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Letters to a Young Poet (Translated and with an Afterword by Ulrich Baer) Kindle Edition

4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 34 ratings

“It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will one distant day simply live your way into the answer.”

In this slim collection of ten letters, written to an aspiring poet in the early 1900s, Rilke speaks with his unique insistence about living your true, authentic life. Countless readers have found inspiration, wisdom, and guidance in these deeply personal letters now famous the world over.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), born in Prague into a German-speaking family, is widely recognized as one of the world’s great poets. While based in Paris, he traveled broadly until finally settling in Switzerland. Rilke’s writings have deeply influenced countless readers, including major writers, the world over. His Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus count among the great achievements in world literature.

Ulrich Baer is a graduate of Harvard and Yale and has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and von Humboldt fellowships. He is University Professor at New York University and has translated Rilke’s Letters on Life and The Dark Interval and edited other books by and about Rilke. He has also translated works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Buber, and Sigmund Freud.


From the Publisher

Rilke in the Studio al Ponte in the garden of the Villa Strohl-Fern in Rome, 1904

New Introduction and New Translation by Ulrich Baer

"You ask whether your poems are good. You are asking me. You have asked others before. You are sending your poems to magazines. You compare them to other poems and worry when certain editors reject your efforts. Well (since you permit me to offer advice), I ask you to stop all of that right now. You are looking toward the outside, and that above all is the one thing you should not do at this moment. Nobody can give you advice and help you. Nobody. There is only one way. Go within yourself. Explore the cause that compels you to write; examine whether it plunges its roots into the deepest part of your heart. Admit to yourself whether you would have to die if you were kept from writing. Above all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: “Must I write?” Dig within yourself for a deep answer. And if the answer is affirmative, if you can counter this grave question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this need."

—Letter I, Letters to a Young Poet

Cover of Rilke on Love from the Warbler Press Contemplations Series

Also from Warbler Press — A New, Original Edition of Short Excerpts from Rilke's Writings on Love from Warbler Press

This slender volume is organized into four chapters and includes a brief afterword by world renowned Rilke translator and scholar Ulrich Baer, University Professor at New York University.

Table of Contents

  • When love begins
  • When love grows
  • When love ends
  • When love endures
  • About This Book
  • Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke on Love Is Part of the Warbler Press Contemplations Series on Love

Covers of the Warbler Press Contemplations Series on Love fanned out
Shakespeare on Love cover Dickinson on Love cover Nietzsche on Love cover Wilde on Love cover Rilke on Love cover
Shakespeare on Love Dickinson on Love Nietzsche on Love Wilde on Love Rilke on Love
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These five elegant volumes gather short excerpts on love by five of the world's greatest authors "I would not wish / Any companion in the world but you." —William Shakespeare, The Tempest “Love—is that later Thing than Death— / More previous—than Life” —Emily Dickinson “The deepest insights are gained only out of love.” —Friedrich Nietzsche “If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.” —Oscar Wilde “To love another person is...the supreme work for which all other work is merely preparation.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

Editorial Reviews

From the Author

From the Afterword: "I had read Letters to a Young Poet as a college student but had forgotten much about the slim book by the time my life was upended by the events of September 11th, 2001, which I witnessed in close proximity in New York, and by my father's death, completely unrelated to yet temporally close to that event, a few weeks later. I experienced the great disequilibrium of those months as violent changes imposed on me from the outside, against my will. I felt terribly exposed to the vagaries of the world, which disrupted my world that I had worked hard till then to be lasting, stable, and secure. I returned to the passage in Letters where Rilke encourages the young poet "to love the questions." There were so many unsettling questions for me after the terrorist attacks and after my father's death, all of which I thought I needed to resolve, and lay to rest, by finding answers. "Loving the questions" felt furthest from my intuition to find a way out of the sense of uncertainty, vulnerability, and helplessness. I resisted Rilke at that time, oscillating between reading his letters obsessively for some clue on how to proceed and dismissing his advice as useless and even glib since they did not still my incessantly churning mind. Ultimately, however, Rilke's Letters encouraged me stay with the questions instead. Or rather they taught me how to stay with the questions from which I could not escape and for which I lacked the answers in any case, and to explore this new sensation of radical helplessness as an opening to a new me. I needed to understand myself better, I realized, to understand the world. Letters to a Young Poet further encouraged me to think again what I really wanted to do, rather than what society expected of me. My life changed, in some significant ways, after those events. But with the help of the Letters I made the next set of decisions by exploring my connections with others and with loss, rather than feeling defensive about change imposed upon me from without. I responded to the violent upheavals of that fall (while reading Rilke's letters) with a transformation of my own priorities. Instead of blaming what had happened to me, I scrutinized my own responses to these events. I became less afraid of solitude, and less dependent on others' opinions of me. 
In producing a new translation that captures the letters' original flow, I have relied for guidance on the first French translation of the
Letters by Rilke's French editor and translator, Maurice Betz. During the summer of 1925 Betz spent several weeks with Rilke in Paris to discuss and verify the first French translation of Rilke's novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. The two writers sat for hours each morning to parse versions Betz had provided to let Rilke's German sing in French. When Betz published Letters to a Young Poet five years later (after excerpts had appeared in two journals in 1927, after Rilke's death), he relied on Rilke's explicit suggestions during those earlier discussions on how to capture his German in another language. My translation takes more of Betz's version rather than existing English variations as a model, since it is closest to what Rilke would have preferred. It is also, perhaps surprisingly given how well Betz knew Rilke's preferences, one of the freer translations. The existing English translations often preserve quite literally what the translators presumably regard as particular Germanic grammatical constructions. The current translation instead captures Rilke's directness and his creative way of altering German syntax and diction, which he had employed not only to instruct, inspire, and illuminate but to change your life.

From the Back Cover

In this slim collection of ten letters, written to an aspiring poet in the early 1900s, Rilke speaks with his unique insistence about living your true, authentic life. Countless readers have found inspiration, wisdom, and guidance in these deeply personal letters now famous the world over.

ULRICH BAER is a graduate of Harvard and Yale and has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and Alexander von Humboldt fellowships. He is University Professor at New York University and has translated Rilke's
Letters on Life and The Dark Interval, and edited other books by and about Rilke. He has also translated works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Buber, and Sigmund Freud.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BNLRHNT9
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Warbler Press (November 28, 2022)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 28, 2022
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4373 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 79 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 34 ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2024
    I honestly bought this book because it’s so frequently hyped on social media. And it doesn’t disappoint. Initially, I thought it was really only advice for young writers, but it’s much more than that; it’s really life advice for anybody. I read it really slowly, and found some things about myself that I didn’t even know I was questioning. Also saw Lady Gaga has a quote from this book tattooed.
  • Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2023
    A beautiful new translation of a boo that everyone should read. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote these ten letters starting in 1904 to a young poet who wanted advice, first about his poems, and then about how to live his life. Rilke took the young man’s inquiry seriously, an and ultimately ended up writing ten letters over the course of several years of such beauty, depth and sensitivity that they have become one of the great classic texts of modern literature. Countless artists, actors, and creative people have acknowledged that they have read these letters and how they have transformed them. The actress Anna Deavere Smith used Rilke’s book as inspiration to write “Letters to a Young Artist, and the Peruvian novelist wrote •Letters to a Young Novelist” in 1997. These are only two of many creative people who make Rilke a touchstone in their lives; a more recent example is singer and actor Lady Gaga, who said she reads Rilke every day and has a line from this book tatooed on her arm. This new translation by Ulrich Baer, who has also translated and edited a moving book of Rilke’s letters on loss, grief, and transformation, called “The Dark Interval,” a short selection of Rilke’s writings on love called “Rilke on Love,” and published translations of Nietzsche, Freud, Zweig and others, makes Rilke’s language sing in English. In an afterword, Baer explains that he relied on the first French translation of these letters by Maurice Betz, who worked very closely with Rilke in the 1920s in translating other works by Rilke. So there is an assumption that the first French editions is closest to what Rilke had wanted from a translation, and this translation reflects that. Baer also writes why and how these letters became so important in his life, and that personal dimension, paired with his deep scholarly knowledge of Rilke’s life, work and influence, makes this beautiful book quite special. A beautiful timeless classic that belongs on every bookshelf, and also a wonderful gift for anyone who is creative or for younger people who reflect on what could be the purpose and meaning of their lives.
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Neil Garden
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great title
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 28, 2024
    So deeply beautiful
  • Ed Chambler
    5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 1, 2018
    The most compelling life advice I have ever read.

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