4.5
Diaries of a Young Poet
ByPublisher Description
"In the diaries [Rilke] kept from 1898 to 1900, now translated for the first time . . . the overall impression is that of a genius just coming into his own powers."—Boston Phoenix
In April 1898 Rainer Maria Rilke, not yet twenty-three, began a diary of his Florence visit. It was to record, in the form of an imaginary dialogue with his mentor and then-lover, Lou Andreas-Salome, his firsthand experiences of early Renaissance art. The project quickly expanded to include not only thoughts on life, history, and artistic genius, but also unguarded moments of revulsion, self-doubt, and manic expectation. The result is an intimate glimpse into the young Rilke, already experimenting brilliantly with language and metaphor. "For the lover of Rilke, this superb translation of the poet's early diaries will be a watershed. Through Edward Snow's and Michael Winkler's brilliantly supple and faithful translation . . . a new and more balanced picture of Rilke will emerge."—Ralph FreedmanDownload the free Fable app
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4.5
“LIVE
LAUGH
RILKE
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
"You are not a goal for me; you are a thousand goals. You are everything, and I know you in everything..."
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
"I need not say: Forgive! For I ask that from you in every silence. I need not ask: Forget! For we want to remember these hours also, in which I tried to flee from you in shame; and on my blind flight I was always running toward you."
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“In all my best hours I shall take your smiling as a city, a distant city that shines and is alive—I shall recognise a word from you as an island on which birches stand or pines but at any rate quiet and festive trees. I shall regard your glance as a well in which the things have gotten lost and over which even the sky trembles with blissfully fearful thoughts of falling in—I shall know that all this exists, that this city can be entered, that I have often beheld this island, and that I know exactly when it is most lonely at the edge of the well; but if you ask me, you will see me hesitate: I don’t know for certain whether the forest we walk through is not merely my mood—a dark, shadowy mood. Who knows: perhaps even Venice is only a feeling.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
‘“You are?” — “Good Lord man, like you I am a writer.”
“A wanderer, I.”
“And your name?”
“That was long ago.”
“And so who are you?”
“Someone different from whomever you suppose.”’
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“But the world is not laughter. That’s not true. It’s the figment of misunderstood genius that feels itself ridiculed. The world is good, souls are noble, and to laugh at suffering is an aberration, something reprehensible… No, good Doctor, the world is not laughter, but it Is the great common realm of happenstance whose loudest and readiest voice is the sound of laughing. And to the solitary, to the deeply serious person, such laughter can only mean the masses, who are forever hammering at his aloneness. He hears laughing; what goes o behind it may not always be suitable for laughing, may in fact be toil or poverty—but far up above it all there’s laughing from a hundred mouths…”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“The reddest roses never showed so red
as on that evening that was cloaked in rain.
I thought so long about your softest hair…
The reddest roses never showed so red.
The bushes never darkened quite so green
as on that evening in that time of rain.
I thought so long about your gentle dress…
The bushes never darkened quite so green.
The slender birch trunks never stood so white
as on that evening that was dark with rain;
and then I saw your hands, their perfect shapes…
The slender birch trunks never stood so white.
The waters mirrored there a land of black
that very evening I found misting with rain;
and thus in your eyes I recognized myself…
the waters mirrored there a land of black.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Everything takes us. The good and that for which we have no name. But as we are continually being gripped by all that asserts its might above us and above the things, we begin to trust more and more the hands that do this to us every day and in all the nights in which we lie awake by ourselves or dream deeply. And someday the knowledge will come to us, when we have just given something its shape, that even with the darkest thing we say we do not mean Death, not Death at all, but Life.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“The Russian journey with its daily losses remains for me such painful evidence that my eyes haven’t ripened yet: they don’t understand how to take in, how to hold, nor how to let go; burdened with tormenting images, they walk past things of beauty and towards disappointments.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“I want to remain in this storm and feel all the tremors of being so deeply moved. I want to have autumn. I want to cover myself over with winter and not betray any presence with any color. I want to remain snowed in for the sake of a coming springtime so that what is germinating inside me might nor rise prematurely from the furrows.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“…for in the wake of beauty there is nothing but decline. And there is nothing out beyond beauty. Beauty is closure, the final vista…”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Observing this I said to her [the blond painter] when we were alone again: ‘You are the very soul of kindness… This is the second time I have said that to you. When I shall have said it for the third time, it will be irrevocable.’—‘O there are many I treat much less…’—‘And precisely that is kindness. Treating gently those you’ve chosen. For kindness is, as are all those qualities we call virtues, not something simply given, working its effects blindly, but one’s own store of life opened to someone else’s needfulness. Someone who is kind without distinguishing, is simply kind; but someone who bestows her kindness on those few she’s chosen is doing so much more…’”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“The world is real.
And everything is world
that moves us, to great feelings or to fear:
desire and solitude, death and song.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“And Death, who plucks eyes like flowers,
doesn’t find my eyes…
(in my face,
which blossoms toward the inside…)”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Every day is the beginning of life. Every life is the beginning of eternity.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“For you were not happy in all that brilliance,
every color lay on you like guilt.
And you lived in impatience,
for you knew: This is not the whole.
Life is only a part… of what?
Life is only a note… in what?
Life had meaning only bound up with many occurrences in infinite space,
life is only the dream of a dream,—
and wakefulness is elsewhere.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Whoever walks now anywhere out in the world,
walks without cause in the world,
walks towards me.
Whoever dies now anywhere out in the world,
dies without cause in the world,
looks at me.
…
And what I saw belonged to me,
and if you feel I’m vanishing,
it’s because my life enshadows me.
Before you possessed me.
I didn’t exist. But I remain now
when you no longer see me.
Not in the words I write down;
I live on
in all that decays,
blows away…:
I am growing more alone.
…
My life is: the stillness of final form.
I am gesture’s beginning and end.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“I walk, walk, and your homeland is still everywhere around me, this wintry far-offness, I walk, walk, and have forgetting that I ever knew another country.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Whoever understands and honors Death correctly grants Life greatness.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹”
About Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), the author of Sonnets to Orpheus, Duino Elegies, and Letters to a Young Poet, was one of the greatest poets of the German language.
Other books by Rainer Maria Rilke
Edward Snow
Edward Snow has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for his Rilke translations. A professor at Rice University, he lives in Houston, Texas.
Other books by Edward Snow
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