I Am In Love

That's right, kids. I have met Rainer Maria Rilke (who names a boy Maria?) and am 100% besotted. He's a German-speaking poet born in Prague in 1875 (a resident of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). I'd learn German to read him, I think, and that makes for the first time since Russian and Dostoevsky that I've said something like that... I hope this doesn't auger for a love affair with Germany--that'd be too messed up for even me, being of Polish background and all... :)

His Bio.... How dramatic! And his name means "Reborn." How brilliant...

Check out these fantabulous sections from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which are a bunch of recollections and imaginings from when he moved to Paris in the early 1900s...

On Paris, and this is how the book starts *shiver*

So, this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in. I have been out. I saw: hospitals. I saw a man who staggered and fell. A crowd formed around him and I was spared the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. She was dragging herself heavily along a high, warm wall, and now and then reached out to touch it as if to convince herself that it was still there. Yes, it was still there.

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To think that I can't give up the habit of sleeping with the window open. Electric trolleys speed clattering through my room. Cars drive over me. A door slams. Somewhere a windowpane shatters on the pavement; I can hear its large fragments laugh, and its small ones giggle.

Later

And yet something happened again that took me up and crumpled me like a piece of paper and threw me away: something incredible.

And then

From the open windows, the air of the previous night crept out with a bad conscience.

Comparing people to lids of cans

Let us agree on one point: the lid of a can--or let us say, of a can that is in good condition, whose edge curves in the same way as its own--a lid like this should have no other wish than to find itself on top of its can; this would be the utmost that it could imagine for itself; an unsurpassed satisfaction, the fulfillment of all its desires. Indeed, there is something almost ideal about being patiently and gently turned and coming to rest evenly on the small projecting rim, and feeling its interlocking edge inside you, elastic and just as sharp as your own edge when you are lying alone. Ah, but there are hardly any lids now that can still appreciate this. Here it is very evident how much confusion has been caused among Things by their association with humans. For humans--if it is permissible to compare them, just in passing, with tin lids--humans sit upon their occupations ungracefully and with extreme unwillingness. Some because in their haste they haven't found the right one; some because they have been put on in anger, crooked; some because the corresponding rims have been dented, each in a different way. Let us admit in all sincerity that basically they have just one thought: as soon as they get a chance, to jump down and roll around and clatter.

On rulers, their mortality and their propensity to travel and luxuriate in all their ostentatiousness

For the sake of this blood he dragged around with him all these objects that he cared so little about. The three large diamonds and all the precious stones; the Flemish laces and the Arras tapestries, in piles. His silk pavilion with its cords of twisted gold and four hundred tents for his retinue. And pictures painted on wood, and the twelve disciples in massive silver. And the Prince of Taranto and the Lord of Chateau-Guyon. For he wanted to persuade his blood that he was emperor and there was nothing above him: so that it would fear him. But his blood didn't believe it, in spite of all the proofs; it was a distrustful blood. Perhaps he kept it in doubt for a while. But the horns of Uri betrayed him. After that, his blood knew that it was circulating in a lost man: and it wanted to escape.

And on and on, he writes like an intoxicating, undulating music coursing through the reader's senses. He's incredible. Such a poet, such a visual, tactile experience. He talks about death, mortality, solitude, mothers, and our faces, to each other and masking us even from ourselves, separating us from others. He's incredible.

I now have to buy every single thing he's written. He's displaced Keats (who?), Pushkin (who? *ducking from hostile missiles sent by the Russians*), and ... dare I say it? Shakespeare! *ducking from the slings and arrows of outraged fans*

Ah, love.

Let me see if I can dig up some of his poetry. I daren't continue to write about him now; work beckons (rather manically, I might add). But here's a link I'll enjoy perusing, and which you might too; one which leads to a selection of his poetry, translated. Stephen Mitchell is the translater of my copy (oh, beloved copy) of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and so he's my preferred translator...

Rilke, thy name is beauty.