Daniel Slager is an editor at Harcourt, a contributing editor to
Grand Street, and a widely published translator from German.
William Gass (The Tunnel, Omensetter s Luck, and Reading Rilke)
received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, a
Lannan Lifetime Achievement award, the Pen-Nabokov Prize, and a
gold medal for fiction from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters.
Michael Eastman has received a National Endowment for the Arts
grant and has been published in The New York Times, Life, American
Photographer, and Communication Arts.
“Combining Daniel Slagers’s elegant translation from the German of
Rilke’s writings on Rodin with Michael Eastman’s photographs of
Rodin’s sculptures, Auguste Rodin offers a fresh look at an
unlikely mentorship.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Brilliant and subtle but richly colored new photographs of Rodin’s
sculptures by Michael Eastman make this new translation of Rilke’s
classic meditation on Auguste Rodin a feast for the eye and mind.
National Book Critics Circle Award winner Wiliam Gass examines the
text and the setting to provide insight and context. Fine writing,
beautiful images, and exciting ideas make this edition of Rilke’s
Auguste Rodin a real treat.”
—R.K. Dickson
“Poets and the visual arts—it is a vast subject; and all through
the twentieth century artists and writers collaborated almost
constantly, sometimes with such intensity that it seemed as if they
were passing back and forth a single flask labeled 'Inspiration.'
Few poets have written more eloquently about the visual arts than
Rilke, and one of the most beautiful books of the year is his
Auguste Rodin (Archipelago Books, $30), translated by Daniel
Slager, with photographs by Michael Eastman, which bring us close
to the charged surfaces of Rodin's bronzes, and catch their
storm-tossed intensity. Rodin was at times a disturbingly bombastic
artist—while his Gates of Hell may be the work of a genius, it is
also pure kitsch—but in the years just after 1900, when Rilke got
to know him, the avant-garde was still inclined to embrace Rodin as
a rough-hewn visionary, a man in whose studio, as Rilke wrote,
'everything was becoming, but nothing was in a hurry.' For Rilke,
both Rodin and Cézanne suggested, through the very physicality of
their labors, a route beyond fin-de-siècle preciosity. Rilke
discovered in Rodin a man who was utterly committed to the
materiality of the artistic vocation. Rodin taught Rilke to make
his feelings concrete.’
—Ruth Franklin
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
