Original Price: $29.00

UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS

Signed copies from translator Ulrich Baer are available.

This book was featured as part of our Literatur Café series. 

By Ulrich Baer

Translated by Andrew Hamilton

"Ulrich Baer has given us a serious jeu d’esprit with rich results: assured entry, after so many have tried without success, into Rilke’s intellectual and poetic world. Baer’s primer, in both senses of the word, is a triumph of the Horatian ideal: a work full of wit and study, pleasure and instruction. It will make every reader strive to fill in the virtual letters between the letters of Baer’s alphabet as doors to open into Rilke."―Stanley Corngold, Princeton University

"In The Rilke Alphabet, which appeared in German in 2006, Baer foes where few Rilke enthusiasts have gone before, tracking echoes of Rilke's difficulties with autoeroticism into the poetry itself. . .Baer this makes good on his promise to 'disturb' our sense of Rilke. . .[equally] instead of pressing to show that Rilke was either a great poet, and basically a good person, or an artist whose work in comprised by his bigotry and political wrong-headedness, Baer provocatively, but also subtly, opens up the discussion."―Time Literary Supplement

The enduring power of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry rests with his claim that all we need for a better life on earth is already given to us, in the here and now. In twenty-six engaging and accessible essays, Ulrich Baer’s The Rilke Alphabet examines this promise by one of the greatest poets in any tradition that even the smallest overlooked word may unlock life’s mysteries to us.

Fueled by an unebbing passion and indeed love for Rilke’s poetry, Baer examines twenty-six words that are not only unexpected but also problematic, controversial, and even scandalous in Rilke’s work. In twenty-six mesmerizing essays that eschew jargon and teutonic learnedness for the pleasures and risks of unflinchingly engaging with a great artist’s genius, Baer sheds new light on Rilke’s politics, his creative process, and his deepest and enduring thoughts about life, art, politics, sexuality, love, and death.

The Rilke Alphabet shows how Rilke’s work provides an uncannily apt guide to life even in our vexingly postmodern condition. Whether it is a love letter to frogs, a problematic brief infatuation with Mussolini, a sustained reflection on the Buddha, the evasion of the influence of powerful precursors, or the unambiguous assertion that freedom must be lived in order to be known, Rilke’s writings pull us deeply into life.

Baer’s decades-long engagement with Rilke as a scholar, translator, and editor of Rilke’s writings allows him to reveal unique aspects of Rilke’s work. The Rilke Alphabet will surprise and delight Rilke fans, intrigue newcomers to his work, and deepen every reader’s sense of the power of poetry to penetrate the mysteries and confusions of our world.

Paperback
264 pages
Fordham University Press, 2014
5.9 x 8.9 inches
ISBN 9780823256297
Literature, Essays