The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Overview

This is the definitive, widely acclaimed translation of the major prose work of one of our century's greatest poets -- "a masterpiece like no other" (Elizabeth Hardwick) -- Rilke's only novel, extraordinary for its structural uniqueness and purity of language. First published in 1910, it has proven to be one of the most influential and enduring works of fiction of our century.

Malte Laurids Brigge is a young Danish nobleman and poet living in Paris. Obsessed with death and with the reality that lurks behind appearances, Brigge muses on his family and their history and on the teeming, alien life of the city. Many of the themes and images that occur in Rilke's poetry can also be found in the novel, prefiguring the modernist movement in its self-awareness and imagistic immediacy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679732457
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/27/1990
Series:	Vintage International
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.26(w) x 7.97(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was one of the greatest lyric German-language poets. Born in Prague, he published his first book of poems, Leben und Lieber, at age 19. In 1897 he met Lou Andreas-Salomé, the talented and spirited daughter of a Russian army officer, who influenced him deeply. In 1902 he became a friend, and for a time the secretary, of Rodin, and it was during his 12-year Paris residence that Rilke enjoyed his greatest poetic activity. In 1919 he went to Switzerland where he spent the last years of his life. It was there that he wrote his last two works, Duino Elegies (1923) and Sonnets to Orpheus (1923).

Editorial Reviews

"This book has been central for many young poets, in many languages, for generations. Now, Edward Snow has created a fresh, inviting version in English."— Robert Pinsky

"Reading Rilke in English, one faces three doors: read Edward Snow, read a lesser translator, or learn German. Just as Snow has produced masterpieces in the past, his rendering of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a revelation. Though I had read the volume before with curiosity, I found Snow’s version a page-turner. I devoured it like a velociraptor."— Mary Karr

"This brilliant new translation walks right off the page into the streets of Paris and into the recessed corridors of memory and impassioned imagination.… Sentence by sentence, Snow releases the hallucinatory revelations of a mind creating its own indelible tracks between ‘curiosity and dread,’ between shocking estrangement and almost unbearable sympathy. I first read the Notebooks in earlier translations fifty years ago; they have never felt so radiant, so nuanced, so immediately yet enduringly prophetic."— Peter Sacks

"[Edward Snow] has outdone himself by rendering the German writer’s prose classic in all its eerie, crepuscular shadings…Every sentence glistens."— Phillip Lopate

"The Notebooks matches the literary heights of Rilke’s finest verse…Edward Snow’s new translation is an opportunity to revisit this elusive masterpiece."— Ratik Asokan Nation

"The short heart-pounding sentences, the imaginative illustration of unseen events, the conveyance of first thoughts and unfiltered experiences—all of these elements elevate the prose into something close to poetry…[Edward] Snow transfers the complexities of [Rainer Maria] Rilke’s story and language out of the German and into moving and readable English."— Warren Frye New Criterion

From the Publisher