How to Begin

"Enchanting, illuminating and tender" - Nigel Slater

"I believe you can live in a book of poems"

A book about finding a creative voice and becoming an artist via a startling rediscovery in Edmund de Waal's family archives: letters between his grandmother and the charismatic poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

With letters translated from the German by prizewinning translator Karen Leeder.

This is a story about how to begin.

In 1921, Elisabeth Ephrussi writes a letter to the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She too is a poet, or an aspiring one: a young law student in Vienna just beginning her creative life. To her surprise, Rilke writes back with advice. A five-year correspondence follows, an exchange of lyrical and exhortatory letters alongside books, translations and poems in manuscript. They never meet.

Fifty years later, Elisabeth's grandson, Edmund de Waal, wants to be a poet and a potter. He sends her his own poetry, and she responds with guidance and Rilke's "Duino Elegies".

How to Begin follows Edmund's journey as an artist. This is a book about failure, about starting again, about apprenticeship and asking for, and then disregarding, advice; about working out ways to keep going when you don't know how.

It is a moving, intergenerational story about the traces of memory within a family, and a deeply personal reflection on how we learn resilience with the support of others. It is for any reader starting out, seeking the permission to begin.