"We must become children if we want to attain the sublime." These words, which Rilke wrote in a text on landscape art, can be read as the essence of his perception of things, of a sensibility that was born and died with him.

A sensibility that is expressed with rare intensity in all the writings offered in this volume – collected and translated by Giorgio Zampa, one of Rilke's greatest interpreters – through meditations and memories, confessions and travel impressions, letters (such as those to a very young Balthus) and dreamlike visions. A sensibility that is conveyed to the reader through some of the most elevated prose of the German twentieth century, ethereal and profound, luminous and shadowy.

A sensibility capable of grasping the reverberation of the absolute in every object it turns to: from art ("It is characteristic of the artist to love enigma. For all art is only love poured over enigmas") to the "childlike and prodigious essence" of the poet, to eroticism ("an utterly immeasurable thing that men tirelessly attack with norms, measures, regulations"). And capable of reaching "where known and unknowable reality converge at a single point, complete each other, and become a single possession" – where the external and the internal form "an uninterrupted space in which, arcanely protected, only a single point of purest, deepest consciousness remains."

Adelphi edition, in Italian. Collected and translated by Giorgio Zampa.