Dick and Warren R. Maurer (eds.), Rilke: The Alchemy of Alienation (Lawrence, Kansas: Regents Press of the University of Kansas, 1986), pp. 171–90.

For those with German, an indispensable source book is Hartmut Engelhardt (ed.), Materialien zu Rainer Maria Rilke ‘Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge’ (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974). William Small's Rilke-Kommentar zu den ‘Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge’ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) is a detailed gloss that can usefully be read together with Schoolfield's.

A Note on the Text

The numbering of sections in the novel, from 1 to 71, is not Rilke's, but was devised by the critic August Stahl in his Rilke-Kommentar zu den ‘Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge’, zur erzählerischen Prosa, zu den essayistischen Schriften und zum dramatischen Werk (Munich: Winkler, 1978). It was intended as a convenience, for ease of reference, and has been widely adopted in Rilke criticism. It should be emphasized that these numbers are not part of Rilke's understanding of the text; it was of course part of his conception that the text should read as if it were indeed notebooks, and numbered divisions would have ruined any such illusion. The only major break envisaged by Rilke comes between sections 38 and 39, where the gap left is perhaps intended to signal Malte's moving on from one notebook to the next.

Footnotes appearing in the body of the text are Rilke's own.

THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE

11 September, rue Toullier

[1] This, then, is where people come to live; I'd have thought it more of a place to die. I have been out. I saw hospitals. I saw one man who tottered and then collapsed. People gathered around him, which spared me the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. She was inching ponderously along by a high, sun-warmed wall, occasionally touching it as if seeking assurance that it was still there. Yes, it was still there. And behind the wall? I located it on my map: Maison d'Accouchement. Very well. She will be delivered of her child – that is where their skill lies. Further on, rue Saint-Jacques, a large building with a cupola. The map read: Val-de-Grâce, hôpital militaire. That I did not need to know, but it does no harm. The street began to smell from all sides. As far as I could distinguish the odours, it smelled of iodoform, the fat in which pommes frites are fried, and fear. Every city reeks in summer. Then I saw a building curiously blinded with cataracts, unmarked on the map, though the words over the door were still quite legible: Asyle de nuit.1 Beside the entrance was the tariff of charges. I read it through. It was not expensive.

What else? a baby in a halted pram, plump, greenish, with quite a rash on its forehead. The rash was clearly healing and not painful. The child was asleep, its mouth hung open, it was breathing in iodoform, pommes frites, fear. That was simply the way it was. The main thing was to be living.