One of a series of books I picked up while over in the U.K. last week. I suspect it's a work that divides opinion amongst the academics/professional translators/Rilke obsessives - Gass' tone veers between adulatory and glib. Never mind. There are passages where the reading is close, attentive and illuminating. I haven't read it all - up to page 94 Inhalation in a God - but there's plenty to dwell upon (as Rilke might say) and digest. The short chapter Transreading is a particular favourite where Gass slows his reading down to a few lines, a line, a few words, the placement of a word. Manna in the wilderness. And what about this from Lifeleading:

' "To see" means to taste and thereby to "dance the orange", to touch and feel at one's finger end a little eternity, to smell ourselves cloud like steam from a warm cup, to hear voices, to listen so intensely you rise straight from the ground.'

Frank O'Hara's love of Rilke ... Pasternak ... Mayakovsky ... Rachmaninoff ... "Do you know young Rene Rilke?" ... "Against the winter I must get a samovar" ... Rilke's movement from Prague to Germany to Russia, O'Hara's via the Cedar Tavern and "Mike's painting" and the word ORANGES ... on to Tarkovsky's Mirror and the fading circle left from the cup lifted by the woman seated at the window ... The Rose discloses ...