Since Rilke’s death in 1926 the publication of his letters has proceeded steadily, in a somewhat haphazard way (the number of letters to a volume varying between two and two hundred), until well over a thousand in all have been given, mainly by his publisher Kippenberg and his son-in-law Carl Sieber, to the world. I wish to express my gratitude for the generous and scholarly help afforded me by Dr Julian Hirsch, who has taught me much German. The photographs of the poet hitherto published in England have represented him in moods varying from dogged seriousness to the profoundest dejection, and I take pleasure in producing this evidence that Rilke knew how to smile. Weininger, who took the snapshot near Muzot, Switzerland, in 1925. The frontispiece portrait of Rilke is here reproduced by kind permission of Frau M.
Rilke is a master of the unlikely, but poetically true, word and a cunning employer of alliteration, personification, and hypallage. The translation is designedly very literal, and the nature of German prose is such that an English rendering which aims-as this does-at close correspondence rather than happy paraphrase, can hardly avoid displaying at times a certain stiffness in the joints but I have thought it right to reproduce Rilke’s oddities of expression and punctuation, which are no less curious in the original than they must seem here and never to succumb to the temptation to write pretty-sounding English just because it is a poet that speaks. But the student will probably care to pursue further some of the astonishing wealth of ideas which the poet here raises. I have thought it best to group all the explanations which any letters of Rilke necessarily involve, at the end of the book and out of the way indeed, no harm will be done if the ordinary reader ignores them altogether, and enjoys the letters simply for what they are.
Translated, with an introduction and commentary, by LetterYoungPoet-Cover-Epub-01.jpg Letters to a Young Poet
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