Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rillke

I was just a year out of university when I was in a downtown Philadelphia book store and picked up a slender volume entitled Letters to a Young Poet. I read it over and over and the advice I found there helped me in my struggle through young adulthood. Forty years have passed, and I was curious to read this new translation and commentary of the Letters from the perspective of maturity.

Anita Barrows is a translator and poet, a professor of psychology and a clinical psychologist. Joanna Macy is a professor of philosophy and scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology. Their commentary offers interesting psychological and social insights into the letters.

Rilke was himself a young poet of twenty-seven when cadet Franz Xaver Kappus wrote and asked him to read his poetry and for advice. Kappus had learned that Rilke had attended the his military academy and hoped for advice as he endeavored to be a poet while in the military.

Rilke had been sent to the academy because his father wanted to remove him from his mother's influence. She had given him a girl's name, Rene Maria, and put him in dresses. His father decided that he needed toughening up to prepare for a man's life.

Rilke responded to Kappus by warning that no one, nothing external, could advise him; he must look within for the answers, and in the process, he must embrace the unknown and that which is terrifying.

If his work and peers provided little inspiration, he told Kappus, "If your daily life seems to bleak--don't blame it--blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its wealth." And if all else fails, there was his childhood, "that deep well of memories."

Letter Four includes one of my favorite lines, "have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language." He continues to advise not to seek the answers, but to live into them. 

Rilke had been influenced by the sculptor Rodin who had taught the importance of solitude for the artist. Art required looking within and being separate. An artist does not need others:"Where there is no community among people, draw close to the things that present themselves around you; they will not abandon you. The nights are there, and the winds that blow through trees and over the lands..." 

Yes, solitude is difficult, but so is love. And love, he says, is not about "merging," the goal is a "more human love" that consists of "two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other," a love that allows personal space and growth.

Fear of the mysterious and the unknown is also good, something we should be open to and embrace. "If our world has fears, they are our fears. If it has an abyss, it belongs to us. If dangers appear, we must try to love them...Perhaps every terror is, at its core, something helpless that wants our help." 

And he advises to "let life happen to you. Believe me--you can count on life in any case." 

Trust the process, embrace that which frightens you, learn to love the unknown, and do not look for romantic love to save you. 

Rilke's advice helped me as a young woman, and it helps me as I approach my seventh decade. For the questions have only become larger, the unknown closer.

The commentators point out that the first letter from Kappus arrived as Rilke was writing The Book of Hours, in which he "reconcieveing of God as not the image of perfection but as the sacred process of seeing the brokenness of the world as a sacred act."

They see Rilke's Letter 7, to love without merging, representing Rilke's relationship with his great love Lou Andreas-Salome, and demonstrating the Jungian concept of individuation (self-realization that rises above self-centeredness). Lou studied with Freud and became the first female psychoanalyst. 

Also, in Letter 8 ("the world has fears") they find Rilke's message foreshadowing Jung's concept of the collective unconscious (shared archetypes/symbols, not personal) which Jung wrote about twelve years later.  

Barrows and Macy have eliminating sections of the letters as pontificating, or not relevant to modern readers, or because the message was badly conceived. Those segments appear in the commentary.

The translation is clear and easy to understand. 

Every generation faces a world of terrors, every person struggles to forge a path to a whole and healthy life. I believe that the Letters are still relevant and have much to offer. 

I received a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Letters to a Young Poet: A New Translation and Commentary

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Pub Date June 1, 2021  

ISBN: 9781611806861

hard cover $14.95 (USD)

from the publisher

A fresh perspective on a beloved classic by acclaimed translators Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.

German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s (1875–1926) Letters to a Young Poet has been treasured by readers for nearly a century. Rilke’s personal reflections on the vocation of writing and the experience of living urge an aspiring poet to look inward, while also offering sage wisdom on further issues including gender, solitude, and romantic love. Barrows and Macy’s translation extends this compilation of timeless advice and wisdom to a fresh generation of readers. With a new introduction and commentary, this edition places the letters in the context of today’s world and the unique challenges we face when seeking authenticity

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Poems to Night by Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Poems to Night is the first time Rilke's Night poems have been published in their entirety, translated in English. In 1916, Rilke presented his friend and fellow writer Rudolph Kassner the twenty-two poems in a handwritten notebook. 

Rilke wrote the poems between January 1913 and February 1914, during the same time he was working on the Duino Elegies, which has been my favorite volume of poetry for over forty years. And of the elegies, the eighth is my favorite; it was dedicated to Kassner.

In the Introduction, Will Stone confesses that the Poems to Night "possess the aura of a clandestine text, and resist any assured interpretation." 

Which is a great relief to me, baffled as I have been by these verses. Each reading further reveals the arc of Rilke's vision, how the poems reflect his basic understanding. The experience of being human and finite, and aware of the vast mystery beyond, is the bedrock of Rilke's poetry.

I read the Poems of Night, and read them again. I  reread portions of Rilke's biography and a fiction novel of his life to understand Rilke at the time he wrote these poems. 

Rilke arouses feelings in me, with certain lines flashing out like neon, and yet to understand his meaning seems to always hover beyond my full grasp. I struggle with the poems, eliciting more from the lines with every reading. His poetry is so unique to his own world view.

There is the theme of alienation, how humans can never fully connect. And how humans are concerned with the temporal and trivial, "seduced" by the world. Above the world is night, the realm of angels, a sacred otherness which we long to encounter and yet "renounce."

The ending lines are powerful.

Lifting one's eyes from the book, from the close and countable lines, to the consummate night outside: O how the compressed feelings scatter like stars, as if a posy of blooms were untied...Everywhere craving for connection and nowhere desire, world too much and earth enough. (Paris, February 1914)~from Poems to Night by Rainer Maria Rilke

Drafts of the Night poems are also presented, along with snippets from his other works that include the theme of Night, and biographical notes on Rilke's life. He was abroad when WWI broke out, unable to return to his Paris apartment. He lost all his manuscripts, books, and personal belongings, including photographs of his family. When he presented the notebook of poems to Kassner, he was in the military working as a clerk.

Poems to Night is a significant addition to Rilke's published works that will interest his legion of readers as well as all lovers of poetry.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Will Stone was the translator for Rilke in Paris, which I reviewed here.

Poems to Night
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Pushkin Press
Pub Date:  March 2, 2021   
ISBN: 9781782275534
price $18.00 (USD)

from the publisher

A collection of haunting, mystical poems of the night by the great Rainer Maria Rilke - most of which have never before been translated into English

One night I held between my hands
your face. The moon fell upon it.

In 1916, Rainer Maria Rilke presented the writer Rudolf Kassner with a notebook, containing twenty-two poems, meticulously copied out in his own hand, which bore the title "Poems to Night." This cycle of poems which came about in an almost clandestine manner, are now thought to represent one of the key stages of this master poet's development.

Never before translated into English, this collection brings together all Rilke's significant night poems in one volume.

Lost Son by M. Allen Cunningham

In my late 20s I was browsing in a downtown Philadelphia book store and happened upon a slender volume, Letters to a Young Poet. It changed my life. A few years later, I took the Duino Elegies on vacation to Maine, and sitting on pink granite cliffs overlooking the Atlantic ocean, I opened it and read the words, "If I cried out/who would hear me up there among the angelic orders?" It gave me chills.

Forty years later, I still read Rainer Maria Rilke and still struggle with understanding the words that thrill me. 

When I heard of a novel about Rilke I ordered a copy and it languished on my TBR shelf until I found myself the recipient of an egalley of previously uncollected Rilke poetry. I had to revisit Rilke to understand where the poetry came from. I hoped that M. Allen Cunningham's novel could be help.

Lost Son  follows Rilke's life from 1875 to 1915, incorporating the poet's letters into his text. 

Rilke's parents had lost a daughter; his mother turned her son into that lost daughter, naming him Rene Maria and putting him in dresses until his father took a stand. Rene was sent to military school, where he endured much suffering. 

His family had determined his sex, his education, his career, all unsuitable to his disposition and sensitive soul. He knew he was to be a poet.

At the center of his story is Lou, an older, intellectual, beautiful woman who eventually becomes his lover. Although married, she had remained a virgin. She listened to him, counseled him, consoled him, traveled abroad with him.

And then, held him at a distance. She studied with Freud, remained with her husband. Rilke met a young artist Clara. A pregnancy brought them to marry. Clara had studied with the master sculptor Rodin, and she encouraged her husband to write a monograph about Rodin.

Rilke took Rodin as his mentor, taking to heart the advice Rodin did not even follow: that work must displace everything else for the artist. Solitude was necessary for the artist to work.

And so he befriended women, felt eros, and fled.

Rilke struggled with his art in isolation, separated from his family, wandering from place to place, finding succor and temporary lodging, writing endless letters to Lou and Clara and everyone else he met along the way, pouring out his anguish and thoughts and communing from afar.

Rilke was out of France when the Germans took over; in effect, he was exiled from his home, his apartment, his possessions, his everything in this world.

"Even your papers are gone. Your manuscripts Your hundreds upon hundreds of letters and copies of letters...Uncle Jaroslav's old Rilke family crest. The small silver-framed photograph of your young Papa..." Cunningham writes, the chapter concluding with Rilke's letter to Princess Marie that ends,"Once again, my heart has fallen out."

Perhaps this is not a novel for 'everyone,' as Rilke's writing is not for 'everyone'. But for those who love the poet, it does feel right, a slant of light illuminating a difficult life. Cunningham immersed himself in Rilke's writings, especially those letters, and recreates Rilke's life in poetic prose. 

Rilke in Paris: Rainer Maria Rilke and the Writing of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

"I am in Paris; those who learn this are glad, most of them envy me. They are right. It is a great city; great and full of strange temptations." from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

I was in my late 20s when I discovered Rainer Maria Rilke. Although I have revisited his poetry over the years and read biographies and books about Rilke it has been forty years since I last read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the composition of which figures in Rilke in Paris.

I opened up my copy of Notebooks and was amazed to find underlinings and notations and bent pages and bookmarks. How could I have forgotten this book?

"I have succumbed to these temptations, and this has brought about certain changes, if not in my character, at least in my outlook on the world, and, in any case in my life." from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke in Paris focuses on Rilke's time in Paris beginning in 1902 when he was a young man. By 1926 he had died of leukemia. Betz plumbs letters and excerpts from Rilke's works to illustrate the city's influence on Rilke, forming his artistic vision, especially as related to his writing of the highly personal Notebooks.

Also included is Rilke's poem essay Notes On the Melody of Things. 

The book is a concise overview of Rilke's life from the young poet seeking a mentor through his development as a writer, including his influences. I was interested to read how Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy influenced Rilke.

Beautiful black and white photographs of Rilke's Paris illustrate the text.

An entirely different conception of all things had developed in me under these influences; certain differences have appeared that separate me from other men, more than anything heretofore. A world transformed. A new life filled with new meanings." from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

We encounter Rilke as a solitary whose quest for authenticity separated him from others so that even when they were in the same city he only dined with his wife weekly. He believed his mentor, the sculptor Rodin, when he preached that artists must give up personal life and happiness for their art. Rilke had presented himself to Rodin and was taken in, working as a personal secretary in exchange. A break forced Rilke on his own and he took residence in Paris, and over the next twenty years, he returned to "the same Paris" between his wanderings across Europe.

Rilke spent time in the Luxembourg Gardens, observing and learning from the beauty and the ugliness he saw. I recalled one of my favorite paintings from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, In the Luxembourg Gardens by John Singer Sargent, painted in 1879. I always wanted to be transported into that scene.

In the Luxembourg Gardens by John Singer Sargent, PMA

"For the moment I find it a little hard because everything is too new. I am a beginner in my own circumstances." from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

I love to learn how writers work. Betz offers us a detailed look into the "genesis" of The Notebooks. First came Rilke's encounter with the story of a poet who had lived in Paris for some time, and feeling a failure, died at age thirty-two. Rilke saw the Notebooks as a "sequel to The Stories of God." He became haunted by his imagined poet Malte.  He worked on the book for years; "Prose must be built like a cathedral," he wrote Rodin.

"My God, if any of it could be shared! But would it be then, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude." from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

The Notebooks "is a confession and a lyrical novel of sorts, a study in psychology and a treatise on the interior life," Betz wrote, "a moving example of maturation through solitude and lucid contemplation of the loftiest problems in life." I am glad to have read Rilke in Paris for it has brought The Notebooks back into my life.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Rilke in Paris
by Rainer Maria Rilke and Maurice Betz*
Translated by Will Stone
Steerforth Press/Pushkin Press
Published 06/25/2019
$15.95 paperback
ISBN: 9781782274742

*Maurice Betz was Rilke's translator.

The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief and Transformation by Rainer Maria Rilke

Gleaned from Rainer Maria Rilke's voluminous, never-before-translated correspondence, this book collects the poet's best writings on grief and loss in one place for the first time. The result is a profound vision of the mourning process and a meditation on death's place in our lives, as well as a compilation of sensitive and moving expressions of consolation and condolence. from the publisher

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote over 14,000 letters before his tragic death from leukemia at age fifty-one, we are informed in the Preface to The Dark Interval. This volume consists of two dozen of Rilke's condolence letters, newly translated and gathered into one volume. Also included is a letter Rilke wrote to his Polish translator in which he discusses the themes communicated in his poetry.

The letters convey Rilke's philosophy of accepting death as part of existence, embracing the pain, and ensuring that we never truly lose loved ones, they are always with us and their work becomes our work.

I was in my late 20s when I picked up Rilke's slim volume Letters to a Young Poet. I kept the book close, often rereading it, and I gave copies to friends. I added Rilke's poetry to my shelves. I will never forget sitting on the cliffs of Mt. Desert Island, under blue skies with gulls circling overhead, the rushing sea and lobster boats below, and opening for the first time Duino Elegies to read,

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us.

Forty years later I still return to Rilke again and again, struggling to understand the letters and poems that have moved me so. I had no idea that The Dark Interval would offer so many answers.

I read a letter at a time, for Rilke's original ideas take concentration and thought. These are letters I will read and reread.

On the death of Countess Alexandrine Schwerin's father Rilke wrote, "...have faith in what is most horrible, instead of fighting it off--it reveals itself for those who can trust it," for "death is only a relentless way of making us familiar and even intimate with the side of our existence that is turned away from us."

To Nanny Wunderly-Volkart he wrote, "We have to get used to the fact that we rest in the pause between two of God's breaths: for that means: to be in time...The brief time of our existence is probably precisely the period when we lose all connection to him and, drifting apart from him, become enmeshed in the creation which he leaves alone."

To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy on the death of her mother, Rilke wrote, "...we should make it our deep and searing curiosity to explore such loss completely and to experience the particular and singular nature of this loss and its impact within our life." He again mentions death as the side of life "permanently turned away from us, and which is not its opposite but its complement to attain perfection, consummation, and the truly complete and round sphere and orb of being." Death is a friend, he consoles, the true yes-sayer. In another letter to the Countess he writes about life's horrors and the unity of bliss and horror as "two faces of the same divinity" as the meaning of his Sonnets to Orpheus.

Rilke's letter to Witold Hulewiz, who translated Rilke's writing into Polish, he addresses the central theme of "the affirmation of life-and-death," death being the "side of life turned away from us."

"Transience everywhere plunges unto a deep being," he wrote Hulewiz. The angel of the Elegies "is that being which vouches for the recognition of the invisible at a higher order of reality." 

Rilke states that his angels are not biblical but is "that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible...appears already consummated." And that is what terrifies we mortals so for we cling to the visible world.

As Letters to a Young Poet can help us learn how to live, The Dark Interval can show us how to accept the mystery of the future which we cannot see or know.

The title The Dark Interval comes from a poem in Rilke's Book of Hours which ends,

I am the rest between two notes
That harmonize only reluctantly:
For death wants to become the loudest tone--

But in the dark interval they reconcile
Tremblingly, and get along.
And the beauty of the song goes on.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Ulrich Baer
Random House Modern Library
Pub Date 14 Aug 2018 
ISBN 9780525509844
PRICE $22.00 (USD)

I have previously written about Rilke at

The Rilke of Ruth Speirs: New Poems, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus & Others
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-rilke-of-ruth-speirs-new-poems.html

Roots of Understanding: Letters to a Young Poet
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2014/04/roots-of-understanding-letters-to-young.html

Review of You Must Change Your Life: the Friendship of Auguste Rodin and Ranier Maria Rilke
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-friendship-of-auguste-rodin-and.html

The Friendship of Auguste Rodin and Rainer Maria Rilke

I was excited to receive an ARC of You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin by Rachel Corbett in the mail. I was clamouring to read it, entering give-a-ways and requesting it on Edelweiss, then it arrived unanounced in the mail. Thank you, W. W. Norton!

I was in my twenties and living in Philadelphia when browsing in a Center City bookstore I happened upon Letters to a Young Poet. Later I bought the Duino Elegies-which I read on vacation camping at Acadia National Park-and collected poems in several translations.

The Burghers of Calais by Rodin

I first encountered Rodin in a high school art history class, learning about The Burghers of Calais. Later we visited the marvelous Rodin Museum in Philadelphia.

Corbett's book follows the lives of both poet and artist, concentrating on their friendship and how Rodin influenced Rilke's view of the artistic life and appreciation of art, in context of their contemporary society and artist communities.

As a young man Rilke traveled to visit his idols but it was Rodin who took him into his home and confidence.

The poet served as Rodin's personal secretary, living with him at Meudon. In a writing slump, Rodin directed Rilke to the zoo to observe the animals, altering the trajectory of his work culminating in his famous poem The Panther.

Rilke took to heart Rodin's admonition that the artist must dedicate their life to their art; seeking solitude Rilke abandoned his wife and child to fend for themselves.

Rilke wrote a monograph on Rodin in which he wrote, "and he labors incessantly. His life is like a single workday" in which "therein lay a kind of renunciation of life." Rilke stressed Rodin as "solitary": "Rodin was solitary before his fame"; he lived "in the country solitude of his dwelling"; he learned his craft "alone within itself" until "Finally, after years of solitary labor, he attempted to come out with one of his works."  That work was rejected and he "locked himself away again for thirteen years."

Rilke's perception of the artist influenced his own artistic philosophy, evident in the letters he wrote to a young student, Franz Xaver Kappus, who published them in 1929 as Letters To A Young Poet. In the letters Rilke advises the aspiring poet that no outsider can affirm one's own artistic worth, that it must come from within. He tells Kappus to "look to Nature," the "little things that hardly anyone sees." Rilke praises solitude, "it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it."

Neither man was a paragon. Rodin lived with a commonlaw wife who had to tolerate his series of mistresses, including his art student Camille Claudel. He was sensitive and irascible and after nine months he threw Rilke out over a perceived breech of trust: in Rodin's absence Rilke had written a letter to a friend he'd introduced to Rodin, and Rodin had not approved his writing the letter.

The world in the early 20th c. was rapidly changing. Rodin's art became repetitive and was considered too representational. Rilke's work was in keeping with the new movements of Existentialism, Abstract Art, and Depth Psychology. Rilke's poetry continued to show growth during his brief 51 years, but Rodin, over twenty years older, in old age realized how serialized his work had become and felt the irony that only as he neared the end of his life did he realize the pupose of his work.

Toward the end of Rodin's life Rilke realized Rodin had failed to live up to his own advice, which Rilke had taken to heart: work, only work.

"You must change your life" is the last line in Rilke's poem Archaic Torso of Apollo which I first read translated by Stephen Mitchell. Rilke responds to a sculpture of the god Apollo, sans head, arms, and legs, but which still holds a transformative power so that "you must change your life" upon encountering it.

Read about a newly published translation of Rilke by Ruth Spiers here
Read about Rilke's influence on me here

I received an ARC from W. W. Norton in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

You Must Change Your Life
Rachel Corbett
W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Sept. 2016
$26.95 hard cover
ISBN: 978-0-393-24505-9

The Rilke of Ruth Speirs: New Poems, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus & Others

I fell in love with the poetry of Ranier Maria Rilke nearly forty years ago. We were living in Philadelphia and going camping in Maine. I brought along the Duino Elegies. I read the poems while sitting on Otter Cliffs in Acadia National Park, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and the trawlers checking their lobster traps. The endless sea, the summer sun and unclouded sky, the fresh salt breeze, the rugged cliffs, and the raucous cries of the gulls were the backdrop.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the order 
of angels? and even if one of them took me
suddenly to his heart: I should fade in his stronger 
existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning
of terror which we can scarcely bear,
and we marvel at it because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.
The First Elegy, translated by Ruth Spiers


To this day, the remembrance of reading those opening lines in a place of such rare beauty sends a shudder down my spine.

I was thrilled to receive The Rilke of Ruth Speirs through NetGalley. Speir's translations of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was considered "lucid and pure as water" by Lawrence Durrell in his 1943 review of her Selected Poems.

After his death, Rilke's German publisher authorized one translator, J. B. Leishman, limiting rival translators from publishing in book form. Now the translations by Speirs (1916-2000) have been collected  into one volume, edited by John Piling and Peter Robinson.

The introduction of this book explains quite nicely how Speir's translation compares to the original, and to other's translations. It makes an impression.

The poems are a delight to read, clear, sharp, and accessible. The forward notes that Speirs aimed at exactness and to make the poems 'a little less forbidding'. She wanted to make Rilke's poetry sound as if written in English.

My book was published in 1978 by Norton and translated by David Young.

Here are the last lines of the Eighth Elegy translated by Young:

Who has turned us around this way
         so that we're always
                       whatever we do
in the posture of someone
          who is leaving? 
                       Like a man
on the final hill
           that shows him
                       his whole valley
one last time
         who turns and stands there
                    lingering--
that's how we live
           always
                  saying goodbye.

And Speirs:

Who had thus turned us around that we,
whatever we may do, are in the attitude
of one who goes away? As he,
on the last hill which once more shows him
all his valley, turns and stops and lingers--
we live, for ever taking leave.

For someone like myself who flunked out of high school German it is wonderful to have another translation available, another avenue that just might bring me closer to Rilke's original voice.

from the publisher's website:

Here for the first time are all the surviving translations of his poetry made by Ruth Speirs, a Latvian exile who joined the British literary community in Cairo during WWII. Though described as 'excellent' and 'the best' by J. M. Cohen on the basis of magazine and anthology appearances, copyright restrictions meant that during her lifetime, with the exceptions of a Cairo-published Selected Poems (1942), Speirs was never to see her work gathered between covers in print.

Her much-revised and considered versions are a key document in the history of Rilke's Anglophone dissemination Rhythmically alive and carefully faithful, they give a uniquely mid-century English accent to the poet's extraordinary German, and continue to bear comparison with current efforts to render his tenderly taxing voice.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Rilke of Ruth Speirs
John Piling, Peter Robinson
Inpress Books, Two Rivers Press
Publication October 5, 2015
ISBN:9781909747128

Roots of Understanding: Rainer Maria Rilke

"I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

I was in my late 20s when I stumbled across Stephen Mitchell's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet in a downtown Philadelphia bookstore. I had never read him before, or even had heard of him. Soon after I started to read his poetry. I read his Duino Elegies while sitting on cliffs overlooking the ocean in Maine.

The creature gazes into openness with all

its eyes. But our eyes are

as if they were reversed, and surround it,

everywhere, like barriers against its free passage.

We know what is outside us from the animal’s

face alone: since we already turn

the young child round and make it look

backwards at what is settled, not that openness

that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death.

We alone see that: the free creature

has its progress always behind it,

and God before it, and when it moves, it moves

in eternity, as streams do.

We never have pure space in front of us,

not for a single day, such as flowers open

endlessly into. Always there is world,

and never the Nowhere without the Not: the pure,

unwatched-over, that one breathes and

endlessly knows, without craving.

Generations of aspiring writers have turned to Rilke's letters. But what I most found in them was advice on how to LIVE. Most importantly, how to accept the unknown and the frightening things in life as part of life. He said that the things we encounter are not external threats, but arise from our inner selves and are part of ourselves. So we should not be frightened. If we trust the process we will live into the answers. "Life is right, in any case."

I loved his advice to turn to one's childhood as a creative source. Because of this advice I wrote several poems about childhood memories.

"And if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possesion, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither."

When I included an open book on my Album quilt I thought long on what to write on it. I finally chose these lines from the Eighth Elegy. Having moved when young I found myself for years looking backwards. Homesickness has been a part of my life every since.

Who has turned us round like this, so that,

whatever we do, we always have the aspect

of one who leaves? Just as they

will turn, stop, linger, for one last time,

on the last hill, that shows them all their valley - ,

so we live, and are always taking leave.

You can read the first letter at

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/07/letter-to-young-poet.html

From Open Culture, Dennis Hopper reading from the first letter:
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/dennis_hopper_reads_from_rainer_maria_rilkes_timeless_guide_to_creativity_iletters_to_a_young_poeti.html

Roots of Understanding: Rainer Maria Rilke

"I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

I was in my late 20s when I stumbled across Stephen Mitchell's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet in a downtown Philadelphia bookstore. I had never read him before, or even had heard of him. Soon after I started to read his poetry. I read his Duino Elegies while sitting on cliffs overlooking the ocean in Maine.

The creature gazes into openness with all

its eyes. But our eyes are

as if they were reversed, and surround it,

everywhere, like barriers against its free passage.

We know what is outside us from the animal’s

face alone: since we already turn

the young child round and make it look

backwards at what is settled, not that openness

that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death.

We alone see that: the free creature

has its progress always behind it,

and God before it, and when it moves, it moves

in eternity, as streams do.

We never have pure space in front of us,

not for a single day, such as flowers open

endlessly into. Always there is world,

and never the Nowhere without the Not: the pure,

unwatched-over, that one breathes and

endlessly knows, without craving.

Generations of aspiring writers have turned to Rilke's letters. But what I most found in them was advice on how to LIVE. Most importantly, how to accept the unknown and the frightening things in life as part of life. He said that the things we encounter are not external threats, but arise from our inner selves and are part of ourselves. So we should not be frightened. If we trust the process we will live into the answers. "Life is right, in any case."

I loved his advice to turn to one's childhood as a creative source. Because of this advice I wrote several poems about childhood memories.

"And if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possesion, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither."

When I included an open book on my Album quilt I thought long on what to write on it. I finally chose these lines from the Eighth Elegy. Having moved when young I found myself for years looking backwards. Homesickness has been a part of my life every since.

Who has turned us round like this, so that,

whatever we do, we always have the aspect

of one who leaves? Just as they

will turn, stop, linger, for one last time,

on the last hill, that shows them all their valley - ,

so we live, and are always taking leave.

You can read the first letter at

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/07/letter-to-young-poet.html

From Open Culture, Dennis Hopper reading from the first letter:
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/dennis_hopper_reads_from_rainer_maria_rilkes_timeless_guide_to_creativity_iletters_to_a_young_poeti.html