Customer Reviews

Stories of God

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This endearing, wise little book is a must for all Rilke fans. Parables and fables, this book is a great companion to Letters to a Young Poet. Cozy and contemplative like sitting inside a room watching snow fall through a window, these stories are small miracles of faith and love and devotion. However, this book reads much better in the German than it does in this translation. I believe this is the only known English translation and it does not do Rilke's poetic prose justice. That is the problem with translation - the reader is a victim to the translator. Think of all the horrible translations of Dante that existed before Charles Singleton took the poem into his hands. Or the Aeneid or the Odyssey before Robert Fitzgerald.

Nonetheless, this is an important book for those who love the quiet that lies in-between the lines of Rilke's writing. Hopefully, someone like Stephen Mitchell will try their hands at this. We can only hope.

While this is certainly an interesting reading to fans of Rilke's poems and word plays, the nature in which this book was written made it more than a little rough for those used to Rilke's usual effortless passages. Personally, I love the lightness of being in Rilke's passages, being uttered in the most sensitive, but almost carefree fashion, while maintaining depth and thoughtfulness.

In this book, we witness a much younger Rilke at his most spontaneous: the short parts chronicle his conversations with the people whom he lived with at the time. The different parts tell different stories that he seemed to have improvised at the time. It's very charming to see Rilke's deft and quick observations in inspiration, and how he turns these inspirations into parables and short stories in real time. But the instantaneous creation of these parables robs thoughtfulness off of them, and a particular charm compared to Rilke's more thoroughly thought out writings.

"Letters to a young poet" drew its strength from Rilke's warmth and careful construction, comparable to "The notebooks of Laurids Brigge". This writing maintains the former but not the latter, and it's a pity that he never polished the writings at a later stage in life. The liner notes do mention the manuscripts of this writing having been lost at some point: a pity considering the promising strength of the material here, and the proof of what Rilke could have accomplished given more time to contemplate (for example, the hauntingly intense "Duino elegies" took many decades to write, with Rilke revisiting it again and again over time). It appears that one should view this as a sketchbook; an unfinished work of Rilke.