Under the rose

[Doug Millison]

"The myth concerning the onset of his illness was, even among his myths,
the most remarkable. To honor a visitor, the Egyptian beauty Nimet Eloui,
Rilke gathered some roses from his garden. While doing so, he pricked his
hand on a thorn. This small wound failed to heal, grew rapidly worse, soon
his entire arm was swollen, and his other arm became affected as well.
According to the preferred story, this was the way Rilke's disease
announced itself, although Ralph Freedman, his judicious and most recent
biographer, puts that melancholy event more than a year earlier. Roses
climb his life as if he were their trellis."

from the first chapter of _Reading Rilke Reflections on the Problems of
Translation_ by William Gass, also reviewed in the new issue of New York
Times Book Review, on the Web at
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/gass-rilke.html

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