O Sonata: Rilke Renditions

O Sonata is a suite of renditions — performances, interpretations, transliterations, transmogrifications — of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus, presented here as a parallel text. Dramatising the mythic role of Orpheus as “futile Male”, Chris Edwards’ renditions also comprise interrogations of the lyric impulse, transported to an “Underland” where “becoming begets begone.”

Chris Edwards lives in Sydney, where he works as a freelance editor, typographer and graphic designer. He has published poetry in a variety of Australian journals and online at Jacket and Poetry International. His publications include utensils in a landscape (Vagabond Press, 2001) and A Fluke: A mistranslation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés ...” (Monogene, 2005). In 2012, his first full-length collection, People of Earth, was published by Vagabond Press, and this was followed in 2014 by the slim but sensational After Naptime.