The connections between Rilke and Kappus are ones that Rilke largely creates, rather than finding them ready-made in their life histories. It has been easy to think that Rilke was writing his letters to a kind of younger version of himself-it’s now clearer that Kappus was quite a different person. Their translation would not have been possible without Erich Unglaub’s and Wallstein Verlag’s generous assistance, and I would like to thank them both. A Rilke scholar named Erich Unglaub got permission from Rilke’s heirs to look at Kappus’s letters from the archive, and the press Wallstein Verlag published them in German for the first time in March 2019. In this edition, the Letters to a Young Poet are for the first time a two-way conversation, a true dialogue.Īs recently as 2018, scholars and translators were saying in print that these letters to Rilke did not survive, but in fact they’ve been in the private Rilke family archive in Germany all along, waiting for someone to find them. Today, even though the Letters to a Young Poet have been in print for nearly a century and translated into English more than half a dozen times, we have the chance to see them afresh, in a genuinely new way, with the discovery and publication of the other half of the story: the letters that the “Young Poet,” Franz Xaver Kappus, wrote to Rilke. They were an inspiration to Marilyn Monroe, Jane Fonda, and the inventor of the programmable computer, who bought the book in 1929 Dustin Hoffman called it his bible Lady Gaga had a line from it tattooed on her arm. (Rilke had recently turned twenty-seven when he wrote his first letter.) They have been taken as a spiritual guide, a source of insight, inspiration, and encouragement for any young person struggling with loneliness and doubt, questions of his or her fate and of what interpersonal and sexual relationships might have the potential to be.
They have been seen as a record of the great man’s own development, written to a “Young Poet” but also by a young poet going through serious personal and artistic crises of his own. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet has spoken powerfully, and differently, to every generation of readers since they were first published in German in 1929.
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