why the hell isn't there a thread for RILKE dammit

Good luck! I suggest listening to the originals as well, even if you don't have German, just so you can get a feel for Rilke's ear. For instance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giKMhvg36QA

I'd prefer a slightly less theatrical reading, but hearing these poems is always a pleasure.

thanks! I’ll check that out

But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back
into herself, as if there were not enough strength
to create them a second time. Have you imagined
Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl
deserted by her beloved might be inspired
by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love
and might say to herself, “Perhaps I can be like her”?
Shouldn’t this most ancient of sufferings finally grow
more fruitful for us? Isn’t it time that we lovingly
freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured:
as the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension, so that
gathered in the snap of release it can be more than
itself. For there is no place where we can remain

Every time I go back to Rilke I find more and more and more. I really think it could be possible to fully self-analyse in deep contemplation of his work.

As a slight aside, not only does Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature single-handedly justify literary criticism, it features several outright life-altering readings of Rilke's work (granted, most of them deal with death). Blanchot's is a very partial view, of course, but it's the one that stuck with me.

O trees of life, when does your winter come?
We are not in harmony, our blood does not forewarn is
like migratory birds’. Late, overtaken,
we force ourselves abruptly onto the wind
and fall to earth at some iced-over lake.
Flowering and fading come to us both at once.
And somewhere lions still roam and never know,
in their majestic power, of any weakness

O trees of life, when does your winter come?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=When+is+winter

been working through the notebooks of malte for a few months. started on the most recent penguin translation but it was a library copy that had fell to bits in my bag, in transit, so i picked up another, but it's an old hogarth press edition - so i started again. translation matters! a particular passage stuck out, to date -- "the existence of the terrible in every particle of the air". that writing on uncanny childhood, domesticity, silence is unlike anything.

https://i.imgur.com/bqU8l3X.png

also! i plan to visit duino castle at some point this/next year. one of a few literary excursions i have planned - the woolf's house in sussex, dylan thomas' boatshed, trieste...

the third elegy has a lot in common with that passage. might be my favorite so far — his utter love of humanity, how he considers his childhood and recognizes beauty, terror, longing, love, death were always present...imprinted, like a gene...is so overwhelming

btw on the topic of translations, I’ve got the stephen mitchell brick, and I really love it

i've only read sonnets to orpheus, and just finished letters to a young poet about 10 minutes ago. i wish i would have read the letters to a young poet 20 years ago.

all of the words on solitude, the theme that probably comes up the most often in these letters, hit hard. i'm in the most extended solitary time of my life right now, and it hadn't really struck me to try to make it a virtue or to learn a damned thing from it. but rilke is very persuasive.

you sort of feel bad for this kappus dude as you read through those letters, the guy obviously idolized rilke so much and struggled to live the solitary, monkish existence rilke prescribed and seemingly was always writing to him saying "man i really don't know if i'm cut out for this" and rilke just keeps coming back with "my dear mr kappus, everything that is worthwhile is SUPPOSED to be difficult" and kappus just goes "welp ok" and presses on with this miserable existence and sending rilke his shitty poetry

-k3vin k.

extremely relatable. the young poet, kappus, provides a kind of epilogue to his own story in the intro, when he write "...my regular correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke which lasted until 1908 and then gradually petered out because my life drove me off into those very regions from which the poet's warm, tender and touching concern had sought to keep me." sometimes you get the all-time best advice, and length, delivered just for you after great contemplation from one of the most thoughtful people who ever existed, and it still doesn't work and your life peters out. the nature of rilke's advice on solitude is such that it still provides a path forward for a creative life that has seemingly lost its value and has gone quiet. i like the way he talks about "things" (animals and plants, etc) existing and growing as they are, without all the human nonsense that we (i) endlessly pile on it. things just grow and go about their business, not knowing why or being able to ask why, and are divine in a sense because of it

"Almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious."