Rilke then called his reader to free himself from the ideological shackles of our culture’s conception of love as a melding of entities. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. To love is good too, for love is difficult. It is good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult, and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it. And the new translation embodies what the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s described as “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes… a second original,”Įxcerpts from the 2021 Edition of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet It is clearly a labor of love to translate the work of a man who lived long ago, who barely survived to fifty, and who was still in his twenties when he composed these singular letters of timeless lucidity.

Both women have spent a quarter century thinking deeply about the same issues that Rilke grappled with. This new edition is the work of the ecological philosopher, Buddhist scholar, and environmental activist Joanna Macy, and Anita Barrows, a poet and clinical psychologist, two women who have lived into the far reaches of life - Macy was 91 at the time of the translation and Barrows 73. Posthumously published in German in 1929, these letters of great poetic insight come alive in a new edition: Letters to a Young Poet: A New Translation and Commentary (Shambhala 2021). In ten letters, Rilke not only shared personal reflections on the vocation of writing but also offered uncommon wisdom on a life, touching topics such as gender, solitude, longing and romantic love. Rilke saw himself in Kappus, and so they’re written from Rilke to Rilke-both to his past and his present. The letters aren’t really letters, they’re diaries.

1902 portrait of Rilke by his brother-in-law, Helmuth Westhoff And so began a ten-letter correspondence lasting from 1902–1908. Rilke got lots of letters from aspiring artists, but Kappus’s touched him, for he had spent the worst five years of his young life forced by his parents into the same military school. Kappus sent Rilke some poems and asked him for advice about becoming a writer. Rilke was 27-still a young artist with his best work ahead of him-when he got a letter from a 19-year old military school student named Franz Kappus. The preeminent Bohemian-Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) left a rich legacy of poetry that contains some of the most moving and astute observations on the human condition – love, longing, solitude, creativity and God.

Rainer maria rilke letters