FICTION

TWO STORIES OF PRAGUE by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Angela Esterhammer (University Press of New England: $18.95; 109 pp.) These two stories, “King Bohush” and “The Siblings,” were first published in 1899, when Rilke was 24. At the time, he was living in Munich, looking back on Prague and his childhood there, although he had only been away from that city for a year and a half. “The aim of the book,” he wrote much later, “was to come closer to my own childhood.” In the end of the 19th Century Prague had a population of about 350,000; one-tenth German and the rest Czech. Roughly one-half of the German population was Jewish; the Czechs, for the most part, Catholic. That is a very terse way of putting what later became an enormous collection of tensions that are still alive and well. These stories have never before been published in English, and they are keenly translated by Angela Esterhammer, who has also written an indispensable introduction that gives the political background needed to understand them. Rilke never wanted his early work published, and it is easy to see why he might feel self-conscious about these stories. While they poke fun at the Prague German culture, the coffee-house literati, the town in which “everyone bedecks himself with his joy and carries his sorrow with him too, as visibly as possible,” they are two-thirds sermon and one-third memoir, with very little to hang onto in the way of characters or story or even moral. While it’s fine for the poet to try to capture the essence of his native city, it’s just a little self-serving, as an author might be in his early 20s. Rilke is clearly indifferent to whether the reader follows the careful layering of cynicism and irony and self deprecation peculiar to this culture. He cannot help, however, but evoke a city of dreams, which every lover of Prague will recognize in all its contradictions.