Diaries of the young poet

the long version

In April 1898 Rainer Maria Rilke, not yet 23, began a diary of his Florence visit. It was to record, in the form of an imaginary dialogue with his mentor and then-lover, Lou Andreas-Salome, his firsthand experiences of early Renaissance art. Two others followed. In these "Schmargendorf" and "Worpswede" diaries, Rilke began to reach toward other people - among them the sculptor Clara Westhoff, whom he would marry and the painter Paula Becker, whose death would haunt him all his life. These diaries, translated into English here for the first time by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler as Diaries of a Young Poet, span what is arguably the most crucial phase in Rilke's development. They emerge in this fluent, copiously annotated translation as central to the Rilke canon, early prose counterweights to the later Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.