Children's Books
Melanie Garanin
Mein Freund Rilke
[My Friend Rilke]
Translation Grant Programme
For this title we provide support for translation into the Polish language (2025 - 2027).
Amour fou for a heavenly poet
Journalist Ellen was surreptitiously making off from a boring event in Worpswede in honour of Rainer Maria Rilke when – wham-bang! – she bumped into a passing gentleman. They got into casual conversation, accompanied by lots of laughter. The man – middle-aged, like Ellen herself – looked a bit as if he belonged to a different era, with his old-fashioned suit, his moustache, and his polite, genteel demeanour. And what’s more: he keeps spouting quotes from Rilke! But he’s certainly very charming. He reminds Ellen of someone – but who?
Readers of the graphic novel Mein Freund Rilke soon realise that Ellen has bumped into none other than Rilke himself: a woman of today has encountered one of the great poets of a century earlier. As we read on, we discover that it takes quite a while for the identity of her new acquaintance to dawn on Ellen. Although she had previously never been very interested in Rilke or his time, it was she of all people who was due to write an online article about the distinguished poet. But her encounter with this strange, likeable and somehow very attractive new acquaintance lights a powerful fuse in Ellen; she becomes more and more invested in her topic, and even travels to other places associated with the poet – not least Paris, where she once again meets “him”…
The author and artist of this graphic-novel-cum-love story is the Berlin-born animator and children’s book illustrator Melanie Garanin. She has long been keen on Rainer Maria Rilke. Born in 1875 in Prague, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Rilke died in Switzerland in 1926, and is still regarded as one of the foremost German-language poets of the modern era. Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, Garanin now presents us with this unusual and decidedly humorous ‘Rilke romance’ in comic-book form. His poetry having proved a real consolation for Garanin herself when she lost her young son to leukaemia, Rilke had already made an appearance in illustrated form as a ‘friend’ and ‘soulmate’ in Garanin’s first autobiographical novel, Nils – Von Tod und Wut. Und von Mut (2020; ‘Nils – on death and rage. And on courage’). This earlier, very touching book had already shown how Garanin, born 1972, can write with a light touch about extremely grievous matters. Her cartoonish figures are unfailingly appealing, vivid and expressive.
Now, in Mein Freund Rilke, Melanie Garanin approaches her favourite poet (who incidentally also died of leukaemia) in an altogether relaxed way. It amounts almost to a ‘culture clash’ when Ellen, very much a woman of today, and one somewhat jaded by everyday life and by her loveless marriage to her husband Volker, encounters Rilke, a man from a completely different era. But between them, Garanin the illustrator and Ellen the narrator take the ‘heavenly poet’ down from his elevated pedestal as they give an account of his life through a series of trenchant episodes. One interesting period of Rilke’s life took place in Paris when, still a young man, he visited the sculptor Auguste Rodin with a view to writing a monograph about him, and in the process began to develop and to write about his first insights into the nature of art.
This parallel narrative technique gives the book a distinct structure, with the result that the comic-book story line, which canters blithely through Rilke’s life and death and its attendant phases, acquires a solid foundation without for that forgoing its lightness of touch. Rilke’s globetrotting life, with its numerous love affairs and friendships with women who have since become famous, such as Lou Andreas-Salomé and Paula Modersohn-Becker, and his short-lived marriage to the sculptor Clara Westhoff and his tenuous relationship with the daughter of their marriage, are thus presented in a casual, humorous manner. We find ourselves attentively following the agreeably scatty, constantly self-ironising protagonist’s often droll thought processes as her relationship with the long-dead but, in this narrative, vividly alive poet steadily evolves into an absurd amour fou. Thus we not only witness a crazy romance, but in the process also learn a thing or two about Rilke’s actual Bohemian mode of life.
Melanie Garanin’s free-and-easy style of drawing contributes significantly to the reader’s pleasure. When thought processes or dialogues are being featured she generally avoids using the panel-frame structure that is customary in comic books, and she also largely avoids background illustrations. She repeatedly interpolates small, free-standing yellow text-boxes containing quotations from important works of Rilke’s, mostly poems and letters.
Like her protagonist, the author, too, made a point in her researches of visiting various places where Rilke had been active in order to trace his development and bring it to life for her readers – from Worpswede in Lower Saxony (where Rilke lived in the artists’ colony for a while), to Paris and on to Sierre in Switzerland.
Summarising her objectives, Melanie Garanin has declared that ‘My aim was to write affectionately about Rilke and to get as many of my readers as possible to share my affection for him.’ And again: ‘Portraying him through the eyes of a woman who falls in love with him was a perfect means of achieving this aim. I think it’s important to realise that it was never my intention to write a biography, but rather to give a pictorial account of a love story.’
Mein Freund Rilke offers an ideal introduction to the life and work of Rainer Maria Rilke, without making any claim to be depicting his œuvre as a whole. And at the same time it is an amusing, tongue-in-cheek biographical fantasy in comic-book form.
Translated by John Reddick
By Ralph Trommer
Ralph Trommer, Dipl. Animator, is a freelance writer and artist who is a regular contributor of reviews and articles on comics, graphic novels and films for a variety of media.
