Rilke in Paris
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Rainer Maria Rilke offers a compelling portrait of Parisian life, art, and culture at the beginning of the 20th century.
In 1902, the young German writer Rainer Maria Rilke traveled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He returned many times over the course of his life, by turns inspired and appalled by the city's high culture and low society, and his writings give a fascinating insight into Parisian art and culture in the last century. Paris was a lifelong source of inspiration for Rilke. Perhaps most significantly, the letters he wrote about it formed the basis of his prose masterpiece, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Much of this work, despite its perennial popularity in French, German, and Italian, has never before been translated into English. This volume brings together a translation of Rilke's essay on poetry, 'Notes on the Melody of Things' and the first English translation of Rilke's experiences in Paris as observed by his French translator.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French publisher and translator Betz's 1941 account, here in its first English translation, of Rainer Maria Rilke's time spent living in Paris, provides an intriguing if less than fully satisfying glimpse of early-20th-century literary Paris. Betz, who translated many of Rilke's works into French, begins by explaining that the poet first arrived in Paris in 1902 in order to write about Rodin, becoming the sculptor's sometimes abject disciple: "Most revered master... My soul opens to your words." Later, Rilke and Rodin had a break, and Rilke came to love Paris itself, intermittently residing in the city until 1914, and returning there in 1925, when he and Betz met. Modern readers will likely find the grand pronouncements Betz quotes Rilke making "Paris is... so content with its greatness and smallness that it can't distinguish between them" rather bizarre. A strong plus for this volume is Rilke's fine "Notes on the Melodies of Things," included at the end, a short series of aphoristic ruminations inspired by his studies of Italian Renaissance painting. While Stone's introduction provides some explanation of this book's background, a lay reader is likely to crave more context for its significance to Rilke's work, and a stronger rationale, beyond Rilke's fame, for its belated publication in English.
