BiblioVault - Books about Orpheus (Greek mythological character)

Paradise Earned

The Bacchic-Orphic Gold Lamellae of Crete

Yannis Tzifopoulos

Harvard University Press, 2010

This is a study of the twelve small gold lamellae from Crete that were tokens for entrance into a golden afterlife: the deceased who were buried or cremated with them believed that they had 'earned Paradise.' The lamellae are placed within the context of a small corpus of similar texts, and published with extensive commentary on their topography, lettering and engraving, dialect and orthography, meter, chronology, and usage. The texts reveal a hieros logos whose poetics and rituals are not much different from Homeric rhapsodizing and prophetic discourses. Cretan contexts, both literary and archaeological, are also brought to bear on these incised objects and on the burial custom involved. Finally, this work adduces parallels to the texts on the lamellae from the Byzantine period and modern Greece to illuminate the everlasting and persistent human quest for 'earning Paradise.'

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Sonnets to Orpheus

Rainer Maria Rilke

University of Scranton Press, 2007

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, first published in German in 1923, has been hailed by critics as some of the finest lyrical verse of the twentieth century. Rick Anthony Furtak’s translation of this legendary collection is the first edition for an English-speaking audience to situate the poems in a philosophical context, lending unexpected depth and a fresh perspective to Rilke’s magnum opus.

Furtak’s rich translations skillfully evoke the haunting, enigmatic nature of these poems that bridge the gap between the romantic and the modern, as his introduction guides the reader through the abundant mystical and spiritual insights to be found in Rilke’s sonnets. This new edition of a literary masterpiece will be essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophical implications of verse.

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Tsvetaeva's Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word

Olga Peters Hasty

Northwestern University Press, 1996

Tsvetaeva’s Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word explores the rich theme of the myth of Orpheus as master narrative for poetic inspiration and creative survival in the life and work of Marina Tsvetaeva. Olga Peters Hasty establishes the basic themes of the Orphic Complex—the poet’s longing to mediate between the embodied physical world and an “elsewhere,” the poet’s inability to do so, the primacy of the voice over the visual world, the insistence on concrete imagery, the costs of the poet’s gift—and orders her arguments in the tragic shape of the Orpheus myth as it worked itself out organically in Tsvetaeva’s own life. Hasty delineates the connections between the Orpheus myth and other key mythological and literary figures in the poet’s life—including Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Pushkin, and Rainer Maria Rilke—to make an important and original critical contribution.

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Under the Spell of Orpheus

The Persistence of a Myth in Twentieth-Century Art

Judith E. Bernstock. Foreword by Peter Selz

Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

This comprehensive view of the Orpheus myth in modern art focuses on an extremely rich artistic symbol and cuts through all the clichés to explore truly significant problems of meaning. The author takes a new approach to the iconography of major modern artists by incorporating psychological and literary analysis, as well as biography.

The three parts of the book explore the ways in which artists have identified with different aspects of the often paradoxical Orpheus myth. The first deals with artists such as Paul Klee, Carl Milles, and Barbara Hepworth. In the second, Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, and Isamu Noguchi are discussed. Artists examined in the final part include Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, Ethel Schwabacher, and Cy Twombly. The author documents her argument with more than sixty illustrations.

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