FROM TRASH TO TREASURE: RILKE AND VENICE REVISITED

Rilke loved Venice and visited or passed through a dozen times between 1897 and 1920. He wrote extensively about the city in prose and verse between 1898 and 1908, including a cycle of poems in the Neue Gedichte and a polemical ‘Aufzeichnung’ in Malte Laurids Brigge. His letters from and about Venice have numerous lexical and imagistic echoes or prefigurations of his literary responses to the city. This article traces his interactions with Venice, his consistent hostility to tourism (and its reasons), and in particular the development of his poetic ways of seizing the city's fragile identity via a conviction that Venice's historical power, despite its precarious foundations, always underpins its surface glamour. Unlike most of his literary contemporaries, he did not regard Venice as the locus classicus of decadent decline; quite the reverse. Close readings both of canonical works and of much less familiar texts allow an elucidation of what might be called Rilke's ‘Venetian poetics’, which are closely associated with the technique of ‘aussparen’ (borrowed from painting). The failure of this technique in the context of his aborted biography of Admiral Carlo Zeno marks the end of his attempts to capture the city's essence in his creative writings.