This morning I bought a slim volume of Rilke’s poetry in one of the few Zagreb bookstores with reasonable selections of foreign books.[1] When I came to the cashiers, I was a bit surprised by its price. For less than a hundred pages, it was more than ten pounds sterling. A while later I found a praise of the poet on the back cover. “His poetry is priceless,” someone or other is quoted as saying. That kind of explains my surprise, I guess. As it turns out, I got the book for a song. 

Footnote

1. Selected Poems, London: Penguin, 1964 (first published in 1960).