Damion Searls on the Discovery of the Real Letters From Rilke's Young Poet

At Lit Hub, Damion Searls reflects on his own translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, which are now "for the first time a two-​way conversation, a true dialogue." Upon "the discovery and publication of the other half of the story: the letters that the 'Young Poet,' Franz Xaver Kappus, wrote to Rilke," some real mysteries have been solved:

…It turns out that Rilke and the Young Poet did meet in person. We now know more of what lay behind the long gap in the correspondence between 1904 and 1908. This information is in my biographical afterword. There is even a lost eleventh letter from Rilke, though only tantalizing glimpses of it remain.

More importantly, Rilke’s pronouncements from on high have turned into answers, sensitively directed not just toward young aspiring artists in general but at a very particular person we can now see clearly.

It has been easy to think that Rilke was writing his letters to a kind of younger version of himself—​it’s now clearer that Kappus was quite a different person. The connections between Rilke and Kappus are ones that Rilke largely creates, rather than finding them ready-​made in their life histories. And while many of the topics in the Letters to a Young Poet are actually introduced by Kappus—​irony, sex, uncomprehending relatives, the loss of a sense of God—​there are others that Rilke declines to take up (for example, many literary matters, including questions about his own works, which he leaves to Kappus to read for himself), as well as things he chooses to bring up on his own (such as his feminist discussion of women’s identity).…

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