RILKE IN PARIS, pretty object, interesting tale, but about someone I did not like knowing more about

RILKE IN PARIS
MAURICE BETZ (tr. Will Stone)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Rainer Maria Rilke offers a compelling portrait of Parisian life, art, and culture at the beginning of the 20th century

In 1902, the young German poet Rainer Maria Rilke travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He returned many times over the course of his life, by turns inspired and appalled by the city’s high culture and low society, and his writings give a fascinating insight into Parisian art and culture in the last century.

Much of this work, despite its perennial popularity in French, German, and Italian, has never before been translated into English. This book brings together Rilke’s sublime poetic meditations on existence Notes on the Melody of Things and the first English translation of Rilke’s experiences in Paris as observed by his French translator Maurice Betz.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've read as little poetry as I've been able to over course of the past sixty-plus years. I've stated why (I don't enjoy it), I've explained why (it's pretentious and condescending), and yet here I am reviewing with praise a book about a poet, by his French translator, published after his sad, early death from leukemia.

Praise?

Praise: The essay on why Rilke wrote poetry is beautiful, deeply moving, and really makes me wish I didn't hate the experience of reading the...stuff. Song lyrics are poetry, so why do I listen to music voluntarily if I hate the stuff in a song? It's in the essay. The melody of the world is not audible to all of us in the same way. I "hear" prose; Rilke "heard" poetry, and made some beautiful poems in the world's opinion. I'm not arguing they're not; based on the essay in here I will bet there are gorgeous poems to his name.

For those who like poetry. I am still not one of you.

Maurice Betz observed Rilke being in the Paris of his time with an intensity I reserve for my lovers. I would guess Rilke was a little bit aware of the depth of Betz's attention. Rilke was under the influence of Rodin and swayed by the older man's frankly nonsensical contention that artists, true artists regardless of métier, must forego personal life and the pursuit of family and sex and friendship. Hogwash! But Rilke did somewhat wake to the foolishness of that, though never completely; he was a rootless wanderer despite being married and fathering a child; not to mention an impressive sexual CV of important artists and creatives, as well as that aforementioned wife.

He was, in other words, the bog-standard thing of beauty and a boy forever; Peter-Panning his way through life and taking nothing but himself seriously. I read this between Betz's besotted lines. What a selfish, rotten way to live one's life. Yes, he wrote right nice. I'll agree to give him that. It does not, in my 2025 eyes, redeem his narcissistic personality that used and discarded multiple people.

But lawsy me, does Maurice Betz love him! It was warming to feel how much he resonated to the Rilke shy-boy charisma. The way he wrote about Rilke is so apt, so fully aware of him: "Paris both fundamentally oppressed Rilke, compelling him to depart elsewhere, and summoned him back with a kind of nostalgic urgency, which he was unable to resist. ... In fact, it is evident that, along with Italy in a supporting role, France and French culture are the dominant guiding forces of Rilke's adult life, exemplified perhaps by the fact that he celebrated this relationship by writing some four hundred poems in French, translated a clutch of French poets, chose to settle in a French-speaking region and became, in his later years, more deeply absorbed in the work of the French poet Paul Valéry than in that of any other poet."

With photos I can't show you, this text is very much more suited to someone who loves poetry, has more than a Wikipedia-level familiarity with his work; my main connection, and a pleasant one, is to Rilke's Francophilia, to his off-kilter sense of himself as other than how his friends saw him.

I'm glad I red the book. I'm glad I didn't know him, or he'd've got an earful about his using others. No loving Maurice Betz, me.