A Reader's Guide to Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. By Timothy J. Casey. Galway: Arlen House, 2001. Pp. 208.

This book presents itself as "a reader's guide, not an exhaustive line-by-line and word-by-word critical commentary in the manner, say, of Mùrchen on the Sonnets or Steiner on the Elegies" (p. 10). A guide for whom? Casey envisages above all the nonspecialist reader. Patently, the book is directed at English-speaking readers of Rilke, because if Casey had had German readers in mind, he would have had to justify the book's publication by differentiating it from the similar, longer commentary by Ernst Leisi, Rilkes Sonette an Orpheus (TÙbingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987). This he does not do. Yet he presupposes an anglophone reader who knows quite a lot of German. The reader who does not know German will find that the Sonnets themselves are cited in German (fairly enough, Casey points the reader to Leishman's rhymed translation, which he believes is the most faithful to the original); that prose quotations are given in German in the text (English translations are found in the endnotes); and that quotations from Rilke's other poetry are sometimes translated into English and sometimes not. Therefore, the likely audience for this book, the audience for which it would be linguistically fully accessible, would seem to be the relatively small pool of English-speaking undergraduate German majors. A wider audience could have been targeted if Casey had consistently translated all quotations.

Lorna Martens
University of Virginia