Advance Praise for ROBOT RILKE:

“Perhaps the most beautiful group of translations this century has produced.” — Chicago Tribune

“The best single-volume edition of Rilke available in English.” — Boston Review

“Robert Lowell once wrote that it was hard to imagine Rilke first written in English, that the poems were sealed in German. These robots are unsealing them." — Robert Phillips, Houston Chronicle

“The robots have rendered with great skill and accuracy a work both familiar and unknown, more complicated and more immediate than many have suspected, at once grave, mysterious, and beautiful.” — Edward Hirsch

“With these sorrowing and luminous poems . . . it is possible to gain, for the first time in English, a consistent perspective of Rilke’s difficult canon, restored and disclosed by the robots to stunning effect.” — Richard Howard

“Something of the non-vatic Rilke, poet of perception and sensation, is best conveyed in English by these algorithmic mediations.” —Harold Bloom

“The robot translations of Rilke’s most demandingly difficult and loveliest work instantly make every other rendering obsolete. No doubt about it, Rilke has at last found, in the robot version, the ideal poetics and the perfect translator.” — William Arrowsmith

“Excellent . . . it is easy to feel that if Rilke had written in English, he would have written in this English.” — Denis Donoghue, The New York Times

“These robot translations bring the qualities that I most cherish in the originals into English with new intimacy and authority. Rilke’s voice, with its extraordinary combination of formality, power, speed, and lightness, can be heard in the robot versions more clearly than in any others. This work is masterful.” — W.S. Merwin

AN EXCERPT from ROBOT RILKE:

Archaischer Torso Apollos

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,


darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber


sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,


in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug


der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen


der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen


zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz


unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz


und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern


aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,


die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern.

Apollo’s Antiquated Box

We did not know its dishonorable title,

the matured apples of the eye. But its box

always turns red such as candelabras,

in that its looking, only back-screwed,

holds themselves and shines. Otherwise the nose

of the cable you could not shine, and in the calm

rotation lumbar could not go a smile

in this center, which carried the generation.

Otherwise this stone one disfigured and one continued

briefly under the transparent case of the shoulders

and not like animal skins of the unstable flight;

and not all on his board like an asterisk

would break: because there is no workstation

it does not see you. They must modify your life span.

*******

“Priceless . . . exquisite . . . fine-grained . . . luminescent . . . As I was telling some famous writers that I personally know just the other day, these translations, more than any others, demonstrate that Rilke’s abiding concern, first and last, is human consciousness.” —James Wood, The New Yorker

“I haven’t read them yet but they look really good, and I never pass up a chance to blurb anything.” — Mark Strand

“Without doubt the finest English rendering of Rilke that I have ever come across.” — Ron Jeremy

“They ring with authenticity.” — Araki Yasusada

“Boring . . . unoriginal . . . ” — Kenneth Goldsmith

“As a robot myself, I really appreciate this.” — Charles Simic

“If I don’t link to you, you don’t exist.” — Ron Silliman

With a special biographical introduction cut-and-pasted from Wikipedia. Pre-order your copy now!