![]() ![]() Rilke fanatics will find some value in seeing Kappus’s side of the conversation, but the power of the book still lies in Rilke’s letters. ![]() For example, following Rilke’s third letter, on the value of solitude and the importance of attaining it, Kappus asks if “we are supposed to endure our solitude in love too” and “share with the other person only the one common element of each having this solitude.” Too often, however, Kappus’s replies are simply fawning, as when he praises Rilke’s words as possessing the “simple grandeur of the Gospels and the richness of fairy-tale kings.” Searls’s translation lacks the poetic tone of earlier editions, and the book’s structure is disappointing, placing all of Kappus’s letters together after Rilke’s, rather than arranging them chronologically. Some of them provide enriching context for Letters’ famous passages. ![]() In 2019, Rilke scholar Erich Unglaub discovered the letters that Franz Xaver Kappus, then an Austrian military cadet and aspiring poet, sent to Rilke between 19. ![]() Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929) is given an expanded treatment including, for the first time, the letters from Rilke’s correspondent, with intermittently intriguing but underwhelming results. Rilke himself hardly assented to the isolation he felt during his schooling in military academies (‘when I was a boy among boys, I was alone among them’), nor did he welcome it when he moved to Paris to write about Rodin (‘how alone I was this time among these people, how perpetually disowned by all I met’). ![]()
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