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

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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

meaulnes, Thursday, 21 March 2019 14:23 (five years ago) link

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...

meaulnes, Thursday, 21 March 2019 14:24 (five years ago) link

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

k3vin k., Thursday, 21 March 2019 18:14 (five years ago) link

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

k3vin k., Thursday, 21 March 2019 18:15 (five years ago) link

three years pass...

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

Karl Malone, Tuesday, 7 February 2023 23:12 (one year ago) link

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

Karl Malone, Tuesday, 7 February 2023 23:13 (one year ago) link


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