7.50 Rilke — «Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge» (opening) — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the opening of Rainer Maria Rilke's novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), about 3,000 words without a break: a young poet's first notes in Paris, ending with the long death of his grandfather on a Danish estate. Follow a novel written as notes, without a plot: impressions, fears, memories and reflections in short entries. Read Rilke's prose rhythm: short sentences next to long ones, repetitions, sudden questions. Understand the novel's great theme in this opening: the difference between a modern, mass-produced death and a death of one's own. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the German aloud; all of them come back below. German English es war dick, grünlich und hatte einen deutlichen Ausschlag auf der Stirn. it was fat, greenish and had a clear rash on its forehead. Das sind die Geräusche. Those are the noises. Gegen die Furcht muß man etwas tun, wenn man sie einmal hat. One has to do something against fear, once one has it. Was für eine Erleichterung: What a relief: natürlich nutzt es sich ab, es wird schmutzig, es bricht in den Falten, of course it wears out, it gets dirty, it splits at the folds, Sie sind nicht gewohnt, Gesichter zu schonen, They are not used to taking care of faces, Prerequisites : 7.49 — you need Rilke's poems from 7.34 Reading and the narrator's self-observation from 7.49 Reading . About this text Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), whose poems you read in 7.34 Reading , lived in Paris from 1902 and for a time worked as secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin. From his own experience of the city, its poverty, illness and noise, he wrote his only novel, published in 1910. Malte Laurids Brigge is a twenty-eight-year-old Danish poet, the last of an old noble family, who lives alone in Paris and writes notes. The novel has no story in the usual sense. It moves between what Malte sees in the streets of Paris, his fear, his childhood memories of the family estates in Denmark, and figures from history. Its subject is how to see, how to bear fear, and how to become a poet. The passage here is the opening of the novel, from the first entry to the end of the Chamberlain's death, complete and without omissions, about 3,000 words, from the standard edition of Rilke's works by Ernst Zinn in the TextGrid digital library. It begins with the date and the street of Malte's room. It ends with one of the most famous passages in German prose, the death of his grandfather, the Chamberlain Christoph Detlev Brigge, at Ulsgaard. Grammar in the text The impersonal passive. The first sentence uses an unusual construction: ich würde eher meinen, es stürbe sich hier , I would rather think that one dies here . es stirbt sich is an impersonal reflexive, like es lebt sich gut hier , life is good here , here in Konjunktiv II . Later: Jetzt wird in 559 Betten gestorben , an impersonal passive of an intransitive verb, as in 2.19 Grammar : dying happens, and nobody does it. Notes and their rhythm. Many entries begin abruptly: Ich lerne sehen. , Ich fürchte mich. , Habe ich es schon gesagt? Short sentences of three or four words alternate with long, winding ones. The rhythm is that of a person talking to himself. The noun that acts. In the grandfather's death the noun Tod becomes the subject of active verbs: Christoph Detlevs Tod lebte nun schon seit vielen, vielen Tagen auf Ulsgaard und redete mit allen und verlangte. The death is a person, a lord in the house, with a voice of its own. Old spellings. The edition keeps Rilke's giebt , Hôtel and Bewußtsein . Reading it a second time, section by section Paris (paragraphs 1–5). So, also hierher kommen die Leute, um zu leben, ich würde eher meinen, es stürbe sich hier. Malte has seen hospitals, a man who staggered and fell, a sick child. At night the noise of the trams and cars comes through his open window; worse than the noise is the silence. Learning to see (paragraphs 6–12). Ich lerne sehen. Everything goes deeper into him. He notices how many faces there are, more than people, because each person has several, and he sees a woman in the street who has fallen into her hands so that her face stays in them. Fear (paragraphs 13–15). Malte is afraid of falling ill and dying in the great hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu . There, he writes, people now die in 559 beds, as in a factory. Even the rich are beginning to care less for a death of their own. The grandfather (paragraphs 16–29). In the past, Malte remembers, people carried their death within them like a fruit its core. His grandfather, the old Chamberlain Brigge, had his own death. Dying, he had himself carried through all the rooms of the manor house, followed by servants and dogs. For weeks his death shouted through the house in a voice no one had known, demanded, and would not be hurried, until the villagers prayed there would be no more lord at Ulsgaard. It was a proud, princely death, a death of his own. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. 11 September, rue Toullier. So this, then, is where people come to live; I would rather have thought that one dies here. I have been out. I have seen: hospitals. I have seen a man who swayed and sank to the ground. People gathered around him, and that spared me the rest. I have seen a pregnant woman. She was pushing herself heavily along a high, warm wall, which she sometimes groped for, as if to make sure it was still there. Yes, it was still there. Behind it? I looked on my map: Maison d'Accouchement . Good. They will deliver her – they can do that. Further on, rue Saint-Jacques, a large building with a dome. The map said Val-de-grâce, Hôpital militaire . I did not really need to know that, but it does no harm. The street began to smell from all sides. It smelled, as far as one could tell the smells apart, of iodoform, of the grease of p