'What matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.' A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke's profound and lyrical letters to a young friend advise on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. Over the course of six years, Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, suffering and the nature of advice itself; these profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for writers and artists of all kinds. This volume also contains the 'Letter from a Young Worker', a striking polemic against Christianity written too in letter form.

Friedrich Holderlin's translations have long been seen as some of the most fascinating ever made, so radical and unconventional that they have altered our ideas of what translation is. Based on a close study of the versions of Pindar and Sophocles, and placing Holderlin's practice in its 18th-century context, this book explores the meaning of translation for Holderlin's work as a whole, devoting particular attention to the poetry. The author draws links between translations, individual poems, essays and Holderlin'a working techniques, and suggests that translation, both as figure and practice, is at the centre of Holderlin's imaginative world.

The great English, Anglican and modernist poet and writer C.H. Sisson was born in Bristol a hundred years ago. This Reader draws on his poetry, fiction, translations, and his literary, political and religious essays. It justifies what his peers and critics said of him. Of the poems Donald Hall wrote in the New York Times Book Review that they 'move in service of the loved landscapes of England and France, they sing (and growl) in love of argument, in love of seeing through [ - ]; they move in love of the old lost life by which the new life is condemned.' Writing of his essays in the same pages Louis Simpson notes 'his fearless views'. 'Mr Sisson isn't afraid to say what he thinks. He isn't looking over his shoulder at an establishment as he writes.' Jasper Griffin in the Times Literary Supplement dubbed him 'one of the great translators of our time'. As a writer he was always starting anew, rejecting, he said, 'whatever appeared with the face of familiarity' and referring the present to those defining periods of English and European history and culture that tried humanity and languages most harshly: the seventeenth century, for example, and the twentieth.

Rilke's powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for generations of writers and artists of all kinds, including Lady Gaga and Patti Smith. With honesty, elegance, and a deep understanding of the loneliness that often comes with being an artist, Rilke's letters are an endless source of inspiration and comfort. Lewis Hyde's new introduction explores the context in which these letters were written and how the author embraced his isolation as a creative force. This edition also includes Rilke's later work "The Letter from the Young Worker."

One of Germany's greatest poets, Johann Christian Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770-1843) was also a prose writer of intense feeling, intelligence and perception. This new translation of selected letters and essays traces the life and thoughts of this extraordinary writer. Hoelderlin's letters to friends and fellow writers such as Hegel, Schiller and Goethe describe his development as a poet, while those written to his family speak with great passion of his beliefs and aspirations, as well as revealing money worries and, finally, the tragic unravelling of his sanity. These works examine Hoelderlin's great preoccupations - the unity of existence, the relationship between art and nature and, above all, the spirit of the writer.

Rilke's powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet, now available in a beautiful hardcover Penguin edition At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for generations of writers and artists of all kinds, including Lady Gaga and Patti Smith. With honesty, elegance, and a deep understanding of the loneliness that often comes with being an artist, Rilke's letters are an endless source of inspiration and comfort. Lewis Hyde's new introduction explores the context in which these letters were written and how the author embraced his isolation as a creative force. This edition also includes Rilke's later work "The Letter from the Young Worker."

The life of Rilke’s work is in its words, and this book attends closely to the life unfolding in Rilke’s words over the course of his career. What is a poem, and how does it act upon us as we read? What does reading involve? These are questions of the greatest interest to Rilke, who addresses them in several poems and for whom the experience of reading affords an interaction with the world—a recalibration of our ways of attending to it—which sets it apart from other kinds of experience. Rilke’s work is often approached in periods—he is the author of the New Poems, or of Malte, or of the Duino Elegies, or of the Sonnets to Orpheus—as if its different phases had little to do with one another, but in fact his writing is a concentrated and evolving exploration of the possibilities of poetic language, a working of the life of words into precise and exacting forms in dialogue with the texture of the world. The Life of the Work traces that trajectory in a series of close readings that do not neglect the lesser-known, uncollected verse and the poems in French, as well as Rilke’s activity as a translator of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Barrett Browning, Mallarmé, and Valéry, among many others. These encounters were part of Rilke’s engagement with the world, his way of extending the reach of his language to get it ever closer to the ungraspable movements, the risk and promise, of life itself. One of his best-known poems ends with the words ‘You must change your life’, an injunction that animates the whole of his work.