Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker
Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,History & Criticism
Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker Details
Review "It was not until I read 'Requiem for a Friend' in Eric Torgersen's translation that I understood what a great and tragic poem it is: guilt-ridden, impassioned, intimate, a sublimated howl. Torgersen's version is one of those rare complete successes in the absolutely impossible art of translation." --Galway Kinnell"A brilliant and valuable study, written with grace and passion, Torgesen's work could scarcely be bettered, both for the delight of reading it provides and for the insights into the lives it exposes." --Choice"As a guide through the intersecting lives and relevant work of Rilke, Modersohn-Becker, and Westhoff, this study has qualitatively and in its focus no parallel in either English or German."—Reinhold Heller, University of Chicago Read more About the Author Eric Torgersen has published five volumes of poetry, two novellas, and the NBA-nominated Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker. Born in Huntington, New York, he has a BA in German Literature from Cornell and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia (a time he draws on for the novella entitled Ethiopia). He has retired after forty years of teaching, thirty-eight of them at Central Michigan University. He lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, with his wife, the quilt artist Ann Kowaleski, and now writes almost daily when not traveling. Read more
Reviews
This well-written and well-researched book is important for anyone interested in painting at the turn of the century, in the position of woman artists at that time, or in Paula Modersohn-Becker herself. It also offers insights into the life and psyche of the famous poet Rainer Maira Rilke. Modersohn-Becker suffers from being known primarily though "Requiem for a Friend," a poem written about her by Rilke, whose view is colored by his own needs and beliefs. Torgersen shows that far from only having made a good beginning, as Rilke claimed, Modersohn-Becker had developed a style of her own and had created a number of arresting and original paintings. Rilke also claimed that in attempting to reconcile marriage and a career in art, Modersohn-Becker had chosen wrongly. Torgersen traces Modersohn-Becker's handling of her husband's attempt to assert authority over her, and shows that she had convinced him to allow space for her art in their marriage. This, too, was a remarkable achievement for her time. Art historians and feminists ought to read this book.