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    Letters on Cézanne
    Letters on Cézanne
    Letters on Cézanne
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    Letters on Cézanne

    By Rainer Maria Rilke

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 15, 2002
    ISBN9781466807259
    Letters on Cézanne
    Author

    Rainer Maria Rilke

    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.

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    • 5/5
      This seems to me a peculiarly precious book -- one of those small gems, perfect in their way, that change your life and to which you return over and over.Composed of excerpts from letters Rilke wrote to his wife Clara in 1907, this brief book chronicles the encounter of a great writer with the work of a great painter ... and how that encounter forever changed the way the writer looked at the world and his work.I admit to being in the midst of a feverish obsession with Cezanne's work myself. And while trying to stay short of "this is what I think because of what another person wrote" I would like to say that Rilke has clarified and deepened the way I look at Cezanne's work (and also made me hungry for more Rilke ... is that "win-win" as they say in that alien world, business?)Highest recommendation. I will buying my own copy to have around for re-reading.

    Book preview

    Letters on Cézanne - Rainer Maria Rilke

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    Table of Contents

    Title Page

    TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD - TO THE NORTH POINT EDITION

    FOREWORD

    HÔTEL DU QUAI VOLTAIRE, MONDAY, JUNE 3, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, MONDAY, JUNE 24, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, JUNE 28, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, SEPTEMBER 13, 1907 (FRIDAY)

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, ON SUNDAY [SEPTEMBER 29, 1907]

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 2, 1907

    STILL WEDNESDAY EVENING [OCTOBER 2, 1907]

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 3, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 4, 1907 (FRIDAY)

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, SUNDAY AFTERNOON [OCTOBER 6, 1907]

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 7, 1907 (MONDAY)

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 8, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 9, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 10, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 11, 1907 (FRIDAY)

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 12, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 13, 1907 (SUNDAY)

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 15, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 16, 1907 (WEDNESDAY)

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 17, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 18, 1907 (FRIDAY)

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 19, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, SUNDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 20, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 21, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 22, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 23, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 14, 1907

    PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE, OCTOBER 25, 1907

    PRAGUE, HOTEL ERZHERZOG STEFAN, WENZELSPLATZ [NOVEMBER 1, 1907]

    NOVEMBER 4 [1907]. MORNING. IN THE TRAIN PRAGUE-BRESLAU

    About the Author

    Notes

    Copyright Page

    TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

    TO THE NORTH POINT EDITION

    He was a poet and hated inexactness. Rilke said that, through his fictional alter ego Malte Laurids Brigge: Er war ein Dichter und hasste das Ungefähre.

    Inexactness is not exactly what is said with "das Ungefähre. Mere approximation" comes closer, but that is itself too ungefähr, not nearly exact enough. He hated the approximate is a literal translation, nothing ungefähr about it, but this is the exactness of pedantry, not of poetry. What "das Ungefähre" suggests to a German reader is vagueness of all kinds, pseudo-synonyms, portmanteau equivalences, and also the dullness of mind that contents itself with these.

    Surely "das Ungefähre" is the cardinal sin of translators, and translators of Rilke in particular. I have been fortunate in being granted, with this new edition of the Letters on Cézanne, a chance to absolve myself of all such transgressions, or at least as many as I could detect, by submitting my translation to the most scrupulous comparison with the original, tracking down major and minor instances of Ungefdhrheit and bringing them to the justice of a more faithful rendering.

    One example may illustrate the nature and the quality of these changes. In his letter of October 11, 1907, Rilke begins a sentence as follows: Eine grosse, fächerformige Pappel spielte blätternd … Faced with these words for the first time, I was puzzled by the odd use of blättern, a verb that normally describes the action of a hand turning the pages of a book, while here it was used to describe a tree. I assumed it was a regional idiom—after all, Rilke had learned his German in Prague—and that it referred to the tree’s shedding of leaves—after all, it was autumn. It is always a mistake to second-guess a writer of Rilke’s extravagant subtlety. I had overlooked a charming turn on the word Blatt, meaning leaf, which fortunately can be not just imitated but replicated in English: A large fan-shaped poplar was leafing playfully … Isn’t that exactly what poplars do when a slight breeze stirs their leaves?

    The reader will encounter a few lines where Rilke’s love of precision appears to have abandoned him: the language hovers so tentatively and elusively around its subject that a second or third reading is needed before the meaning begins to emerge. I have not attempted to clarify these passages; they were written that way. But it would be a mistake to regard them as lapses in an otherwise lucid performance by Rilke. Even the clearest water seems opaque at great depth.

    JOEL AGEE

    Brooklyn, New York, 2002

    FOREWORD

    Rilke was once asked to name the formative influences on his poetry. He replied, in a letter from Muzot, that since 1906 Paul Cézanne had been his supreme example, and that after the master’s death, I followed his traces everywhere. This is not an isolated remark; it could be complemented by numerous other statements which powerfully attest to the importance the painter held for the poet. In one letter, he speaks of an insight which struck him like a flaming arrow while he stood gazing at Cézanne’s pictures: that here was one who remained in the innermost center of his work for forty years, and that this explained something beyond the astonishing freshness and purity of his paintings. For in a conflagration of clarity, Rilke had realized that without such perseverance, the artist would always remain at the periphery of art and be capable only of accidental successes; an insight which touched upon Rilke’s painfully divided allegiance to life and to the great work. That is why the example of this man who had learned to endure like the kernel in the flesh of the fruit assumed virtually mythic proportions for him, so that in the end Cézanne looms like a Homeric patriarch whose warnings against the darkening of the earth had the weight of prophesy. For one thinks of him as of a prophet, Rilke wrote in 1916, but they have all left earlier, those old men who would have had the power to weep before the nations of our day. The same sense of something extraordinary, even enormous, is expressed in a remark Rilke made to Count Harry Kessler in front of a picture of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire: Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly. For the poet, this painter and his work formed a unity that exceeded artistic and aesthetic criteria: Only a saint could be as united with his God as Cézanne was with his work. Thus Cézanne and his art assume a central position among the tutelary spirits that cast a guiding light on Rilke’s path as a poet.

    The series of contemporary painters who merit mention in this connection reaches up to Picasso and Chagall. Many of these artists were relatively close acquaintances and friends of Rilke’s: Emil Orlik, for instance, whom he had known since his early youth in Prague, and Heinrich Vogeler and Paul Klee. His trips to Russia—for which the studio sketch Vladimir the Cloud Painter

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