M. L. Brigge

Had a little conversation with Rainer Maria Rilke this morning. Well, actually with Malte Laurids Brigge. To be quite honest... it was my own voice, in my head, reading to me, this good 1910 Journal of a Danish Nobleman in Paris. (There seems to be an English translation, called: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge available at amazon. I had picked up the book as one of the many possible voices currently resting on my bookshelves. Whenever I go to Germany I come back with a suitcase filled with books, but somehow never manage to find the time to read all of the bounty. Now and then there is a little more time flying around and then I grab one of the recommendations made by me or my German friends, now here, ready to be read. Malte Laurids Brigge came to me as a gift. A curator brought if for me from Germany. She liked the book so much, she brought two editions on two separate occasions. And I never had the nerve to even start. I am not very deep into the book, but it is striking how interesting it feels from the perspective of the age of Blogs and online journals. The thoughts captured in the book seem more like prosapoems, very dense (Dichtung) compact little pieces that look like a journal, but are of course something sly different.