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Histoires Du Bon Dieu

1927

Rainer Maria Rilke

Histoires Du Bon Dieu

Histoires Du Bon Dieu

Rainer Maria Rilke

1927

French Literature, Philosophy & Ethics, Short Stories

Translated by Maurice Betz

Rilke's only collection of stories for children, written in the final years of his life, threads the needle between fairy-tale wonder and theological inquiry. A narrator moves through a small town, telling tales to neighbors who will pass them on to children. In one story, God is portrayed with human hands, impatient and uncertain about creation. In another, St. Nicholas makes a brief appearance. We wander through Renaissance Venice with an old Jewish goldsmith and his granddaughter, eavesdrop on Michelangelo listening to stones, sit with a gravedigger discussing death. The questions these stories ask are deceptively simple: Why does a benevolent God allow poverty? How did betrayal come to Russia? What does the song of justice sound like? Yet Rilke never offers easy answers. He believed the world's joys belonged most truly to the young, and these fourteen tales honor that belief not with simplifications, but with genuine mystery. The divine becomes intimate, strange, and wonderfully human.

Project Gutenberg

A collection of stories written in the early 20th century. The work reflects on themes of divinity and humanity through...

Goodreads

Rainer Maria Rilke felt that the world's joys most truly belonged to the young. His 14 'Stories of God' captured for the...

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Histoires Du Bon Dieu
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Project Gutenberg · 124 pages (French)
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“To make myself understood and to diminish the distance between us, I called out: “I am an evening cloud too.” They stopped still, evidently taking a good look at me. Then they stretched towards me their fine, transparent, rosy wings. That is how evening clouds greet each other. They had recognized me.””

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“There comes a time when we have deposited in it all our firstlings, all beginning, all confidence, the seeds of all that which might perhaps some day come to be. And suddenly we realize: All that has sunk into a deep sea, and we don't even know just when. We never noticed it. As though some one were to collect all his money, and buy a feather with it and stick the feather in his hat: whish!--the first breeze will carry it away. Naturally he arrives home without his feather, and nothing remains for him but to look back and think when it would have flown.””

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“ghost of a distant author, with the disturbing presence of the foreign text, and with the phantom of the reader.””

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“The things we experience often cannot be expressed, and anyone who insists on telling them nevertheless, is bound to make mistakes…””

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“passionate reader of books in German, her favorites to date include Stiller by Max Frisch, Die Wand by Marlen Haushofer, Die Große Liebe by Hans-Josef Ortheil, Selina by Walter Kappacher, Der verschlossene Garten by Undine Gruenter, as well as the poetry of Heinrich Heine, Georg Trakl, Ingeborg Bachmann, and, of course, Rainer Maria Rilke. Gunilla currently divides her time between the Baltic Sea and the Italian Alps, where she enjoys spending time with her family, her boyfriend and her red Somali cat, Polzerino.””

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Happily, somewhere in the heart of darkness, my optimism prevailed.””

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“[...] gal mirusieji yra tie, kurie išėjo pamąstyti apie gyvenimą.””

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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