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tabularasablog 's review for:
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Let me be honest; I have loved almost everything I have read by Rilke, and it has mostly been poetry - except of course, the letters. And even those, I have read mostly in translation. Now I have a feeling, and I may be totally wrong about this - correct me, if you know better / have a more discerning eye for the language than I do with my out-of-touch German - I have a feeling that Rilke sounds better in translation than he does in the original German; and I wonder if the credit lies with the translators? Either way, the prose in this book was far too clunky for me to look beyond its weight and form, and into the content. I couldn't focus on anything but how difficult it was to read every new line. Maybe experimental writing shouldn't be read in translation at all (though I can think of cases where that's totally untrue.) The book just didn't work for me, no matter how much I wish it had. It was about death and how death lives in us all, yet we have so distanced ourselves from its reality that we have lost a bit of ourselves.. or something to that effect. A compelling idea that didn't translate well to this novel (if it can be called that.)