Novel
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge
Rainer Maria Rilke · 1910
Opening lines
So, also hierher kommen die Leute, um zu leben, ich würde eher meinen, es stürbe sich hier. Ich bin ausgewesen. Ich habe gesehen: Hospitäler.
So this is where people come to live; I would rather think one dies here. I have been out. I have seen: hospitals.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from zeno.org
Synopsis
Paris, at the beginning of the century. Malte Laurids Brigge, twenty-eight years old, the last of a ruined Danish noble family, lives alone in a room and writes down what he sees: the hospitals, the faces in the street, the noises behind the walls. Between one note and the next, the house of his childhood, his grandfather's death and stories he learned then come back to him.
Context
Begun in Rome in 1904 and completed in Paris between 1908 and 1910, the novel appeared in 1910 from Insel, in Leipzig, in two volumes, and remained its author's only novel. It proceeds through seventy-one separate entries and bears the trace of the first Parisian months of 1902 and 1903. A partial French translation appeared as early as 1911; the complete translation by Maurice Betz, revised with Rilke himself, appeared in 1926 from Émile-Paul, and the English translation by Mary D. Herter Norton in 1930.
Who it is for
A book without a plot, made of notes and memories in no apparent order. It is read in fragments, and the absence of narrative progression is deliberate.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first great novel of modernity in the German language, before those of Joyce, Proust or Kafka.
Sources for this page 10
The pages consulted to check this page.