Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

#566
Title: Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke
Translator: Stephen Mitchell
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1923/2009
(Audio cassette 1997 by Audio Literature)
110 pages (as audio)

Translated and read by Stephen Mitchell. I love Rilke so instead of commenting on the poems, I'll kvetch a little about some of the shortfalls of audiobooks. In book form, does this translation have an introduction? Explanatory notes? A facing page in the original German? In addition to the pretty clear sense at times of not getting the whole book, I also wonder how to convert audio duration to pages. It doesn't trouble me that much, but I find myself more drawn to novels as I peruse audiobooks. It's a nuisance to read non-fiction and then go to a bookstore or library to look at intros, afterwords, end notes, and diagrams. In any event, Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus work very well together and I enjoyed Mitchell's somewhat academic but non-intrusive reading.