Book description
While his old furniture rots in storage, Malte Laurids Brigge lives
in a cheap room in Paris, with little but a library reader's card to
distinguish him from the city's untouchables. Every person he sees
seems to carry their death with them, and he thinks of the deaths, and
ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which only he remains. The only
novel by one of the greatest writers of poetry in German, the
semi-autobiographical Notebooks is an uneasy, compelling and
poetic book that anticipated Sartre and is full of passages of lyrical brilliance.
Michael Hulse's new translation perfectly conveys the unsettling
beauty of the original and is accompanied by an introduction on
Rilke's life and the biographical and literary influences on the
Notebooks. This edition also includes suggested further
reading, a chronology and notes.
Michael Hulse has won numerous awards for his poetry, among them
first prizes in the National Poetry Competition and the Bridport
Poetry Competition (twice) as well as the Society of Authors' Eric
Gregory Award and Cholmondeley Award. He has been editor of a
literature classics series and of literary quarterlies, has scripted
news and documentary programmes for Deutsche Welle television, and has
taught at the universities of Erlangen, Eichst tt, Cologne, Zurich,
and currently Warwick. Among over sixty books he has translated from
the German are titles by W. G. Sebald and Elfriede Jelinek and, for
Penguin, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther and Jakob
Wassermann's Caspar Hauser.
Rainer Maria Rilke was born in 1875 in Prague. He studied
literature, art history and philosophy in both Munich and Prague, and
is often considered one of the German language's greatest 20th century
poets. His two most famous verse sequences are the Sonnets to
Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose
works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the
semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
