Rilke's Book of Hours

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 20s, Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the 20th 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, 100 years after it was written.

Rilke's Book of Hours shares with the listener 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. This brand-new audio edition is expressively narrated by Christine Buffle, a native German speaker. Each poem is read first in English, then followed by the original German. This audiobook was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.

©1996, 2005 Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (P)