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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Translated by Burton Pike
First published in Paris in 1910, Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is one the first great modernist novels, the account of poet-aspirant Brigge in his exploration of poetic individuality and his reflections on the experience of time as death approaches. This new translation by Burton Pike is a reaction to overly stylized previous translations, and aims to capture not only the beauty but also the strangeness, the spirit, of Rilke’s German.
Details
ISBN-10
1564784975
ISBN-13
9781564784971
Publication Date
Oct 2008
Nb of pages
235
Excerpt
So, this is where people come in order to live, I would have rather thought: to die. I have been out. I have seen: hospitals. I saw a man who tottered and collapsed. People gathered around him, that spared me the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. She was pushing herself with difficulty along a high warm wall, which she sometimes reached out to touch as if to convince herself that it was still there. Yes, it was still there. And behind it? I looked on my map: Maison d'Accouchement. Good. They will deliver her—they can do that. Further on, rue Saint-Jacques, a big building with a dome. The map indicated Val-de-Grâce, Hôpital militaire. I didn't really need to know that, but it does no harm. The street began to smell from all sides. It smelled, as far as one could distinguish, of iodoform, of the grease of pommes frites, of fear. All cities smell in summer. Then I saw a curiously cataract-blinded building, it wasn't to be found on the map, but over the door it said, fairly legibly: Asyle de nuit. Beside the entrance were the prices. I read them. It was not expensive.
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ReviewsPress Reviews
O Magazine
Rain Taxi
In Burton Pike's refreshing new translation of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the reader encounters... an emergent Rilkean persona in full flowering, a figure so uneasy about being that he must write his way toward an ecstatic becoming, rejecting along the way each received formulation that fixes existence too simply: "One comes along," his Malte warns us, “one finds a life all prepared, one only has to put it on.”
Quotations
There have been books that have struck me like lightning and left me riven, permanently scarred, perhaps burned-out but picturesque; and there have been those that created complete countries with their citizens, their cows, their climate, where I could choose to live for long periods while enduring, defying, enjoying their scenery and seasons; but there have been one or two I came to love with a profounder and more enduring passion, not just because, somehow, they seemed to speak to the most intimate 'me' I knew but also because they embodied what I held to be humanly highest, and were therefore made of words which revealed a powerful desire moving with the rhythmic grace of Blake's Tyger; an awareness that was pitilessly unsentimental, yet receptive as a sponge; feelings that were free and undeformed and unashamed; thought that looked at all its conclusions and didn’t blink; as well as an imagination that could dance on the heads of all those angels dancing on that pin. I thought that [Rilke’s] Notebooks were full of writing that met that tall order.
-William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts WE ALSO SUGGEST
transcript
A disturbing document and a powerful, poetic masterpiece, transcript shows us that the Holocaust was not "unspeakable," but was an eminently describable and described act...
other titles related to • Countries : Austria • Countries : Germany • Genres : Fiction • Genres : Fiction : Classics and Modernism • Genres : Fiction : Europe • Genres : Fiction : Europe : Central Europe |
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