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Diaries of a Young Poet
In April 1898 Rainer Maria Rilke, not yet 23, began a diary of his Florence visit. It was to record, in the form of an imaginary dialogue with his mentor and then-lover, Lou Andreas-Salome, his firsthand experiences of early Renaissance art. Two others followed. In these "Schmargendorf" and "Worpswede" diaries, Rilke began to reach toward other people - among them the sculptor Clara Westhoff, whom he would marry and the painter Paula Becker, whose death would haunt him all his life.
These diaries, translated into English here for the first time by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler as Diaries of a Young Poet, span what is arguably the most crucial phase in Rilke's development. They emerge in this fluent, copiously annotated translation as central to the Rilke canon, early prose counterweights to the later Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
These diaries, translated into English here for the first time by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler as Diaries of a Young Poet, span what is arguably the most crucial phase in Rilke's development. They emerge in this fluent, copiously annotated translation as central to the Rilke canon, early prose counterweights to the later Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
306 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1926
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595 people want to read
About the author
Rainer Maria Rilke
1,810 books6,967 followersA mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include
The Book of Hours
(1905) and
The Duino Elegies
(1923).
People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.
His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .
He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.
People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.
His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .
He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
July 22, 2017
Rilke is my milk
August 3, 2016
These diaries are like the workshop in which Rilke crafted his artistic ethos, where his ideas of God as spiritual construct, the exegency of solitude, the interrelation of life and death, and the imagistic fashioning of the self all begin to flower and bloom.
Rilke often writes about experiences that occur in his life, and will later use these experiences, in tandem with his thoughts and ideals, to craft a poem. This work contains a number of early versions of pieces that would later appear in the Book of Images, as well as some poems not published elsewhere.
Though the young Rilke is still enamoured with ideals, much of his deep-rooted convictions are already in place here. And while it may appear at times that the idea of fashioning one's own life as a work of art is somewhat of an egoistic idea, Rilke writes how this can only be done through a sort of death, by alienating these experiences from oneself, that they become blood after having been forgotten. The thing, which seeks to speak, can aid us in this endeavour. For in allowing the thing to speak our place is subsumed, given over and passed on, and yet something that we ourselves perhaps could not say may be carried forth.
"What good will my blood be, when it ripens like wine?
It cannot scream back out of the ocean
that One who loved me most."
To love, out of oneself, unto death; such would be art.
Rilke often writes about experiences that occur in his life, and will later use these experiences, in tandem with his thoughts and ideals, to craft a poem. This work contains a number of early versions of pieces that would later appear in the Book of Images, as well as some poems not published elsewhere.
Though the young Rilke is still enamoured with ideals, much of his deep-rooted convictions are already in place here. And while it may appear at times that the idea of fashioning one's own life as a work of art is somewhat of an egoistic idea, Rilke writes how this can only be done through a sort of death, by alienating these experiences from oneself, that they become blood after having been forgotten. The thing, which seeks to speak, can aid us in this endeavour. For in allowing the thing to speak our place is subsumed, given over and passed on, and yet something that we ourselves perhaps could not say may be carried forth.
"What good will my blood be, when it ripens like wine?
It cannot scream back out of the ocean
that One who loved me most."
To love, out of oneself, unto death; such would be art.
August 29, 2007
"Imagine: when instead of peoples, nations, families and societies, we shall some day have human beings, when one can no longer combine even three under a single name! Will not the world then have to grow larger?"
Occasional visionary mindblowing stuff.
Occasional visionary mindblowing stuff.
July 1, 2013
Remarkably lucid writing for a twenty something, but then we are talking about one of the truly great poets. Much here about the importance of solitude and the very individual nature of artistic creation and achievement - Rilke is no fan of the masses. Perhaps the most interesting indirect piece is the patterns of relationships and daily life for Rilke and his friends. I opened this mostly as a writer interested in the working patterns of other writers, an issue I am struggling with at the moment. I find in this work that I am not alone. And the combination of poems and journal entries, especially in as much as they are written to be read by Rilke's lover, makes for some quality insight into his developing work and poetics. Very worthwhile.
December 17, 2023
Estas cartas abarcan temas que inquietan la vida artística. Rilke escribió sobre la muerte, el sufrimiento, la soledad y su Dios. Estas cartas, dirigidas a una especie de pupilo, son un suspiro dulce y calmo que invitan a cuestionarse el sentido/orden de las cosas.
April 4, 2024
LIVE
LAUGH
RILKE
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
"You are not a goal for me; you are a thousand goals. You are everything, and I know you in everything..."
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
"I need not say: Forgive! For I ask that from you in every silence. I need not ask: Forget! For we want to remember these hours also, in which I tried to flee from you in shame; and on my blind flight I was always running toward you."
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“In all my best hours I shall take your smiling as a city, a distant city that shines and is alive—I shall recognise a word from you as an island on which birches stand or pines but at any rate quiet and festive trees. I shall regard your glance as a well in which the things have gotten lost and over which even the sky trembles with blissfully fearful thoughts of falling in—I shall know that all this exists, that this city can be entered, that I have often beheld this island, and that I know exactly when it is most lonely at the edge of the well; but if you ask me, you will see me hesitate: I don’t know for certain whether the forest we walk through is not merely my mood—a dark, shadowy mood. Who knows: perhaps even Venice is only a feeling.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
‘“You are?” — “Good Lord man, like you I am a writer.”
“A wanderer, I.”
“And your name?”
“That was long ago.”
“And so who are you?”
“Someone different from whomever you suppose.”’
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“But the world is not laughter. That’s not true. It’s the figment of misunderstood genius that feels itself ridiculed. The world is good, souls are noble, and to laugh at suffering is an aberration, something reprehensible… No, good Doctor, the world is not laughter, but it Is the great common realm of happenstance whose loudest and readiest voice is the sound of laughing. And to the solitary, to the deeply serious person, such laughter can only mean the masses, who are forever hammering at his aloneness. He hears laughing; what goes o behind it may not always be suitable for laughing, may in fact be toil or poverty—but far up above it all there’s laughing from a hundred mouths…”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“The reddest roses never showed so red
as on that evening that was cloaked in rain.
I thought so long about your softest hair…
The reddest roses never showed so red.
The bushes never darkened quite so green
as on that evening in that time of rain.
I thought so long about your gentle dress…
The bushes never darkened quite so green.
The slender birch trunks never stood so white
as on that evening that was dark with rain;
and then I saw your hands, their perfect shapes…
The slender birch trunks never stood so white.
The waters mirrored there a land of black
that very evening I found misting with rain;
and thus in your eyes I recognized myself…
the waters mirrored there a land of black.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Everything takes us. The good and that for which we have no name. But as we are continually being gripped by all that asserts its might above us and above the things, we begin to trust more and more the hands that do this to us every day and in all the nights in which we lie awake by ourselves or dream deeply. And someday the knowledge will come to us, when we have just given something its shape, that even with the darkest thing we say we do not mean Death, not Death at all, but Life.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“The Russian journey with its daily losses remains for me such painful evidence that my eyes haven’t ripened yet: they don’t understand how to take in, how to hold, nor how to let go; burdened with tormenting images, they walk past things of beauty and towards disappointments.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“I want to remain in this storm and feel all the tremors of being so deeply moved. I want to have autumn. I want to cover myself over with winter and not betray any presence with any color. I want to remain snowed in for the sake of a coming springtime so that what is germinating inside me might nor rise prematurely from the furrows.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“…for in the wake of beauty there is nothing but decline. And there is nothing out beyond beauty. Beauty is closure, the final vista…”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Observing this I said to her [the blond painter] when we were alone again: ‘You are the very soul of kindness… This is the second time I have said that to you. When I shall have said it for the third time, it will be irrevocable.’—‘O there are many I treat much less…’—‘And precisely that is kindness. Treating gently those you’ve chosen. For kindness is, as are all those qualities we call virtues, not something simply given, working its effects blindly, but one’s own store of life opened to someone else’s needfulness. Someone who is kind without distinguishing, is simply kind; but someone who bestows her kindness on those few she’s chosen is doing so much more…’”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“The world is real.
And everything is world
that moves us, to great feelings or to fear:
desire and solitude, death and song.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“And Death, who plucks eyes like flowers,
doesn’t find my eyes…
(in my face,
which blossoms toward the inside…)”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Every day is the beginning of life. Every life is the beginning of eternity.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“For you were not happy in all that brilliance,
every color lay on you like guilt.
And you lived in impatience,
for you knew: This is not the whole.
Life is only a part… of what?
Life is only a note… in what?
Life had meaning only bound up with many occurrences in infinite space,
life is only the dream of a dream,—
and wakefulness is elsewhere.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Whoever walks now anywhere out in the world,
walks without cause in the world,
walks towards me.
Whoever dies now anywhere out in the world,
dies without cause in the world,
looks at me.
…
And what I saw belonged to me,
and if you feel I’m vanishing,
it’s because my life enshadows me.
Before you possessed me.
I didn’t exist. But I remain now
when you no longer see me.
Not in the words I write down;
I live on
in all that decays,
blows away…:
I am growing more alone.
…
My life is: the stillness of final form.
I am gesture’s beginning and end.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“I walk, walk, and your homeland is still everywhere around me, this wintry far-offness, I walk, walk, and have forgetting that I ever knew another country.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Whoever understands and honors Death correctly grants Life greatness.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
LAUGH
RILKE
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
"You are not a goal for me; you are a thousand goals. You are everything, and I know you in everything..."
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
"I need not say: Forgive! For I ask that from you in every silence. I need not ask: Forget! For we want to remember these hours also, in which I tried to flee from you in shame; and on my blind flight I was always running toward you."
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“In all my best hours I shall take your smiling as a city, a distant city that shines and is alive—I shall recognise a word from you as an island on which birches stand or pines but at any rate quiet and festive trees. I shall regard your glance as a well in which the things have gotten lost and over which even the sky trembles with blissfully fearful thoughts of falling in—I shall know that all this exists, that this city can be entered, that I have often beheld this island, and that I know exactly when it is most lonely at the edge of the well; but if you ask me, you will see me hesitate: I don’t know for certain whether the forest we walk through is not merely my mood—a dark, shadowy mood. Who knows: perhaps even Venice is only a feeling.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
‘“You are?” — “Good Lord man, like you I am a writer.”
“A wanderer, I.”
“And your name?”
“That was long ago.”
“And so who are you?”
“Someone different from whomever you suppose.”’
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“But the world is not laughter. That’s not true. It’s the figment of misunderstood genius that feels itself ridiculed. The world is good, souls are noble, and to laugh at suffering is an aberration, something reprehensible… No, good Doctor, the world is not laughter, but it Is the great common realm of happenstance whose loudest and readiest voice is the sound of laughing. And to the solitary, to the deeply serious person, such laughter can only mean the masses, who are forever hammering at his aloneness. He hears laughing; what goes o behind it may not always be suitable for laughing, may in fact be toil or poverty—but far up above it all there’s laughing from a hundred mouths…”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“The reddest roses never showed so red
as on that evening that was cloaked in rain.
I thought so long about your softest hair…
The reddest roses never showed so red.
The bushes never darkened quite so green
as on that evening in that time of rain.
I thought so long about your gentle dress…
The bushes never darkened quite so green.
The slender birch trunks never stood so white
as on that evening that was dark with rain;
and then I saw your hands, their perfect shapes…
The slender birch trunks never stood so white.
The waters mirrored there a land of black
that very evening I found misting with rain;
and thus in your eyes I recognized myself…
the waters mirrored there a land of black.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Everything takes us. The good and that for which we have no name. But as we are continually being gripped by all that asserts its might above us and above the things, we begin to trust more and more the hands that do this to us every day and in all the nights in which we lie awake by ourselves or dream deeply. And someday the knowledge will come to us, when we have just given something its shape, that even with the darkest thing we say we do not mean Death, not Death at all, but Life.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“The Russian journey with its daily losses remains for me such painful evidence that my eyes haven’t ripened yet: they don’t understand how to take in, how to hold, nor how to let go; burdened with tormenting images, they walk past things of beauty and towards disappointments.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“I want to remain in this storm and feel all the tremors of being so deeply moved. I want to have autumn. I want to cover myself over with winter and not betray any presence with any color. I want to remain snowed in for the sake of a coming springtime so that what is germinating inside me might nor rise prematurely from the furrows.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“…for in the wake of beauty there is nothing but decline. And there is nothing out beyond beauty. Beauty is closure, the final vista…”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Observing this I said to her [the blond painter] when we were alone again: ‘You are the very soul of kindness… This is the second time I have said that to you. When I shall have said it for the third time, it will be irrevocable.’—‘O there are many I treat much less…’—‘And precisely that is kindness. Treating gently those you’ve chosen. For kindness is, as are all those qualities we call virtues, not something simply given, working its effects blindly, but one’s own store of life opened to someone else’s needfulness. Someone who is kind without distinguishing, is simply kind; but someone who bestows her kindness on those few she’s chosen is doing so much more…’”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“The world is real.
And everything is world
that moves us, to great feelings or to fear:
desire and solitude, death and song.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“And Death, who plucks eyes like flowers,
doesn’t find my eyes…
(in my face,
which blossoms toward the inside…)”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Every day is the beginning of life. Every life is the beginning of eternity.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“For you were not happy in all that brilliance,
every color lay on you like guilt.
And you lived in impatience,
for you knew: This is not the whole.
Life is only a part… of what?
Life is only a note… in what?
Life had meaning only bound up with many occurrences in infinite space,
life is only the dream of a dream,—
and wakefulness is elsewhere.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Whoever walks now anywhere out in the world,
walks without cause in the world,
walks towards me.
Whoever dies now anywhere out in the world,
dies without cause in the world,
looks at me.
…
And what I saw belonged to me,
and if you feel I’m vanishing,
it’s because my life enshadows me.
Before you possessed me.
I didn’t exist. But I remain now
when you no longer see me.
Not in the words I write down;
I live on
in all that decays,
blows away…:
I am growing more alone.
…
My life is: the stillness of final form.
I am gesture’s beginning and end.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“I walk, walk, and your homeland is still everywhere around me, this wintry far-offness, I walk, walk, and have forgetting that I ever knew another country.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
“Whoever understands and honors Death correctly grants Life greatness.”
₊˚⊹౨ৎ ₊˚⊹
February 18, 2021
Writers notebook from 1898-1900, when the poet was 23-25 years old. It starts with a bunch of random thoughts, intended to impress his lady love who was the recipient of the diary, but which is rather difficult to follow. The rest consists of sketches of poems and stories, and tales of time with friends, written (and translated) skillfully, and a joy to read.
June 8, 2019
A mix of diary and poetry. It's a fantastic view of the inner mind.
February 11, 2020
A book about poetry which makes you get imbibed in the book for a good time.
January 20, 2023
I wanted more thoughts and introspection about the experiences of his life/interactions with others rather than frequent (and never-ending) prose about other people's art.
January 16, 2024
Detta gäller endast första delen, "The Florence Diary".
February 20, 2024
First book finished in a long time, very interesting views on art and what it means to be an artist
June 14, 2025
vie florentine en coquille, crissante curiosité pour les gigantesques idoles des toiles
vie à Worpswede moissonnée, intimes élans vertigineux
vie à Worpswede moissonnée, intimes élans vertigineux
September 25, 2025
the best writer ever
March 12, 2008
Gorgeous prose and poetry. One of my all time favorite books.
January 30, 2024
As enchanting as the first time I read it!
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews