Rainer Maria Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet
18 pages
Publié par
Monica Zúccoli - english.pro.work
Copyright :
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Letter One
Paris
February 17, 1903
Dear Sir,
Your letter arrived just a few days ago.
I want to thank you for the great
confidence you have placed in me.
That is all I can do.
I cannot discuss your
verses; for any attempt at criticism...
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Letter One
Paris
February 17, 1903
Dear Sir,
Your letter arrived just a few days ago.
I want to thank you for the great
confidence you have placed in me.
That is all I can do.
I cannot discuss your
verses; for any attempt at criticism would be foreign to me.
Nothing touches a work
of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less
fortunate misunderstandings.
Things aren t all so tangible and sayable as people
would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a
space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are
works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small,
transitory life.
With this note as a preface, may I just tell you that your verses have no style of
their own, although they do have silent and hidden beginnings of something
personal.
I feel this most clearly in the last poem, "My Soul.
" There, something of
your own is trying to become word and melody.
And in the lovely poem "To Leopardi"
a kind of kinship with that great, solitary figure does perhaps appear.
Nevertheless, the poems are not yet anything in themselves, not yet anything
independent, even the last one and the one to Leopardi.
Your kind letter, which
accompanied them, managed to make clear to me various faults that I felt in reading
your verses, though I am not able to name them specifically.
You ask whether your verses are an y good.
You ask me.
You have asked others before
this.
You send them to magazines.
You compare them with other poems, and you are
upset when certain editors reject your work.
Now (since you have said you want my
advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing.
You are looking outside, and
that is what you should most avoid right now.
No one can advise or help you - no
one.
There is only one thing you should do.
Go into yourself.
Find out the reason
that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very
depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were
forbidden to write.
This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your
night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer.
And if this answer rings
out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must,"
then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your while life, even into
its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this
impulse.
Then come close to Nature.
Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try
to say what you see and feel and love and lose.
Don t write love poems; avoid those
forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it
takes great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even
glorious, traditions exist in abundance.
So rescue yourself from these general
themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows
and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind
of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when
you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and
the objects that you remember.
If your everyday life seems poor, don t blame it;
blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth
its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent
place.
And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of
the world s sounds - wouldn t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all
price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it.
Try to raise up
the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger,
your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight,
where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance.
- And if out of
this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you
will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not.
Nor will you try to
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