Letters on Cézanne

by Rainer Maria Rilke, Joel Agee (Translator)

Overview

Rilke's prayerful responses to the french master's beseeching art

For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes.

Virtually every day in the fall of 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke returned to a Paris gallery to view a Cezanne exhibition. Nearly as frequently, he wrote dense and joyful letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, expressing his dismay before the paintings and his ensuing revelations about art and life.

Rilke was knowledgeable about art and had even published monographs, including a famous study of Rodin that inspired his New Poems. But Cezanne's impact on him could not be conveyed in a traditional essay. Rilke's sense of kinship with Cezanne provides a powerful and prescient undercurrent in these letters -- passages from them appear verbatim in Rilke's great modernist novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Letters on Cezanne is a collection of meaningfully private responses to a radically new art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466807259
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/15/2002
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	236 KB

About the Author

Rainer Maria Rilke (1975-1926) was born in Prague and traveled throughout Europe, returning frequently to Paris, where he wrote his finest works: the two volumes of New Poems and the great modernist novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He lived the last years of his life in Switzerland, where he completed his two poetic masterworks, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.

Joel Agee has translated Elias Canetti, Friedrich Dürenmatt, and Gottfried Benn. He won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his work on Heinrich von Kleist's verse play Penthesilea. He is the author of Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany.

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and traveled throughout Europe for much of his adult life, returning frequently to Paris. There he came under the influence of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and produced much of his finest verse, most notably the two volumes of New Poems as well as the great modernist novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Among his other books of poems are The Book of Images and The Book of Hours. He lived the last years of his life in Switzerland, where he completed his two poetic masterworks, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukemia in December 1926.
Joel Agee has translated Elias Canetti, Friedrich Dürenmatt, Gottfried Benn, and a collection of Rilke's letters, Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence. He won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea, a verse play. He is the author of Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany and lives in Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

My dear friend: what I am trying to say is that you should forget everything you've read in my letters about the structure of the novel -- just sit down and write." The final sentence of the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Letters to a Young Novelist, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), may undercut the careful tutorial it concludes, but it's probably his soundest advice. As didactic as Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" -- "Have you read ' Jealousy ' by Alain Robbe-Grillet?" "And, speaking of Joyce, wasn't 'Ulysses' a cataclysmic innovation?" -- Vargas Llosa's book takes the form of a one-sided correspondence with an imaginary fan. Defining the fiction writer as a rebel, a " 'dissident' from reality," Vargas Llosa lectures on persuasiveness and the "aura of indispensability" present in the language of a true writer.

That aura clings to nearly every phrase of Rilke's Letters on Cezanne (a new edition is forthcoming from North Point), which he wrote to his wife in 1907 while living in Paris and waiting for the proofs of "New Poems" to appear. Two rooms devoted to Cézanne at the Autumn Salon mesmerized him -- the still-lifes in particular, which he found "wonderfully occupied with themselves." The painter's "objectivity" resonated with Rilke's emerging interest in the Ding-Gedicht, or "thing poem." One canvas showed a red armchair whose "round bulging back curves and slopes forward and down to the armrests (which are sewn up like the sleeve stump of an armless man)." Cézanne's colors -- "chrome yellow" and "burning lacquer red -- could, he wrote, "heal one of indecision once and for all. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you." (Dana Goodyear)

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The New Yorker

This small volume of correspondence, written in 1907, reflects Rilke's admiration for the French painter Cezanne, who was a major influence on the poet. ``These profound letters mirror the search of a writer grappling with the most intimate questions of identity and artistic purpose,'' stated PW. (October)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

When Rilke first discovered Cezanne's paintings in an art salon in Paris, he was moved to remark, ``all reality is on his side.'' These letters, written to his wife, Clara, are the record of Rilke's efforts to impart something of Cezanne's la realisation to his own life and work, for the painter came to represent for Rilke, the poet, that perfect unity between the creator and his art which he must strive to emulate. A few impressions of van Gogh and other artists are interwoven, but the letters are primarily concerned with Cezanne. With luminous insight, clarity, and sympathy, they reflect how experiencing Cezanne's art became a sort of artistic watershed for Rilke, af ter which he could see with the ``right eyes.'' Highly recommended for liter ary and art collections. Carol J. Lich tenberg, Washington State Univ. Lib., Pullman

Library Journal

The greatness of Cezanne could be conveyed only by an artist equally great.” —Howard Moss, The New Yorker

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