macy for it.

Kristeva's early masterpiece that helped to solidify her reputation in the early 70s as a masterly leftist feminist can now be reread as indicative of the Orientalism of the Paris of the 1970s in which Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Philippe Sollers, and many others championed Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. This revolution of the Parisian letters of the 1970s has now become a powerful wing of what is euphemistically called Cultural Studies, but which is actually a branch of Mao's Cultural Revolution, being played out today in almost every institution of higher education in America.

This book is the purest Orientalism of the kind that Edward Said complains about. She actually argues that because the future is so bright after the Cultural Revolution that the possibilities are unlimited.

It shows the left's prophetic powers in retrospect.