translated by Howard A. Landman
I'm currently in the process of translating these.
What you see here are working drafts which I do not
yet consider final. Caveat lector.
And I learned of the slim, pale boy whose parents had long before placed him in the junior military academy in Sankt Pölten at age 15, in the hope that he would later become an officer. At that time Horacek had worked there as the resident chaplain, and he still remembered his former pupil perfectly. He described him as a quiet, earnest, highly gifted youth, who liked to hold himself apart, calmly endured the pressures of boarding school life and after four years with the others in the military high school advanced to be in Mährisch-Weisskirchen. There however his constitution proved to be not robust enough, so his parents took him out of the institution and let him study at home in Prague. What shape his life had then taken on the outside, Horacek knew no more to report.
After all that, it's quite understandable that within the same hour I resolved to send my attempts at poetry to Rainer Maria Rilke and ask his opinion. Not yet twenty years old, and barely on the threshold of a career to which I felt my inclinations directly opposed, I hoped, if in anyone, then in the poet of To Celebrate Myself to find understanding. And without really meaning to, I wrote an accompanying letter to my verses, in which I revealed myself more candidly then ever before or ever since to any other human being.
Many weeks passed before an answer came. The blue-stamped letter bore the postmark of Paris, weighed heavily in my hand, and showed on the envelope the same clear, beautiful and certain script in which the text was set down from the first line to the last. So began my regular correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke, which lasted until 1908 and then gradually dwindled, because life drove me from those areas which the poet's warm, tender, and touching concern had sought to protect for me.
But that is not important. Only the ten letters which here follow are important, for their insights into the world in which Rainer Maria Rilke lived and created, and important also for those many who will grow and become, today and tomorrow. And when a great and singular voice speaks, the lesser have to keep quiet.
Berlin, June 1929
Franz Xaver Kappus
Your letter just reached me a few days ago. I want to thank you for your very great and loving trust. I can do no more. I can not analyze the art of your verses; because critical intent is too remote from me. With nothing can one touch a work of art so little as with critical words: they always lead to more or less unfortunate misunderstandings. Things are not all as comprehensible and sayable as one would usually have us think; most events are unsayable, taking place in a space where never a word has trespassed, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose lives endure next to our own, which pass.
Having said that, I can now only tell you that your verses have no art of their own, but quiet and concealed beginnings of something personal. I felt this most clearly in the last poem, "My Soul". There, something of your own wants to come to word and way. And in the beautiful poem "To Leopardi" there develops perhaps an artistic relationship with this great, lonely man. Despite that the poems are still nothing for you, nothing of your own, not even the last one and the one to Leopardi. Your good letter, which accompanied them, omitted nothing in explaining many shortcomings to me, which I felt in reading your verses, but without which I could not have named.
You ask, if your verses are good. You ask me. You have previously asked others. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and worry yourself when certain editors reject your attempts. Now (since you have authorized me to advise you) I must beg you to give all that up. You look outside, and that above all you must not do now. No one can help or advise you, no one. Go into yourself. Seek out the reason which calls you to write; investigate whether it stretches into the deepest place in the roots of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would have to die if it were forbidden for you to write words. This above all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write? Tunnel into yourself for a deep answer.
more soon