In this outstanding biography, Ralph Freedman traces Rilke's extraordinary career by combining detailed accounts of salient episodes from the poet's restless life with an intimate reading of the verse and prose that refract them."

This culmination of award-winning author Andrew Harvey’s life’s work bridges the great divide between spiritual resignation and engaged spiritual activism. A manifesto for the transformation of the world through the fusion of deep mystical peace with the clarity of radical wisdom, it is a wake-up call to put love and compassion to urgent, focused action. According to Harvey, we are in a massive global crisis reflected by a mass media addicted to violence and trivialization at a moment when what the world actually needs is profound inspiration, a return to the heart-centered way of the Divine Feminine, the words of the mystics throughout the ages, and the cultivation of the nonviolent philosophies of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Dalai Lama. Harvey’s concepts of radical passion and sacred activism fly in the face of restraint, of pessimism, of denial, of all that is inhumane, fusing the mystic’s passion for God with the activist’s passion for justice and for healing the division between heaven and earth, heart and will, body and soul, prayer and action. Sacred activism asks that we engage deeply on a personal, spiritual, and political level so as to become a fully empowered, fully active, and contemplative humanity that can turn tragedy into grace, and desolation into the opportunity to build and co-create a new world. Unlike many spiritual books, Radical Passion does not veil the dark with artificial hope. It explores the catastrophes of our current times and celebrates the ecstatic hope and divinity that is possible—right now and in the future.

Travelogue, literary autobiography, and journalistic exposé of the mores of capital punishment, Rue Rilke chronicles its author's initiatory Rilke pilgrimage to France and Switzerland and—upon his return to America—his up-close involvement in death penalty politics. Immersed in the legal and human drama unfolding in Houston in the days leading up to an impending execution, the intimate linkage of love and death learned from Rilke aid him in his efforts to confront his country's sanction of lethal violence and make spiritual sense of his torn, too often black-and-white world. “Poetry matters and this book shows us why. The astonishing range of Rue Rilke—a travel diary, a meditation on Rilke, and a gripping account of efforts to oppose an unjust judicial execution—reveals the essense of what James Hillman calls soul-making. Poet, essayist, and passionate abolitionist, Daniel Polikoff gives us a book dedicated to the fiery poetry of life itself.” SUSAN ROWLAND, author of Jung as a Writer and The Ecocritical Psyche “In his stunning early book Rue Rilke, Daniel Joseph Polikoff offers us an impassioned and stylistically brilliant travelogue. With Rilke as his Virgil, he descends in quest of the feminine values he must labor to integrate into contemporary life. Never before has Rilke’s mythic identification with the prodigal son been so personally authenticated, taken up with such imaginative immersion and inquisitive grace. A remarkable achievement.” BRUCE BOND, University of North Texas, author of Immanent Distance “Polikoff's is a profound and spacious spiritual imagination. That passionate young man who wrote of his experiences one summer more than two decades ago was filled with the old wisdom of The Poet, the song-lines of landscape, and the prophetic voice that dares confront “the fear that guts the spiritual house of this land.” We need his voice now in our own deeply disturbed times.” NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY, author of The Sister from Below and The Faust Woman Poems Poet, translator, and internationally recognized Rilke scholar Daniel Joseph Polikoff received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University and his Diploma in Waldorf Education from Rudolf Steiner College. In addition to work in numerous literary journals, he has published five books of poetry, translation, and criticism, incuding In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke—A Soul History and a bilingual translation of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. Dr. Polikoff has taught literature in Waldorf high schools as well as courses in literature and depth psychology at Sonoma State University and the California Institute of Integral Studies. He has shared his passion for Rilke in a wide variety of venues in the United States and abroad, including annual meetings of the International Rilke and Jean Gebser Societies, the San Francisco Jung Institute, and the Napa Valley Writer's Conference. His webinars on Rilke: Poetry and Alchemy and Rilke and the Hermetic Tradition are available through the Asheville Jung Center. He resides with his wife Monika and family in the San Francisco Bay area. More information is available at danielpolikoff.com.

Spanning four centuries from the Renaissance to today's avant-garde, Migration and Mutation explores how the sonnet has evolved in and out of translation. Contributors examine little-studied translation trajectories in the early modern period, such as the pivotal role of France between Italy and England or the first German sonnets and their Italian, French, Dutch and Scottish origins. Essays then shed new light on major European sonneteers In the 19th and 20th centuries, including Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Rilke and Pessoa, alongside lesser-known contemporaries and with novel approaches. And finally, contributors explore how translation and adaptation create metaphorical space in the 21st century. Migration and Mutation also pays attention to the political or subversive dimension of the sonnet, with essays on women, gay or postcolonial reclaimings of the sonnet and recent experiments such as post-Soviet Sonnets on shirts by Genrikh Sagpir. It takes the sonnet out of the confines of enclosed national traditions bringing it into renewed contact with mostly European, but also other, cultures.

In part through critical biography, in part through a close reading of almost all of the poems Rilke wrote, including many poems from his Diaries, this large book challenges new ideas about what went into the making of Rilke over twenty years of production, from his early beginnings under the tutelage of Lou Salomé, right through, to his famous final works, the 'Sonnets to Orpheus' and the 'Duino Elegies.' Volume 1 focuses largely on 'The Book of Hours'; Volume 2 on 'The Book of Images,' the two parts of 'New Poems,' 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,' and the first Elegies written while at Duino; Volume 3 on those all-crucial, self-transforming ten years beyond Duino that lead up to the 'Sonnets to Orpheus' and Rilke’s eventual completion of the Elegies. Two major theses are put forward in this book, the first touching on Rilke’s well-known relationship to his former lover and mentor, Lou Salomé, who is understood to have been a far more problematic influence on him than we had supposed, the second touching on an equally crucial and at some point saving influence on Rilke from the literary sphere, which is shown to be that of the great visionary poet who went by the name of Novalis. Behind the grand story of Rilke’s poetic emergence lies the fundamental and long-standing reality of his repression by Lou and what that would sow, paradoxically, by way of a sublimated achievement as sublimely poignant as it is finally tragic. JOHN O’MEARA received his PhD from the University of East Anglia in 1986. He taught for many years at the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa. He is the author of 'The Way of Novalis' and 'Remembering Shakespeare.' Visit the author’s website at johnomeara.squarespace.com

This book is devoted to the study of the bilingual “parallel poems” of Ludwig Strauss (Aachen 1892 ˗ Jerusalem 1953) created between 1934 and 1952 in Palestine/Israel and which exist in two variants, a Hebrew and a German version, one of which is the original and the other a self-translation. The aim of this study is to compare the versions and their interpretation based on Strauss’s theoretical essays on poetry and translation, his political writings and works of literary criticism. Special attention is paid to Strauss’s concept (linked with the idea of messianic redemption) of poetry as a “fore-image” of a future true community of men and as “the earthly expression of the Absolute” directed at interpreting divine revelation and its “translation” into human language. In examining Strauss’s experiments with self-translation, by which he aimed at establishing a dialogue between languages, and between people and nations, this study considers the two processes of translation: from divine speech into human language and from one human language into another.

A new translation of Rilke's great work with close readings of each of the ten elegies elucidating how their poetic attributes constitute their meaning. Rilke continues to be the most read and discussed German poet of the modern period. The Duino Elegies, together with the Sonnets to Orpheus, remain his greatest achievement. The themes of the ten elegies - and the conceptual world unique to Rilke from which they emerge - can best be understood through their poetic form: their imagery and neologistic formations, their angular syntax, their abrupt changes of tone and linguistic register, their use of multiple personae and speaking voices, and the often-ironic self-presentation of the author. Commentators, however, have often treated these features as mere formal devices that we can somehow see through to get to what really matters, that is, to what Rilke has to say about the human condition or the meaning of life, to his philosophy or worldview. On the contrary, they are constitutive of meaning in the elegies, and understanding them is crucial to our experience of reading Rilke's work. The purpose of this book is to make such features visible and to explain them to the reader as clearly as possible. This is the first full-length book in English devoted to the elegies in over thirty years. It offers an entirely new translation of each elegy, paired with the original German text, and a close reading of each.

Recaptures the magical vitality of the original Orphic Hymns • Presents literary translations of the teletai that restore important esoteric details and correspondences about the being or deity to which each hymn is addressed • Includes messages inscribed on golden leaves meant to be passports for the dead as well as a reinvention of a lost hymn to Number that preserves the original mystical intent of the teletai • Explores the obscure origins and the evolution of the Orpheus myth, revealing a profound influence on countercultures throughout Western history As famous Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino wrote, “No magic is more powerful than that of the Orphic Hymns.” These legendary teletai of Orpheus were not simply “hymns”—they were initiatic poems for meditation and ritual, magical, and ceremonial use, each one addressed to a specific deity, such as Athena or Zeus, or a virtue, such as Love, Justice, and Equality. Yet despite the mystical concepts underlying them, the original hymns were formulaic, creating an obstacle for translators. Recapturing the magical vitality that inspired mystery cults through the ages, Tamra Lucid and Ronnie Pontiac present new versions of the teletai that include important esoteric details and correspondences about the being or deity to which each hymn is addressed. The authors also include a new version of a lost hymn called “Number” and messages that were inscribed on golden leaves meant to be passports for the dead, reinventions that preserve the original magical intent and mysticism of the teletai. Revealing the power of the individual hymns to attune the reader to the sacred presence of the Orphic Mysteries and the higher order of nature, the authors also show how, taken together, the Orphic Hymns are a book of hours or a calendar of life, addressing every event, from birth to death, and walking us through all the experiences of human existence as necessary and holy.

Tracing the the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead. For as long as recording and communications technologies have existed, operators have evoked the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead. In Unsound:Undead, contributors from a variety of disciplines chart these undead zones, mapping out a nonlinear timeline populated by sonic events stretching from the 8th century BC (the song of the Sirens), to 2013 (acoustic levitation), with a speculative extension into 2057 (the emergence of holographic and holosonic phenomena). For the past seven years the AUDINT group has been researching peripheral sonic perception (unsound) and the ways in which frequencies are utilized to modulate our understanding of presence/non-presence, entertainment/torture, and ultimately life/death. Concurrently, themes of hauntology have inflected the musical zeitgeist, resonating with the notion of a general cultural malaise and a reinvestment in traces of lost futures inhabiting the present. This undead culture has already spawned a Lazarus economy in which Tupac, ODB, and Eazy-E are digitally revivified as laser-lit holograms. The obscure otherworldly dimensions of sound have also been explored in the sonic fictions produced by the likes of Drexciya, Sun Ra, and Underground Resistance, where hauntology is virtually extended: the future appears in the cracks of the present. The contributions to this volume reveal how the sonic nurtures new dimensions in which the real and the imagined (fictional, hyperstitional, speculative) bleed into one another, where actual sonic events collide with spatiotemporal anomalies and time-travelling entities, and where the unsound serves to summon the undead. Contributors Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Charlie Blake, Lisa Blanning, Brooker Buckingham, Al Cameron, Erik Davis, Kodwo Eshun, Matthew Fuller, Kristen Gallerneaux, Lee Gamble, Agnès Gayraud, Steve Goodman, Anna Greenspan, Olga Gurionova, S. Ayesha Hameed, Tim Hecker, Julian Henriques, Toby Heys, Eleni Ikoniadou, Amy Ireland, Nicola Masciandaro, Ramona Naddaff, Anthony Nine, The Occulture, Luciana Parisi, Alina Popa, Paul Purgas, Georgina Rochefort, Steven Shaviro, Jonathan Sterne, Jenna Sutela, Eugene Thacker, Dave Tompkins, Shelley Trower, and Souzana Zamfe.