Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence (Norton) collects all of the extant letters exchanged by Rilke and Andreas-Salomé , a patron and fellow author, and (as the jacket copy describes her) “a key fin de siècle intellectual” fi
I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.
I can’t blame youfor claiming this place as your ownpersonal theme park. For you,there is only summer when every curvein the road brings a new photograph—red cliffs climbing out of the sea, field upon fieldof white blossoms, a wharf where boatschristened The Maggie-Mae and Aurora Dawndepart for the fishing grounds.