1898 March Returns to Prague to give a well-attended lecture on ‘Modern Poetry’. Publishes the first of several volumes of stories. While in Florence keeps the so-called ‘Florentine Diary’ (published 1942). Back in Berlin with Andreas-Salomé, then spends Christmas with Heinrich Vogeler in Bremen and Worpswede.
1899 April−June Journey to Russia, in the company of the Andreas couple. Visits Tolstoy and meets the painter Leonid Pasternak. Publishes Mir zur Feier (To Celebrate Myself) at the end of the year.
1900 May−August More travels in Russia, alone with Andreas-Salomé. This journey was preceded by an intensive study of things Russian, including the translation of Chekhov’s Seagull. At the end of August accepts an invitation from Vogeler to Worpswede, where he meets Clara Westhoff and Paula Becker. October Returns to Berlin.
1901 February Lou Andreas-Salomé breaks off relationship with Rilke by letter. 28 April He marries Clara Westhoff. They set up home in Westerwede, where a daughter, Ruth, is born on 12 December.
1902 In need of money, undertakes to write a monograph on the Worpswede artists. Also reviewing widely. In July Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images) appears (poems). August Goes to Paris with a commission for a book on Rodin, leaving his daughter with Clara’s parents. Probably in November, writes ‘The Panther’, the first of what will become the New Poems. The book on Rodin is written by the end of the year.
1903 First letter to Franz Xaver Kappus written on 17 February. Publishes Worpswede (February) and Auguste Rodin (March). Travels, but is mostly in Paris until September when with Clara he goes to Rome. Exchanges important letters with Lou Andreas-Salomé.
1904 In Rome until June, then to Sweden via Denmark. Begins work on his novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. All but one of the Letters to a Young Poet are written by the end of this year.
1905 Mostly in Germany until September when he moves into Rodin’s house in Meudon, outside Paris. He works as a kind of secretary, dealing with Rodin’s correspondence. Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours) appears at the end of the year, beginning Rilke’s association with the Insel Press. Its three parts had been written in 1899, 1901 and 1903.
1906 Lectures on Rodin in Hamburg and Berlin. March His father dies. After a misunderstanding with Rodin, moves into his own lodgings in Paris. Working hard on the New Poems. In the summer travels in Belgium; then in Germany and Italy, ending up on Capri in December. Second, much-revised edition of The Book of Images appears. Also Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (The Lay of the Love and Death of the Cornet Christoph Rilke) in book form.
1907 Remains in Capri until the end of May. With the help of his host, Alice Faehndrich, translates Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (published 1908). Returns to Paris. Frequent visits to Cézanne retrospective exhibition on which he writes a famous series of letters to Clara (published in 1952). August Writes nearly half the poems that will appear in the second volume of New Poems. December The first, Neue Gedichte, is published.
1908 Capri, Rome, Paris. Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil (Second Part of the New Poems). December Last letter to Franz Xaver Kappus.
1909 Working on his novel in Paris. Twice in Provence, impressions of which (especially Avignon) go much later into The Letter from the Young Worker. Publishes Requiem, two elegies, of which one is for Paula Modersohn-Becker who died in childbirth late in 1907.
1910 The final pages of Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) dictated in Leipzig; May The novel appears. This is followed by an unsettled period – travels in Italy, Bohemia, Austria, Germany, and, embarking in Marseille, Algeria and Tunisia, Sicily and Naples.
1911 The journey continues to Egypt and up the Nile. April Back to Paris via Venice. Visits Aristide Maillol. Meets Marthe Hennebert, probably the ‘Marthe’ of The Letter from the Young Worker. Reading St Augustine, and translates first eighteen chapters of the Confessions; many other bits of translation besides. July In Prague for the last time. Then Weimar, Leipzig, Munich. From late October in Castle of Duino on the Adriatic coast, as the guest of Marie von Thurn und Taxis.
1912 While in Duino, where he remains until May, writes first two of what will become the Duino Elegies, plus other fragments. Spends the summer in Venice, then autumn and winter in Spain, mainly Toledo and Ronda.
1913 February Back in Paris. Travels in Germany in the summer, then in September is in Munich where he meets Freud, in the company of Andreas-Salomé. October Returns to Paris. Reading Expressionist poets and Kleist. Finishes the third Elegy. Publishes Das Marien-Leben (Life of Mary), a sequence of thirteen poems.
1914 Paris remains his base until July. Reading Hölderlin. Is caught in Munich by the outbreak of war and cannot return to Paris. December In Berlin.
1915 Reading Hölderlin, Strindberg, Montaigne, Flaubert, the Bible, Kierkegaard. April His belongings in Paris are auctioned to cover the unpaid rent. Writes ‘Seven Poems’ and the fourth Elegy. 24 November Rilke is called up. Efforts to avoid this delay things until the end of the year.
1916 Reports for training at a barracks in Vienna but is soon transferred to the Imperial War Archives, where Stefan Zweig is also employed. June Discharged and returns to Munich in July. 27 November Death in a rail accident of Rilke’s friend Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian poet to whom The Letter from the Young Worker is addressed. Gathers together but does not publish a group of poems under the title ‘Gedichte an die Nacht’ (‘Poems to the Night’).
1917 Translating Michelangelo’s sonnets. In Munich until July, then Berlin, Westphalia, Berlin (where he learns of the death of Rodin in November), and back in Munich in December where he lives in the Hotel Continental until the following May. Publishes Die vierundzwanzig Sonette der Louize Labé (The Twenty-Four Sonnets of Louise Labé) (translations).
1918 Does not leave Munich but in May moves into lodgings. One of his neighbours is Paul Klee. Continues work on Michelangelo. Sends copies of his ‘Elegies’ (roughly half of what will become the Duino Elegies) to Lou Andreas-Salomé and to his publisher for safe keeping. Follows the events of the November Revolution in Munich closely, taking part in demonstrations and associating with some of the revolutionaries, such as Ernst Toller.
1919 As well as Michelangelo, translates poems by Verhaeren and Mallarmé. Is shaken by the assassination of the socialist Kurt Eisner, the first minister-president of the Free State of Bavaria. As part of the counter-revolution Rilke’s flat is twice searched. May Lou Andreas-Salomé in Munich, their last meeting. 11 June Leaves Germany for Switzerland with a ten-day permit, never to return. Begins a reading tour in late October. From December is in Locarno.
1920 Having been issued with a Czech passport, travels to Venice in June/July and to Paris in October. Otherwise restlessly in Switzerland, from November in Berg am Irchel. Begins relationship with Baladine Klossowska.
1921 Translating Paul Valéry. After much searching for an ‘elegy-place’, moves into the Château de Muzot in the Valais at the end of July.
1922 February Completes the Duino Elegies; also The Sonnets to Orpheus and The Letter from the Young Worker. Continues to translate Valéry. Reading Proust.
1923 Early symptoms of illness. Publication of Die Sonette an Orpheus (March) and Duineser Elegien (October). Critical of political developments in Germany. Makes small trips within Switzerland. At the end of the year enters the sanatorium in Valmont.
1924 20 January Returns to Muzot. Begins writing many poems in French. Among flow of other visitors receives Valéry, whose works he continues to translate. In Ragaz in the summer. Autumn in Bern and then the sanatorium in Valmont.
1925 January−August In Paris. Recovers two boxes of letters and papers not auctioned in 1915. Works with Maurice Betz on translation of Malte into French. September Two weeks in Ragaz, then back in Muzot. Makes his will. November Translation of Valéry’s poems appears. Regrets not being able to read Lawrence and Joyce in the original. In Valmont again before Chr
istmas.
1926 In the sanatorium until the end of May. Vergers suivi des Quatrains Valaisans appears in Paris – this collection of Rilke’s poems in French is followed by Les Roses and Les Fenêtres in 1927. Three-way correspondence with Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak. June Sends a selection of unpublished German poems to the Insel Press. Summer in Ragaz, then Lausanne. Back in the Valais, translates Valéry’s dialogues Eupalinos and L’me et la danse. 30 November Taken to Valmont in great pain. Finally diagnosed with leukaemia. 29 December Dies.
1929 Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet) published, as a first sample of Rilke’s correspondence.
1933 Der Brief des jungen Arbeiters (The Letter from the Young Worker) published in Über Gott: Zwei Briefe (On God: Two Letters).
Charlie Louth 2011
Afterword
Neither of the works translated here were published in Rilke’s lifetime. Nor are they works in any very strict sense: the Letters to a Young Poet are ten letters written over an interval of nearly six years, not intended to be collected nor conceived as a whole; and The Letter from the Young Worker was jotted down quickly in pencil and never written out fair or apparently considered for publication. Yet the Letters to a Young Poet, since their appearance in 1929, have become Rilke’s most widely read book, and the Letter from the Young Worker, though not so familiar, has long established itself as a key piece of his prose, setting out his thoughts with unflinching forcefulness. They come from opposite ends of Rilke’s writing life. When he wrote his first letter to Franz Xaver Kappus, the ‘young poet’, in February 1903, Rilke had several collections behind him but had written hardly any of the work for which we read him nowadays. The fictive Letter from the Young Worker on the other hand was written nineteen years later in February 1922, the extraordinary February when he completed his Duino Elegies and wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus in what he called a ‘nameless storm, a hurricane in the spirit’. So it belongs to Rilke’s maturity, but as well as having preoccupations in common with the poems in whose company it arose, it connects to the letters to Kappus in ways that suggest that some of Rilke’s ideas and concerns, and his basic attitude to life, didn’t change very much.
Rilke was one of the great letter-writers. He wrote them every day, often many more than one, and really his letters, not all of which have been published, can be considered an integral part of his work, as he intimated himself. He often approached the never-quite-superable task of keeping his correspondence up to date as a way of getting into writing, a way of putting something off and stealing up on it at the same time. The form of the letter, a text addressed to a specific person with no particular constraints, was clearly one which suited him. Quite extensive passages of his novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, were originally written as letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé and to his wife Clara. And the fact that he used a fictitious letter to channel the preoccupations of the Letter from the Young Worker shows how instinctive the epistolary form became. Writing letters was Rilke’s way of facing up to the world and locating himself in it, on a daily basis, and his poems were a more intense and more intricately ordered variation of the same process.
LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET
Franz Xaver Kappus, the recipient and editor of these letters, says in his own prefatory remarks virtually all that is needed by way of introduction to them. He had written to Rilke enclosing some of his own poems on learning that Rilke had once been, as he himself now was, a military cadet and that they even had a teacher in common. This was enough to make Kappus feel that Rilke would understand the dilemma of someone firmly set on a military career but finding that his literary interests were in conflict with it. (In fact Kappus managed a kind of compromise, though not one Rilke would have approved of, becoming a successful writer of popular fiction after having served and been wounded in the First World War.) For Kappus, Rilke seems primarily to have been the author of To Celebrate Myself (Mir zur Feier, 1899), which was the last volume of Rilke’s poems to be written, with great virtuosity, in a largely derivative Art Nouveau style that was entirely of its time. Some sense of the kind of poetry this was can be gleaned from Kappus’s own poem ‘Sonnet’, which Rilke returns to him, written out in his own hand, with his letter of 14 May 1904. Rilke’s early poems were mostly better than this, but not dissimilar in mood and mode. But by the end of 1902, when he received Kappus’s initial letter, Rilke had also published the Book of Images in its first edition, and written most of the Book of Hours, and these poems, though still not his major work, are already far more individual. In fact Kappus catches him on the point of becoming the Rilke we read Rilke for today: ‘The Panther’, perhaps the best known of the New Poems, Rilke’s first incontrovertibly great book, seems to have been written in November 1902, and Worpswede and Auguste Rodin, the two books of art criticism which were important stepping-stones towards the syntactical subtleties and precise apprehensions of the New Poems, came out early in 1903. Rilke is coming into his own, and learning at an astonishing rate from the example of Rodin, whose working techniques and general way of being in the world he observed closely while writing his book on him.
Writing to Kappus, Rilke was also taking a sympathetic step back into an earlier stage of his career, so that much of what he says is actually at odds with his own practice at the time of writing and with the preoccupations dwelt on in letters to other correspondents written in the same period. It seems certain that Kappus’s situation brought back strong memories of his own younger self and that, especially in the first few letters, he enters into a kind of complicity which draws on their similar experience as cadets and on Rilke’s literary beginnings much more than on the insights he was rapidly finding his way to in Paris. One of the key words in the correspondence is ‘deep’ and its cognates. Rilke’s repeated advice to Kappus is that he should delve down into his own self, that he should not look outwards but within. ‘Do not be distracted by surfaces,’ he writes on 16 July 1903. Yet in Paris he had learned from Rodin precisely the importance of surface as the locus of all that is knowable about the world. One of the most striking things about the Letters is that they are precisely calibrated to their recipient, which has obviously not prevented them from having a much wider appeal but does perhaps explain why that appeal is most marked in the young.
To that extent Kappus’s title Letters to a Young Poet is an appropriate one, but in other ways it is misleading: Kappus sent Rilke his poems and asked him whether they were any good, but he also wrote a letter in which he opened his heart ‘more unreservedly than to anyone ever before’ and it is this, more than the verse, that Rilke responds to. Poetry, or even becoming a poet, is only a small part of what they are concerned with. The first three letters do contain some practical advice on writing, including a warning about irony and some suggestions for reading (though what Rilke recommends is not verse but the prose works of the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen and the Bible), but always it is advice that applies much more generally than just to somebody wanting to become a poet. And this, of course, is because for Rilke to be an artist was to live one’s life properly − the artistic and the existential were always inseparable. Rilke is much more interested in Kappus the young man, with his various difficulties and questions, than in Kappus the young poet. His only response to the poems, beyond saying that they have ‘no identity of their own’ (a comment which, he must have been aware, applied equally well to his own early verse) and that Kappus, not Rilke, must be the judge of their validity, is to select the one he likes best (itself a useful service, perhaps) and to send it back copied out in his own hand so that Kappus can read it as if it were ‘unknown’ to him – a reminder of times before the computer or even the typewriter.
During the period when most of the letters to Kappus were written, Rilke was also writing in complete disarray to Lou Andreas-Salomé, turning to her for advice much as Kappus had turned to him. It does seem to be the case that the apparent authority with which Rilke speaks to Kappus comes from
a strong sense of how greatly in need he is of his own advice, and that the words are found because it is as much his own dilemmas as Kappus’s that he is looking for answers to. Most of the time at least he doesn’t dispense hard-won wisdom, but seems to be happening on the hidden structures that make up his existence, and he shares them as he finds them. Many of his thoughts have something improvised about them, such as when he is entertaining the difficult idea, in the letter of 12 August 1904, that the future ‘comes upon us’ much sooner than is actually apparent, and that we are in effect always struggling to catch up with things that have already, unknown to us, occurred. In trying to look at life not as it seems, Rilke is acting according to his own precept of ‘solitude’, attending to the world as if for the first time.
THE LETTER FROM THE YOUNG WORKER
On the face of it, although the ‘worker’ is writing out of a state of ‘commotion’, the Letter from the Young Worker is marked by greater certainty. Its tone is firm and clear, and Rilke is not so much discovering truths as finding the best expression for beliefs he had held from very early on. The Letter is a polemic against Christianity, and Rilke had begun this in one of his earliest works, Christ: Eleven Visions (written 1896−8), a sequence of poems he never published, in which he has Christ, in various guises, travel through the world that is his legacy, full of remorse for what his teachings have wrought. The Letter takes the form of an address to ‘Mr V.’, which the manuscript makes clear refers to Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian poet whom Rilke got to know in Paris in 1905 and whom he always held in high regard. Verhaeren had died falling under a train in 1916, and Rilke read and reread his work in the following years, especially the posthumous collection Les Flammes hautes (1917). In the manuscript, the Letter from the Young Worker is preceded by the crossed-out words ‘If I were a young worker I should have written you something like this.’ It is a letter to a dead friend, a kind of homage to Verhaeren, whom the worker holds up as a ‘teacher who praises the Here and Now’. He thus sets poetry, which heightens our awareness of the beauty and value of the world we live in, against Christianity, which according to the Letter has damaged life and exploited it, diminishing the pleasure we take in the present in favour of the idea of an afterlife: ‘What deceit, to divest us of images of earthly delight in order to sell them to heaven behind our backs!’