NOVEMBER 2018 - AudioFile
Rainer Maria Rilke was a twentieth-century Austrian poet and the author of the iconic volume LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET, written in German and available in English for many years. Rilke wrote 14,000 letters in his lifetime. Here, Rosanne Cash narrates 23 letters newly published in English—these to Rilke’s friends, former lovers, and acquaintances. The themes are loss, grief, and transformation, and Cash’s delivery is expressive and consolatory. Translator and editor Ulrich Baer delivers a lengthy preface that tells of Rilke’s short life and the themes in his letters, along with discussing his own translation process and experience of loss. While the work itself is accessible but often repetitive, Cash’s empathetic tone invites the listener to embrace pain in order to overcome it. This is a helpful work for those looking for solace in a time of grief. A.C. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
From the Publisher
Even though each of these letters of condolence is personalized with intimate detail, together they hammer home Rilke’s remarkable truth about the death of another: that the pain of it can force us into a ‘deeper . . . level of life’ and render us more ‘vibrant.’ Here we have a great poet’s reflections on our greatest mystery.”—Billy Collins
“A treasure . . . The solace Rilke offers is uncommon, uplifting and necessary.”––The Guardian
“As we live our lives, it is possible to feel not sadness or melancholy but a rush of power as the life of others passes into us. This rhapsodic volume teaches us that death is not a negation but a deepening experience in the onslaught of existence. What a wise and victorious book!”—Henri Cole
NOVEMBER 2018 - AudioFile
Rainer Maria Rilke was a twentieth-century Austrian poet and the author of the iconic volume LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET, written in German and available in English for many years. Rilke wrote 14,000 letters in his lifetime. Here, Rosanne Cash narrates 23 letters newly published in English—these to Rilke’s friends, former lovers, and acquaintances. The themes are loss, grief, and transformation, and Cash’s delivery is expressive and consolatory. Translator and editor Ulrich Baer delivers a lengthy preface that tells of Rilke’s short life and the themes in his letters, along with discussing his own translation process and experience of loss. While the work itself is accessible but often repetitive, Cash’s empathetic tone invites the listener to embrace pain in order to overcome it. This is a helpful work for those looking for solace in a time of grief. A.C. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2018-05-07
A collection of never-before-published letters by the renowned poet."What can you say in the face of loss, when words seem too frail and ordinary to communicate our grief and soothe the pain?" asks translator and editor Baer (German and Comparative Literature/New York Univ.; We Are But a Moment, 2017, etc.). The letters included in this brief but dense collection grapple with this crucial question. Taken from correspondences that Rilke had with friends, relatives, and acquaintances in light of the deaths of various individuals, these letters provide a space for ruminations and a careful study of our relationship to death. In each letter, Rilke addresses the death of the person in question, but he also uses it as a steppingstone to offer his own perspective on the ways in which humans are conditioned to die: "I think that the spirit cannot make itself so small that it concerns nothing but our existence in the here and now: Where it rushes toward us, we are both the living and the death." More interestingly, the letters offer windows into daily life between 1908 and 1925, pointing out the many mundane events that punctuated Rilke's life—e.g., a spa treatment he received—as well as the emotional toll his poetry was taking on his letter-writing abilities. Though these letters are an important contribution to Rilke's archive, they don't offer enough context for general readers to truly latch onto them. For those knowledgeable about Rilke's work, these letters will serve as fresh reading material, new modes of understanding his practice, and demonstrations of his thinking about writing and existence ("we have been tasked with nothing as unconditionally as learning on a daily basis how to die"). But for those just now discovering his work, the letters might serve as a disservice to the colossal beauty of his poetry. A slim, mildly intriguing glimpse into Rilke's daily life.
