Marie Darrieussecq et Alexandre PateauDialogue autour de Rainer Maria Rilke et Paula Modersohn-Becker

To mark the 100th anniversary of the death of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Zoé Publishing is releasing for the first time in French his correspondence with the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker from 1900 to 1907. Marie Darrieussecq, who wrote the preface, is the author of a beautiful book titled Être ici est une splendeur, Vie de Paula M. Becker (P.O.L, 2016). She will engage in a dialogue with Alexandre Pateau, the translator of the correspondence.

A translator of Ovid, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, and a psychoanalyst, MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ is also the author of some twenty books translated worldwide, including Truismes (P.O.L, 1996)—her first novel, written at age 27 and selling over a million copies—and Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes (P.O.L, 2013 Médicis Prize). In 2025, she wrote a new translation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Monsieur Toussaint Louverture).

Translator and actor ALEXANDRE PATEAU, winner of several translation awards including the 2020 Nelly Sachs Prize and the 2020 Max Jacob Prize for Jan Wagner’s Les variations de la citerne, translated The Threepenny Opera for the Comédie-Française (L’Arche, 2023). In 2025, he re-translated Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s La panne (Zoé), which he performed as a one-man show throughout French-speaking Switzerland.