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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids BriggeAuthor: Rainer Maria Rilke Translator: Burton Pike German & Austrian Literature Series October 2008 235 pages, Dimensions: 5.5 x 8 Paperback, 9781564784971 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $11.16—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
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.
About the Author
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Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) is considered one of the most important German poets of the twentieth century. He is best known for his two famous verse sequences, Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies, both of which were published in 1923. His collected work is comprised of hundreds of other poems, essays, plays, and stories. |
About the Translator
| Burton Pike is professor emeritus of comparative literature and German at the CUNY Graduate Center. A writer, critic, and editor, he has translated novels by Robert Musil and Goethe, and shorter fiction from German and French. |
Praise
“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 TextsSo, 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.
And what else? A child in a standing baby carriage. The child was fat, greenish, and had a prominent sore on its forehead. The sore was obviously healing and did not hurt. The child was sleeping, its mouth open, breathing iodoform, pommes frites, fear. That's how it was. The main thing was that one was alive. That was the main thing.
That I can't give up sleeping with the window open. Electric trolleys race ringing through my room. Automobiles rush over me. A door slams shut. Somewhere a pane of glass shatters, I hear the big fragments laugh, the small splinters titter. Then, suddenly, a muffled, confined noise from the other side, within the building. Someone is climbing the stairs. Coming, incessantly coming. Is here, is here a long time, passes by. And the street again. A girl screams: Ah tais-toi, je ne veux plus. The trolley comes running up all excited, runs on over it, over everything. Someone calls out. People are running, overtake each other. A dog barks. What a relief: a dog. Toward morning even a cock crows, and that is an indescribable blessing. Then I suddenly fall asleep.