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The Camden Public Library warmly welcomes Mark S. Burrows, one of the leading interpreters of Rilke’s writings and an award-winning translator of his poems, to share his recently published new version of the Austrian poet’s Sonnets to Orpheus.
This event is in-person only and will take place on Tuesday, December 10 at 6:30 p.m. in the Picker Room. Refreshments will be provided.
Join us for an engaging evening featuring a reading of select sonnets from Rilke’s last great poetry-cycle, his Sonnets to Orpheus (1922/1923). Burrows opens these poems to us as expressions of what an early literary scholar called a new “dawn of consciousness where language is in the making, and where myth and symbol must often supply the place of not yet thinkable thoughts.”
The evening will explore what it might mean to “sing the gardens…that [we] don’t know,” to face life’s challenges and burdens with creativity and hope—themes that have a special resonance in times like these.
Mark S. Burrows is an award-winning poet, translator, and scholar. An historian of medieval mysticism, he is a much sought-after speaker and retreat leader in the US and Europe on spirituality and the arts as transformative channels of creativity. Together with Jon Sweeney, he has published three books of meditative poems inspired by Meister Eckhart’s writings, most recently Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light which was awarded the Gold Medal by the Nautilus Book Awards in 2024.
His translations of German poetry include, most recently, the first full-length translation of the German-Jewish poet Hilde Domin’s poems, The Wandering Radiance: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin (2023) and a new translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (2024). He also recently published You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke (2024), cowritten with Stephanie Dowrick. He lives and writes in Camden, ME.
