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Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence
Gathers the correspondence between Rilke and a young Viennese concert pianist who admired his poetry
- GenresNonfictionPoetry
148 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1951
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 12, 2007
A rare and penetrating window on the vagaries of desire.
February 11, 2024
Azares del destino: leer en febrero de 2024 las cartas que se intercambiaron, en febrero de 1914, Magda von Hattingberg y Rilke. 110 después, la palabra escrita prevalece. Las cartas que escribió Rilke, plagadas de lirismo, permiten un acercamiento íntimo al poeta. En estas cartas, Benvenuta y Rilke hablan de la vida, de la poesía, de la música, de la inspiración, de la fe... y de los sueños. No se han visto nunca y la perspectiva de despedirse con un esperanzador 'hasta más ver', les resulta hermosa. Son las cartas de dos almas que aspiran a conocerse y a encontrarse, algún día, más allá de las palabras.
«Amiga, alma preciosa, mi corazón se desborda impetuoso hacia el suyo. Todas las cartas que pudieran escribirse en varios años quisiera escribírselas de una sola vez. ¿Sabe?, junto al mar hay mañanas alegres e impetuosas en las que todas las olas desean venir al mismo tiempo, se detienen fuera, se produce un resplandor, un resplandor y ninguna llega.»
«Amiga, alma preciosa, mi corazón se desborda impetuoso hacia el suyo. Todas las cartas que pudieran escribirse en varios años quisiera escribírselas de una sola vez. ¿Sabe?, junto al mar hay mañanas alegres e impetuosas en las que todas las olas desean venir al mismo tiempo, se detienen fuera, se produce un resplandor, un resplandor y ninguna llega.»
August 17, 2020
This book was a marathon, a marvel, a headache and an anchor to the inner human experience that so rarely finds a home in words. The prose is dense and evocative—the experience is similar to reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil or Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza. You have to hike through some serious mazes to find the genius inside them.
But that genius is very much there. In seeking it, I managed to mutilate my copy of the book, marring it with dark pen marks including the pages of the foreword and the extra blank ones at the end, with something of a serial killer’s obsession to pin down tiny details, my own speculations serving as an alternative narrative to the official text alongside the editor’s footnotes. I am not sure I will ever fully understand it, but I felt this book in a deep, natural way, for all the effort it took to hold onto it. It was like riding the back of a great sea creature with slippery skin. You fall off and grow tired, and you must come up for air, but you still dive in and rush forward again and again in attempts to hold onto a fraction of the beast’s great majesty.
If Rilke’s goal in his letters to Benvenuta was to make his nature known in all its perplexing complexity, he did a wonderful job of it. Sadly, in his efforts to know himself and make himself known, he neglected to understand his audience, either Magda or the one that soaks in his words now, and so we all sort of stumbled away from the experience feeling dazed and a little disappointed, but grateful that we were ever submerged in it.
Rilke was a deeply flawed and painfully beautiful man, frail and brilliant, frustrating and sympathetic. He saw the gray and the black and white in everything, poignantly articulating the complicated natures of the self, love, and so much else. As a result he was deeply self-conscious, yet expressive to a fault of all the shades he saw. He exposed (apologizing every step of the way) the parts of his soul that we may all recognize in ourselves, but from which we are often inclined to shy away. The foolish joy in the early days of new love and the back-and-forth in our hearts, wrestling between the urge to be uninhibited and the rational allowance of measured enjoyment. Oversharing and keenly personal inhibitions. Faulty projection, the placement of people on pedestals where no one truly belongs. The all-too-common act of listening in preparation for speech, not listening to understand. The failure to see the truth about ourselves. The fixation on our own flaws at expense of our enjoyment. The tendency to view ourselves as separate from humanity, richer and poorer than everyone else, instead of a valuable, logical point on a vast and beautiful spectrum. The sensitivity and particularity that is shushed and shooed into the dim corners of our psyches. These tender faux pas and more are readily found in Rilke’s writing.
I will end this wordy review with some of Rilke’s most wonderful thoughts. It will be difficult to limit my selections, but for all the time I’ve spent with this book I feel insistent about holding onto the parts of it that most moved me. These are my interpretations alone and I’m sure reveal the kinds of meaning I was looking for rather than being wholly accurate classifications of Rilke’s ideas.
On the affective powers of music:
“...you would have seen your music perpetually entering without ever arriving, until it reached some innermost place where I myself have never been.”
“...you can believe there were moments when I hoped for it—imagining again and again that among the powers of the earth there must be one that would connect me to all that is human without my suffocating in it, one that would bring my heart to flower indescribably and then hedge it about with a space of protection and allowance, to let it bring forth the true fruit which it has never borne.”
On the troubles of being deeply sensitive:
“...as a child, I was lost in a military school where life could not even enter, not a single breath of my life. And then everything was there after all, in fact there was always too much, and ultimately the privations of life come from its abundance.”
On the vulnerability of sharing ourselves with others:
“Who are you, dear friend? This garden is afraid of the sun.”
“It is precisely this gesture which has been my lot in human relations since I was a child: to reverse the urge of an infinite desire to give by an incomprehensible need to take everything back.”
“...whenever my heart was made to feel better and more capable by some human influence, it would simultaneously experience the strangest limitation...”
On not fitting in:
“But with people, effort was all I knew; my heart—in its most festive dress—had to walk back and forth carrying burdens, and thus its rich garments were spoiled...for one who rejoices finds his strength in rejoicing and not in effort.”
“How often have I feared the influence of distant people. I believe that distance is a path by which I am more defenselessly accesible than by any closeness.”
On the development of a secure attachment style:
“Children rest in love (was I ever allowed that?) but then they are still pure in their illusion that it is possible to belong to someone, and when they say ‘mine,’ they make no claim to ownership; they hug and let go...”
On perseverance in nature:
“How often, in nature, have I watched a little bug attempt something, and fail, and try again and again...I suspect that each time the little creature resumes its ascent, it no longer knows anything about its last disappointment and defeat, has forgotten everything, stands again before something completely new, quite eager to find out what will happen this time, full of cheerful enterprise.”
Benvenuta’s wise musings on the unhurried pacing of a healthy bond:
“How much I have to tell you, and how narrow is the frame! How many hours would be needed just to get past the beginning: you are so right when you say that one would like to write immediately all the letters one could write in a year. But is it not a blessed thought to know that everything still lies before us? And the more trustingly we wait for it to come, the more beautiful it will be.”
Rilke’s reply:
“...a garden does not make an effort to bloom, it takes pleasure in blooming, it finds itself resting in every flower; oh, sister, what have I done, that love always came to me as a thing to achieve, that I have never borne its sunny fruit through my nature...”
On the variable, multifaceted nature of the self, and how a unified identity may function:
“...I live my days in a state of receptivity that can be alerted by a ten-thousandth part of a hint, and that every day seduces me to adopt at least forty different existences, not one of which confirms the validation of what I may have begun in another. Just for a while, to have a sameness about the soul, an invariable goodness, a safety, such as is granted a patient in the fresh air, to restore the confidence of his bewildered body.”
On sleep:
“...it is thanks to sleep that my nature, spoiled though it is, or wilted in so many places, is still connected to something deep, unused, and darkly innocent.”
On the nebulousness of childhood:
“Could it really still be there inside us, the childhood that had nowhere to go, away from us? But then it vanished so deeply inside us and we turned away toward the things of the world, and now we stand about it with such foreignness crowding our faces, and ask: what was it? When we lived it, we did not know it, we used it up, we didn’t know its name; and yet it was then we possessed it completely; later the things turn up with names, are forbidden to pass beyond them, and, out of sheer caution, leave them half empty.”
On redemption:
“For after all, no one can repair whatever wrong he may have done, except within himself.”
“Is there a spring that would not be polluted by washing away one’s shamefulness?”
On creative productivity:
“That is why I have always avoided enticing my nature to bear fruit at any price...never wanted my heart to surge from having some fermenting draught poured into it. When it rose, it rose in accord with the unarguable motions of the sea.”
On embracing the shadow self:
“And in this beauty I gained possession of it, it became substantial and solid, it entered into the world of my art.”
On depression:
“How the most trivial undertaking has become a burden to me, which I want to be done with...love began little by little to withdraw from everything, and now whatever needs to be done has a sullen and loveless demeanor; for just being touched by such a loveless one makes it balk and wish it could run away—I don’t know, perhaps to the place where all things yearn to be when they are badly off.”
On the spectrum of mental health:
“Abnormal? Certainly. That does not frighten me. I am not afraid of abnormality, for I have no intention of holding onto it, I only want to go through it, weather it. I see it as nothing but a sad need of nature for calculating her way to wholeness and health through all these tangled multiplications: she does the best she can.”
On mistrust of medical professionals:
“I have never been able to communicate with a doctor; they start out with a mistrust of what one presents to them...”
On introspection and analysis :
“If I were to tell you where my greatest feeling...the bliss of my earthly existence has been, I would have to confess: it has always, here and there, been in this kind of in-seeing, in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this divine seeing into the heart of things.”
On the miraculousness of kindred spirits:
“...tell me, is the cosmos really that old, that we should know each other so boundlessly, from before all conceivable beginnings up to and beyond all conceivable ends, across this bridge of sudden presence?”
On being awestruck:
“A large part of my nature is always opening out in wonder.”
On love and longing:
“In you I close my eyes.”
“Dear dear girl, may I be granted this, in your hands, the habit of looking on love as a thing to accomplish will leave, like an old pain—and that, slowly raising my eyes to look at you, I would no longer know where it had hurt, or what it had been.”
“Can you imagine that for years I’ve travelled thus: a stranger among other strangers? Now at last you’ve come to take me home.”
But that genius is very much there. In seeking it, I managed to mutilate my copy of the book, marring it with dark pen marks including the pages of the foreword and the extra blank ones at the end, with something of a serial killer’s obsession to pin down tiny details, my own speculations serving as an alternative narrative to the official text alongside the editor’s footnotes. I am not sure I will ever fully understand it, but I felt this book in a deep, natural way, for all the effort it took to hold onto it. It was like riding the back of a great sea creature with slippery skin. You fall off and grow tired, and you must come up for air, but you still dive in and rush forward again and again in attempts to hold onto a fraction of the beast’s great majesty.
If Rilke’s goal in his letters to Benvenuta was to make his nature known in all its perplexing complexity, he did a wonderful job of it. Sadly, in his efforts to know himself and make himself known, he neglected to understand his audience, either Magda or the one that soaks in his words now, and so we all sort of stumbled away from the experience feeling dazed and a little disappointed, but grateful that we were ever submerged in it.
Rilke was a deeply flawed and painfully beautiful man, frail and brilliant, frustrating and sympathetic. He saw the gray and the black and white in everything, poignantly articulating the complicated natures of the self, love, and so much else. As a result he was deeply self-conscious, yet expressive to a fault of all the shades he saw. He exposed (apologizing every step of the way) the parts of his soul that we may all recognize in ourselves, but from which we are often inclined to shy away. The foolish joy in the early days of new love and the back-and-forth in our hearts, wrestling between the urge to be uninhibited and the rational allowance of measured enjoyment. Oversharing and keenly personal inhibitions. Faulty projection, the placement of people on pedestals where no one truly belongs. The all-too-common act of listening in preparation for speech, not listening to understand. The failure to see the truth about ourselves. The fixation on our own flaws at expense of our enjoyment. The tendency to view ourselves as separate from humanity, richer and poorer than everyone else, instead of a valuable, logical point on a vast and beautiful spectrum. The sensitivity and particularity that is shushed and shooed into the dim corners of our psyches. These tender faux pas and more are readily found in Rilke’s writing.
I will end this wordy review with some of Rilke’s most wonderful thoughts. It will be difficult to limit my selections, but for all the time I’ve spent with this book I feel insistent about holding onto the parts of it that most moved me. These are my interpretations alone and I’m sure reveal the kinds of meaning I was looking for rather than being wholly accurate classifications of Rilke’s ideas.
On the affective powers of music:
“...you would have seen your music perpetually entering without ever arriving, until it reached some innermost place where I myself have never been.”
“...you can believe there were moments when I hoped for it—imagining again and again that among the powers of the earth there must be one that would connect me to all that is human without my suffocating in it, one that would bring my heart to flower indescribably and then hedge it about with a space of protection and allowance, to let it bring forth the true fruit which it has never borne.”
On the troubles of being deeply sensitive:
“...as a child, I was lost in a military school where life could not even enter, not a single breath of my life. And then everything was there after all, in fact there was always too much, and ultimately the privations of life come from its abundance.”
On the vulnerability of sharing ourselves with others:
“Who are you, dear friend? This garden is afraid of the sun.”
“It is precisely this gesture which has been my lot in human relations since I was a child: to reverse the urge of an infinite desire to give by an incomprehensible need to take everything back.”
“...whenever my heart was made to feel better and more capable by some human influence, it would simultaneously experience the strangest limitation...”
On not fitting in:
“But with people, effort was all I knew; my heart—in its most festive dress—had to walk back and forth carrying burdens, and thus its rich garments were spoiled...for one who rejoices finds his strength in rejoicing and not in effort.”
“How often have I feared the influence of distant people. I believe that distance is a path by which I am more defenselessly accesible than by any closeness.”
On the development of a secure attachment style:
“Children rest in love (was I ever allowed that?) but then they are still pure in their illusion that it is possible to belong to someone, and when they say ‘mine,’ they make no claim to ownership; they hug and let go...”
On perseverance in nature:
“How often, in nature, have I watched a little bug attempt something, and fail, and try again and again...I suspect that each time the little creature resumes its ascent, it no longer knows anything about its last disappointment and defeat, has forgotten everything, stands again before something completely new, quite eager to find out what will happen this time, full of cheerful enterprise.”
Benvenuta’s wise musings on the unhurried pacing of a healthy bond:
“How much I have to tell you, and how narrow is the frame! How many hours would be needed just to get past the beginning: you are so right when you say that one would like to write immediately all the letters one could write in a year. But is it not a blessed thought to know that everything still lies before us? And the more trustingly we wait for it to come, the more beautiful it will be.”
Rilke’s reply:
“...a garden does not make an effort to bloom, it takes pleasure in blooming, it finds itself resting in every flower; oh, sister, what have I done, that love always came to me as a thing to achieve, that I have never borne its sunny fruit through my nature...”
On the variable, multifaceted nature of the self, and how a unified identity may function:
“...I live my days in a state of receptivity that can be alerted by a ten-thousandth part of a hint, and that every day seduces me to adopt at least forty different existences, not one of which confirms the validation of what I may have begun in another. Just for a while, to have a sameness about the soul, an invariable goodness, a safety, such as is granted a patient in the fresh air, to restore the confidence of his bewildered body.”
On sleep:
“...it is thanks to sleep that my nature, spoiled though it is, or wilted in so many places, is still connected to something deep, unused, and darkly innocent.”
On the nebulousness of childhood:
“Could it really still be there inside us, the childhood that had nowhere to go, away from us? But then it vanished so deeply inside us and we turned away toward the things of the world, and now we stand about it with such foreignness crowding our faces, and ask: what was it? When we lived it, we did not know it, we used it up, we didn’t know its name; and yet it was then we possessed it completely; later the things turn up with names, are forbidden to pass beyond them, and, out of sheer caution, leave them half empty.”
On redemption:
“For after all, no one can repair whatever wrong he may have done, except within himself.”
“Is there a spring that would not be polluted by washing away one’s shamefulness?”
On creative productivity:
“That is why I have always avoided enticing my nature to bear fruit at any price...never wanted my heart to surge from having some fermenting draught poured into it. When it rose, it rose in accord with the unarguable motions of the sea.”
On embracing the shadow self:
“And in this beauty I gained possession of it, it became substantial and solid, it entered into the world of my art.”
On depression:
“How the most trivial undertaking has become a burden to me, which I want to be done with...love began little by little to withdraw from everything, and now whatever needs to be done has a sullen and loveless demeanor; for just being touched by such a loveless one makes it balk and wish it could run away—I don’t know, perhaps to the place where all things yearn to be when they are badly off.”
On the spectrum of mental health:
“Abnormal? Certainly. That does not frighten me. I am not afraid of abnormality, for I have no intention of holding onto it, I only want to go through it, weather it. I see it as nothing but a sad need of nature for calculating her way to wholeness and health through all these tangled multiplications: she does the best she can.”
On mistrust of medical professionals:
“I have never been able to communicate with a doctor; they start out with a mistrust of what one presents to them...”
On introspection and analysis :
“If I were to tell you where my greatest feeling...the bliss of my earthly existence has been, I would have to confess: it has always, here and there, been in this kind of in-seeing, in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this divine seeing into the heart of things.”
On the miraculousness of kindred spirits:
“...tell me, is the cosmos really that old, that we should know each other so boundlessly, from before all conceivable beginnings up to and beyond all conceivable ends, across this bridge of sudden presence?”
On being awestruck:
“A large part of my nature is always opening out in wonder.”
On love and longing:
“In you I close my eyes.”
“Dear dear girl, may I be granted this, in your hands, the habit of looking on love as a thing to accomplish will leave, like an old pain—and that, slowly raising my eyes to look at you, I would no longer know where it had hurt, or what it had been.”
“Can you imagine that for years I’ve travelled thus: a stranger among other strangers? Now at last you’ve come to take me home.”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 20, 2020
Rilke necesita de la soledad y se recrea en el que cree ser su sino. Benvenuta dice comprender su ser a medida que se desarrolla la relación epistolar y nace el entendimiento y el amor entre ambos. Se discute sobre el primer amor, el amor, la fealdad, el padre, la madre, los perros, la pureza, los niños, la infancia, el sacrificio etc. Entre otras cosas y desde luego no todos son tratados con la misma originalidad.
September 30, 2007
rilke's writing/his chosen language is entirely yummy... however, he's riddled with complexities that haunt him. when i began reading, i enjoyed the idea of watching a love unfold between letters sent, but i found myself becoming frustrated with his personality. at one point i had to place the book aside all together in order to process his hardships and rejoin him after i did just that. he's exhausting, yet fucking brilliant.
October 21, 2007
This book paralleled a friendship I had at the beginning of this year... Initially I found Rilke's letters fascinating... Dense, challenging, and somewhat inspiring as his benvenuta pushed him to create again... She was the muse who gave him a shove past a profound slump... But as the book wore on... his style grew tiresome... a real chore to read... And benvenuta's letters are airy and simple... The high contrast proved to be daunting too... There are better Rilke writings.
January 10, 2011
...but then, walking is almost more beautiful still, in the great pure silence. Some day we shall walk like that together, shall take it upon our two selves to outrage the jackdaws with our irrepressible exuberance...
"my heart lies open in a space of fearful conductivity-I cannot hide it, else should i hide it even from the stars..."
"my heart lies open in a space of fearful conductivity-I cannot hide it, else should i hide it even from the stars..."
March 4, 2018
"In a human sense my life is somehow forfeit. I know it, but my art is pure. In my house the golden columns stand like the boles of forest trees, and in the figures on the curtains there is not a thread that is not beautiful with the purest colors."
August 19, 2023
Potser l'edició no és la que es mereixeria i les notes explicatives al final de text no cumpleixen el seu objectiu, però paga la pena assistir "en directe" al neixement, primer d'una relació de confiança, després d'amistat i per últim d'amor. Sobta la sinceritat de Rilke, la imatge íntima que té d'ell mateix i de la seva relació amb la resta de la humanitat. Si us agrada l'obra d'aquest escriptor-poeta excepcional gaudireu de la lectura
January 17, 2021
Thanks to Emma from the * emmie * booktube channel for making me discover this wonderful writing !
Really interesting to read about a "real" pen pal relationship slowly evolving to something less defined and more spritually inclined. Also the concept of seeing/feeling at the center of someone is a bit bonkers.
Really interesting to read about a "real" pen pal relationship slowly evolving to something less defined and more spritually inclined. Also the concept of seeing/feeling at the center of someone is a bit bonkers.
April 23, 2021
Les lettres poétiques malheureusement ne me transporte pas. J'aurais aimé apprécier ce recueil de lettre par Rilke.
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