The musings of a writer during his apprenticeship. Rilke
(1875-1926) spent two and a half years, from 1898 to 1900, keeping
a diary at the suggestion of his lover, Lou Andreas-Salome. This
intrinsically private work takes shape as an impassioned
miscellany, including drafts of poems, gossip about Rilke's friends
and acquaintances, direct observations of place, his reflections on
art and architecture from the Renaissance to Rodin, and fictional
tales. Mixed in with this stimulating hodgepodge is some blather.
"Every day is the beginning of life," exulted Rilke in 1900. "Every
life is the beginning of eternity." But the youthful Romantic could
be witty as well as narcotically lyric. One of the diary's
climactic moments comes as he commits to paper his adventure of
trying to visit and impress Count Leo Tolstoy at the great man's
country estate with Lou: "A dog comes right up to us, trusting and
friendly, as we stand there in front of the small glass door. I
bend down to the white dog and as I straighten up again I see
behind the glass, vague and distorted by the flaws of the pane, a
pair of searching eyes in a small grizzled face. The door opens,
lets You [Lou] in and slams sharply against me, so that I, only
after the Count has already greeted You, come in and now also stand
before him, feeling awkwardly large." Rilke's actual visual sense
takes the measure of Florence evocatively: "The ornamentation that
nestles up against the columns is in the best instances unobtrusive
and straightforward, a beautiful thought or a tender feeling
elicited by the column." The poems included are languorously
unfinished reveries, brimming with girls, flowers, and boyish,
transcendent emotion. But Rilke was not always sacramentally
poetic; even "a dachsund with the demeanor of a sphinx" could catch
his eye and spur his sentences. Platitudes, poetry, and revelations
for Rilke's many American admirers - translated for the first time
into English. (Kirkus Reviews)
"In the diaries [Rilke] kept from 1898 to 1900, now translated for the first time . . . the overall impression is that of a genius just coming into his own powers."—Boston Phoenix
In April 1898 Rainer Maria Rilke, not yet twenty-three, began a diary of his Florence visit. It was to record, in the form of an imaginary dialogue with his mentor and then-lover, Lou Andreas-Salome, his firsthand experiences of early Renaissance art. The project quickly expanded to include not only thoughts on life, history, and artistic genius, but also unguarded moments of revulsion, self-doubt, and manic expectation. The result is an intimate glimpse into the young Rilke, already experimenting brilliantly with language and metaphor.
"For the lover of Rilke, this superb translation of the poet's early diaries will be a watershed. Through Edward Snow's and Michael Winkler's brilliantly supple and faithful translation . . . a new and more balanced picture of Rilke will emerge."—Ralph Freedman
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