The Kelly Writers House presents

RILKE’S LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

a panel discussion featuring translator
MARK HARMAN

and Penn professors
JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ & ERIC JAROSINSKI

Tuesday, February 21, at 6:00 PM in the Arts Café
Kelly Writers House | 3805 Locust Walk
No registration required - this event is free & open to the public

Widely regarded as one of the great poets of the twentieth-century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a now classic book of advice about life, which was inspired by a letter from a budding young poet. In the letters Rilke speaks about love, sexuality, nature, religion, and the importance of solitude. The book is addressed especially to young people with creative aspirations.

After a short reading from the letters, the three panelists, MARK HARMAN, JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ and ERIC JAROSINSKI will explore these paradoxical ideas about creativity, unrequited love and personal growth as well as possible connections between Rilke's advice about relationships and his often fraught love life.

MARK HARMAN’s translation of Franz Kafka's novel The Castle won the Modern Language Association's Lois Roth Award, and his rendering of Kafka's first novel Amerika: The Missing Person (2008) was well-received. Professor of English and German at Elizabethtown College, he has written extensively about modern German and Irish literature. His new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet was published in 2011 by Harvard University Press. Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, wrote that "this fresh translation reminds us anew that. . . (Rilke's) advice is not only about how to write poems but how to live a deliberate, meaningful life."

JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania since 1992 is the Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities. One of the founders and curators of Slought Foundation in Philadelphia (slought.org), he is a managing editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently the president of the American Samuel Beckett Studies association. Rabaté has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound and Joyce. Recent books include Lacan Literario, Siglo 21 (2007), 1913: The cradle of modernism (2007), and The Ethic of the Lie (2008), and Etant donnés: 1) l’art, 2) le crime (2010). The Ghosts of Modernity has been republished in 2010. Currently, he is completing a book on Beckett and editing an anthology on modernism and literary theory, forthcoming in 2012.

ERIC JAROSINSKI is an Assistant Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania, where his teaching and research focus primarily on Weimar-era literature, culture, and philosophy. He is the co-editor, with Mena Mitrano, of The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory, and is currently completing a book manuscript, Cellophane Modernity: Berlin Reflections of Weimar Transparency.