How to See the World Through Poetic Eyes.
Parallels between the Lives of Rainer Maria Rilke and Natsume Sōseki and their path to poetic genius.
A Russian historian Naum Kleiman, in one of his essays wrote that ‘all great artists in history always came in pairs — Da Vinci came with Michelangelo; Byron came with Shelley; Shostakovich came with Prokofiev.’
Kleiman’s statement can also be applied to books. There are books that also come in pairs such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
It seems that the fate had paired the timeless Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke with the poetic novel Three Cornered World written by a Japanese author Natsume Sōseki.
The works of Rilke are well-known in the English speaking world, while those of Sōseki remain largely obscure. In his native Japan, however, Sōseki is considered as one of the greatest among the modern Japanese writers.
Rilke had never heard about his ‘pair’ and neither did Sōseki. They did not influence each other the way Da Vinci influenced Michelangelo or Byron influenced Shelley.
However what unites and what makes this ‘pair’ unique is that their destinies rhymed which led to creation…
