New Criterion - Warren Frye
"The short heart-pounding sentences, the imaginative illustration of unseen events, the conveyance of first thoughts and unfiltered experiences—all of these elements elevate the prose into something close to poetry…[Edward] Snow transfers the complexities of [Rainer Maria] Rilke’s story and language out of the German and into moving and readable English."
Nation - Ratik Asokan
"The Notebooks matches the literary heights of Rilke’s finest verse…Edward Snow’s new translation is an opportunity to revisit this elusive masterpiece."
Peter Sacks
"This brilliant new translation walks right off the page into the streets of Paris and into the recessed corridors of memory and impassioned imagination.… Sentence by sentence, Snow releases the hallucinatory revelations of a mind creating its own indelible tracks between ‘curiosity and dread,’ between shocking estrangement and almost unbearable sympathy. I first read the Notebooks in earlier translations fifty years ago; they have never felt so radiant, so nuanced, so immediately yet enduringly prophetic."
Robert Pinsky
"This book has been central for many young poets, in many languages, for generations. Now, Edward Snow has created a fresh, inviting version in English."
Mary Karr
"Reading Rilke in English, one faces three doors: read Edward Snow, read a lesser translator, or learn German. Just as Snow has produced masterpieces in the past, his rendering of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a revelation. Though I had read the volume before with curiosity, I found Snow’s version a page-turner. I devoured it like a velociraptor."
Phillip Lopate
"[Edward Snow] has outdone himself by rendering the German writer’s prose classic in all its eerie, crepuscular shadings…Every sentence glistens."
From the Publisher
"An almost perfect equivalent for the original." The New York Review of Books
"An extraordinary...translation of one of the world's most beautiful books." Philadelphia Inquirer