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Rainer Maria Rilke.
ger, Pages 109. Reprinted in 2015 with the help of original edition published long back[1919]. This book is in black & white, Hardcover, sewing binding for longer life with Matt laminated multi-Colour Dust Cover, Printed on high quality Paper, re-sized as per Current standards, professionally processed without changing its contents. As these are old books, there may be some pages which are blur or missing or black spots. We expect that you will understand our compulsion in these books. We found this book important for the readers who want to know more about our old treasure so we brought it back to the shelves. Hope you will like it and give your comments and suggestions. Rainer Maria Rilke 1919 [Hardcover], Faesi, Robert, Hünich, Fritz Adolf,
97 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1972
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 22, 2021
This book was a fun little discovery made at the library while looking for a book to read in German (I'm slowly progressing in my studies and was looking for a new challenge). I was able to find a poetry collection by Rainer Maria Rilke, and this little biography (104 pages) was sitting next to it. I figured I might as well learn about the poet's life for context. I'm glad I did, as a name I barely recognized has become a known quantity, and little pieces of disparate artistic and geographic information have been connected with the text and related searches.
Rilke was born in 1875 in then-Czechoslovakia to a German-speaking family. One might be forgiven for suspecting Rilke to be a woman, given that his birth name was René Maria Rilke (he adopted the vorname Rainer after a visit to Munich in his early 20s). Schooling afforded him travel, as did his friendships with various patrons throughout his life, who helped promote his work and gave him the freedom to spend time alone and write (for example, his Duinese Elegies was written in Castle Duino, where a princess friend let him stay). He would eventually visit many parts of Austria, Switzerland, Germany (he lived for a while in the northern artist community at Worpswede with his wife - a seeming marriage of convenience more than of passion; there's little of substance about his love life) and travel as far as North Africa and Russia. Another fun interlude involved Rilke spending multiple years in Paris with the famed sculptor Auguste Rodin, writing essays about the artist and answering his mail. He died at the age of 51 at a sanatorium in Switzerland.
There are only small snippets of Rilke's poetry in this book, but enough to convey some of the broad themes and critical reactions to his major collections. He gained enough popularity in his early 20s to be a known entity, though his earlier works were said to be self-focused. As he matured, he became known as one of the greatest German poets, and this book describes his work as "lyric poetry of vision and beauty of form unsurpassed in the Western world". High praise! Rilke interacted with other poets, but only briefly, and seems to have thrived on solitude, a major theme of his writing. Each poem mentioned is introduced with its German title, which was fun to translate before the English equivalent is substituted for the remainder of the book. A few selected German stanzas are included in an appendix at the end. I'm already a quarter of the way through his 1907 collection New Poems and am enjoying the challenge of reading first aloud in German, then quietly in English, then in German again. The poems are full of rich, descriptive, grandoise language and some fun interpretations on classical and biblical themes. Thanks to this edition from chronicler Arnold Bauer, I know the poet much better.
PS - When I went to review this book, there was no cover image on Goodreads. I took it upon myself to photograph the library copy, clean it up and submit it. Here's the higher-resolution version.
Rilke was born in 1875 in then-Czechoslovakia to a German-speaking family. One might be forgiven for suspecting Rilke to be a woman, given that his birth name was René Maria Rilke (he adopted the vorname Rainer after a visit to Munich in his early 20s). Schooling afforded him travel, as did his friendships with various patrons throughout his life, who helped promote his work and gave him the freedom to spend time alone and write (for example, his Duinese Elegies was written in Castle Duino, where a princess friend let him stay). He would eventually visit many parts of Austria, Switzerland, Germany (he lived for a while in the northern artist community at Worpswede with his wife - a seeming marriage of convenience more than of passion; there's little of substance about his love life) and travel as far as North Africa and Russia. Another fun interlude involved Rilke spending multiple years in Paris with the famed sculptor Auguste Rodin, writing essays about the artist and answering his mail. He died at the age of 51 at a sanatorium in Switzerland.
There are only small snippets of Rilke's poetry in this book, but enough to convey some of the broad themes and critical reactions to his major collections. He gained enough popularity in his early 20s to be a known entity, though his earlier works were said to be self-focused. As he matured, he became known as one of the greatest German poets, and this book describes his work as "lyric poetry of vision and beauty of form unsurpassed in the Western world". High praise! Rilke interacted with other poets, but only briefly, and seems to have thrived on solitude, a major theme of his writing. Each poem mentioned is introduced with its German title, which was fun to translate before the English equivalent is substituted for the remainder of the book. A few selected German stanzas are included in an appendix at the end. I'm already a quarter of the way through his 1907 collection New Poems and am enjoying the challenge of reading first aloud in German, then quietly in English, then in German again. The poems are full of rich, descriptive, grandoise language and some fun interpretations on classical and biblical themes. Thanks to this edition from chronicler Arnold Bauer, I know the poet much better.
PS - When I went to review this book, there was no cover image on Goodreads. I took it upon myself to photograph the library copy, clean it up and submit it. Here's the higher-resolution version.
August 10, 2009
easy read...biography of RMR. so far, so good.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews