Sonetos a Orfeo

In February 1923, while finishing the Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke composed, in a moment of inspiration, the Sonnets to Orpheus, the culmination of the cycle he had begun ten years earlier with that book, one of the most intense and stimulating poetic adventures of modernity. If the elegies concluded with a radical acceptance of the finitude and ephemeral nature of humankind, in the sonnets Rilke turns his gaze to Orpheus as the god of poetry and the starting point of a new vital creed. The myth of the first singer, who descended to the underworld to rescue his wife Eurydice, failed in his endeavor, and was then torn to pieces by the Maenads, becomes for the modern poet a metaphor for humanity's reintegration into the womb of nature, thanks to which there is no longer a here and there, but a single realm redeemed by song. As they did with the Elegies, Adan Kovacsics and Andreu Jaume have produced a new and meticulous translation of the sonnets, adding abundant supplementary material to understand the work, from letters of the time to other poems sketched or discarded, as well as the fragments of Ovid that inspired the author.