LIVE THE QUESTIONS
RILKE, Rainer Maria. Lettres à un jeune poète. Paris: Bernard Grasset. 1971.
8vo. Green card wrappers with black title lettering to spine; pp. [viii], 150, [6]; slight bumping to head and tail of spine and minimal toning to pages; otherwise very good.
Lettres à un jeune poète (English title: Letters to a Young Poet; original title, in German: Briefe an einen jungen Dichter) consists of a series of letters that Rainer Maria Rilke wrote between 1903 to 1908 to a young aspiring poet, first a cadet at the Military Academy and later a second lieutenant in the Imperial and Royal Army of Austria and Hungary, named Franz Xaver Kappus. First published in German in 1929, Rilke's Letters appeared in French translation by Bernard Grasset in 1937.
In his beginning letter, Rilke politely refuses to review the stranger Kappus' poetry, instead advising the 19 year old that "Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself."
Letters to a Young Poet is a discussion about the need to be curious and to exist in moments of tension and solitude. Significantly, these letters were composed during a crucial period of the Austrian poet's own artistic development, coinciding with the publication of his early works.
Rilke writes; "Try to love the questions themsevles like locked rooms, like books that are now written in a foreign tongue… Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
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