"Nous avons parlé comme indéfinement". L'incontro- scontro tra Rainer Maria Rilke e Paul Valéry e il linguaggio della negazione negli ultimi versi francesi

Rainer Maria Rilke’s last years are marked by the influence of the works of the French poet Paul Valéry. The reading of Paul Valéry’s writings leads Rilke to start translating many of his poems from French to German and to write new poems directly in French which this work takes into account through a historical, cultural, poetological and linguistical point of view. The first part of this dissertation concerns the reception of Valéry’s works in Germany and Rilke’s works in France in order to identify the ways in which their different cultural sylstems interlace and also examines the research carried out on the value of the signifier in their works. These preliminary remarks prepare the ground for an analysis in the successive parts of the Rilkian translations of Valéry’s poems that show the particular Rilke’s tendency to negation. Negation represents an instrument from both linguistic and conceptual point of view that Rilke chooses in order to emphasize statements. The act of freeing oneself from the desire of possession to the point of complete renouncement and the game of opposites on which he builds his French cycles from Vergers to Les Fenêtres allows him to reach the final aim of his poetic production, the synthesis between “I” and “world”within the “Weltinnenraum”. Altough he is extremely different from the german poet, Valéry offers him the suitable language, measure and control to give expression to his final poetic impulses.