Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker

By Eric Torgersen

"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

In 1908, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote Requiem for a Friend in memory of Paula Moderson-Becker, the German painter who had profoundly affected him and who had died a year earlier. Although one of the great modern painters, Modersohn-Becker is remembered primarily as she is portrayed in Rilke's poem. Dear Friend looks at the relationship of two great artists whose often-strained friendship was extraordinarily productive for both.

Paperback 
276 pages
Northwestern University Press, 2000
6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
ISBN 9780810118195
Biography, Letters, Poetry