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Letters to a Young Poet (Translated and with an Afterword by Ulrich Baer) Kindle Edition
“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.
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateNovember 28, 2022
- File size4373 KB
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From the Publisher
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
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
Shakespeare on Love | Dickinson on Love | Nietzsche on Love | Wilde on Love | Rilke on Love | |
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Price | $12.00$12.00 | $8.73$8.73 | $8.37$8.37 | $9.00$9.00 | $8.37$8.37 |
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
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
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.
About the Author
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.
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
- Best Sellers Rank: #976,568 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #475 in Letters & Correspondence
- #1,104 in Literary Letters
- #4,327 in European Literature (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature, photography and some texts of continental philosophy. He has published books on poetry, photography, art, and culture, and written for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the Los Angeles Book Review, and various galleries and museum catalogues, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art. His translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters are available as audiobooks read by Ethan Hawke and Rosanne Cash. He hosts two podcasts on big ideas and great books, Think About It and The Proust Questionnaire, with co-host Caroline Weber, and has published editions of numerous classic books with Warbler Press, including Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Beyond Good and Evil, Heart of Darkness, Civilization and its Discontents, The Great Gatsby, Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and others.
His single-author books include: Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (MIT Press); Remnants of Song: Poetry and the Experiences of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (Stanford UP); The Rilke Alphabet (Fordham UP); What Snowflakes Get Right: Speech, Equality and Truth in the University (Oxford UP).
He is editor and/or translator of: The Dark Interval: Rilke's Letters of Loss, Grief and Transformation (Random House/Bloomsbury); 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11 (NYU Press); Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters on Life (Random House); The Claims of Reading: A Shoshana Felman Reader (Fordham UP; with Emily Sun and Eyal Peretz); Hannah Arendt zwischen den Disziplinen (Wallstein; edited with Amir Eshel), and new editions numerous classic books of literature and philosophy.
He is the father of two children and lives in New York City, where he practices Shaolin kung fu and maintains a tiny plot in an urban garden.
Find out more at www.ulrichbaer.com.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
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- Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2024I 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, 2023A 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.
Top reviews from other countries
- Neil GardenReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 28, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Great title
So deeply beautiful
- Ed ChamblerReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 1, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible.
The most compelling life advice I have ever read.