The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Read online

  Vintage International Edition, March 1989

  Introduction copyright © 1982 by Robert Hass

  Copyright © 1980, 1981, 1982 by Stephen Mitchell

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States by Random House, Inc., with the cooperation of Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, W. Germany, in 1982.

  Some of these translations first appeared in the following periodicals: American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, New York Review of Books, Occident, Paris Review, The Ten Directions, Threepenny Review, Zero.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Bechtle Verlag (Munich): Excerpts from Rainer Maria Rilke’s

  Briefwechsel mit Benvenuta, edited by Magda von Hattingberg

  Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.: “Sometimes a man stands up” (this page) from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. A Translation from the German and Commentary by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875–1926.

  The selected poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Reprint.

  Originally published: New York:

  Random House, 1982.

  English and German.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  I. Mitchell, Stephen. II. Title.

  [PT2635.165A2525 1984] 831’.912 83-47799

  Print ISBN: 978-0-679-72201-4

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-78754-5

  v3.1

  To Robert L. Mitchell

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Note on Using This eBook

  Looking for Rilke, by Robert Hass

  THE SELECTED POETRY: ENGLISH

  FROM

  THE BOOK OF HOURS (1905)

  [I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice]

  [I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all]

  FROM

  THE BOOK OF PICTURES (1902; 1906)

  Lament

  Autumn Day

  Evening

  The Blindman’s Song

  The Drunkard’s Song

  The Idiot’s Song

  The Dwarf’s Song

  FROM

  NEW POEMS (1907; 1908)

  The Panther

  The Gazelle

  The Swan

  The Grownup

  Going Blind

  Before Summer Rain

  The Last Evening

  Portrait of My Father as a Young Man

  Self-Portrait, 1906

  Spanish Dancer

  Tombs of the Hetaerae

  Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes

  Alcestis

  Archaic Torso of Apollo

  Washing the Corpse

  Black Cat

  The Flamingos

  Buddha in Glory

  FROM

  REQUIEM (1909): English

  Requiem for a Friend

  FROM

  THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE (1910)

  [For the Sake of a Single Poem]

  [Faces]

  [Fears]

  [The Bird-feeders]

  [Ibsen]

  [The Temptation of the Saint]

  [The Prodigal Son]

  UNCOLLECTED POEMS, 1913–1918

  The Spanish Trilogy

  Ariel

  [Straining so hard against the strength of night]

  The Vast Night

  [You who never arrived]

  Turning-point

  Lament

  ‘We Must Die Because We Have Known Them’

  To Hölderlin

  [Exposed on the cliffs of the heart]

  Death

  To Music

  DUINO ELEGIES (1923)

  The First Elegy

  The Second Elegy

  The Third Elegy

  The Fourth Elegy

  The Fifth Elegy

  The Sixth Elegy

  The Seventh Elegy

  The Eighth Elegy

  The Ninth Elegy

  The Tenth Elegy

  APPENDIX TO

  DUINO ELEGIES

  [Fragment of an Elegy]

  [Original Version of the Tenth Elegy]

  Antistrophes

  FROM

  THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS (1923)

  I, 1

  I, 2

  I, 3

  I, 5

  I, 7

  I, 8

  I, 25

  II, 4

  II, 8

  II, 13

  II, 14

  II, 23

  II, 24

  II, 28

  II, 29

  UNCOLLECTED POEMS, 1923–1926

  Imaginary Career

  [As once the wingèd energy of delight]

  [What birds plunge through is not the intimate space]

  Duration of Childhood

  [World was in the face of the beloved]

  Palm

  Gravity

  O Lacrimosa

  [Now it is time that gods came walking out]

  [Rose, oh pure contradiction]

  Idol

  Gong

  [Four Sketches]

  Elegy

  [Dove that ventured outside]

  THE SELECTED POETRY: GERMAN

  FROM

  DAS STUNDEN-BUCH (1905)

  [Ich bin, du Ängstlicher. Hörst du mich nicht]

  [Ich finde dich in allen diesen Dingen,]

  FROM

  DAS BUCH DER BILDER (1902; 1906)

  Klage

  Herbsttag

  Abend

  Das Lied Des Blinden

  Das Lied Des Trinkers

  Das Lied Des Idioten

  Das Lied Des Zwerges

  FROM

  NEUE GEDICHTE (1907; 1908)

  Der Panther

  Die Gazelle

  Der Schwan

  Die Erwachsene

  Die Erblindende

  Vor Dem Sommerregen

  Letzter Abend

  Jugend-Bildnis Meines Vaters

  Selbstbildnis Aus Dem Jahre 1906

  Spanische Tänzerin

  Hetären-Gräber

  Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes

  Alkestis

  Archaïscher Torso Apollos

  Leichen-Wäsche

  Schwarze Katze

  Die Flamingos

  Buddha in Der Glorie

  FROM

  REQUIEM (1909): German

  Requiem Für Eine Freundin

  FROM

  DIE AUFZEICHNUNGEN DES MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE (1910)

  [Ach, aber mit Versen ist so wenig getan]

  [Habe ich es schon gesagt]

  [Ich liege in meinem Bett, fünf Treppen hoch]

  [Ich unterschätze es nicht]

  [Da saß ich an deinen Büchern]

  [Wie begreif ich jetzt die wunderlichen Bilder]

  [Man wird mich schwer davon überzeugen]

  NICHT GESAMMELTE GEDICHTE, 1913–1918

  Die Spanische Trilogie

  Der Geist Ariel

  [So angestrengt wider die starke Nacht]

  Die Grosse Nacht

  [Du im Voraus]

  Wendung

  Klage

  >Man Muss Sterben Weil Man Sie Kennt<

  An Hölderlin

  [Ausgesetzt auf den Bergen des Herzens]

&nb
sp; Der Tod

  An Die Musik

  DUINESER ELEGIEN (1923)

  Die Erste Elegie

  Die Zweite Elegie

  Die Dritte Elegie

  Die Vierte Elegie

  Die Fünfte Elegie

  Die Sechste Elegie

  Die Siebente Elegie

  Die Achte Elegie

  Die Neunte Elegie

  Die Zehnte Elegie

  ANHANG ZU

  DUINESER ELEGIEN

  [Fragment Einer Elegie]

  [Ursprüngliche Fassung Der Zehnten Elegie]

  Gegen-Strophen

  FROM

  SONETTE AN ORPHEUS (1923)

  I, 1

  I, 2

  I, 3

  I, 5

  I, 7

  I, 8

  I, 25

  II, 4

  II, 8

  II, 13

  II, 14

  II, 23

  II, 24

  II, 28

  II, 29

  NICHT GESAMMELTE GEDICHTE, 1923–1926

  Imaginärer Lebenslauf

  [Da dich das geflügelte Entzücken]

  [Durch den sich Vögel werfen, ist nicht der]

  Dauer Der Kindheit

  [Welt war in dem Antlitz der Geliebten]

  Handinneres

  Schwerkraft

  Ô Lacrimosa

  [Jetzt wär es Zeit, daß Götter träten aus]

  [Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch]

  Idol

  Gong

  [Four Sketches]

  Elegie

  [Taube, die draußen blieb]

  NOTES

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES (GERMAN AND FRENCH)

  INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES (ENGLISH)

  A Note on Using This eBook

  In this eBook edition of The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, the title of each poem contains a hyperlink that allows you to navigate back and forth between the English translation and the original German text.

  There is a link labeled “Notes” on the initial page of each section that navigates to the pertinent notes for poems contained in that section. Each poem title in the Notes section links back to the English translation of the poem.

  LOOKING FOR RILKE

  Last fall, in Paris, a friend promised to take me to the café, not far from Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, where Rilke was said to have breakfasted in the early years of the century when he was working as Rodin’s secretary. I was glad for the pilgrimage because, of all poets, Rilke is the hardest to locate in a place. He was born a year after Robert Frost, in 1875, a little too soon to be a young modernist, and the dissimilarity between his work and Frost’s is so great that the fact does not help to anchor for me a sense of his life. The house where he had lived in Prague as a child cannot be seen; it was destroyed during the war. Besides, Prague—“that, God forgive me, miserable city of subordinate existences,” he had written—seemed to explain very little. In his childhood, it was the capital of Bohemia. Rilke’s family belonged to the German-speaking minority that formed the city’s professional class in those years. He was insulted once to be called a German, and, when the speaker corrected himself, “I meant, Austrian,” Rilke said, “Not at all. In 1866, when the Austrians entered Prague, my parents shut their windows.” He had a lifelong sense of his own homelessness.

  Anyway, Rilke came to hate his native city. His father was a failed army officer who became a petty clerk for the railroad. His mother, a complicated woman, cold and fervent, driven alternately by a hunger for good society and by pious Roman Catholicism, was an affliction to him. There was probably nothing more suffocating than the life of a genteel, aspiring European household of the late nineteenth century in which failure brooded like a boarder who had to be appeased, or like the giant cockroach which was to appear in another Prague apartment in 1915. All his life Rilke carried that suffocation inside him; and it was very much on my mind because I had just been reading Stephen Mitchell’s fresh, startlingly Rilkean translations of the poems. Here, finally, was a Rilke in English that would last for many generations. Walking through European cities with Mitchell’s Rilke in my ear, trying to see with Rilke’s eyes, I could begin to feel in the new downtowns, in the old city squares like stage sets with their baroque churches by the rivers and restored fortresses on the hills, the geography of that suffocation; it flares in the brilliant anger of the Duino Elegies—in the Fourth, for example, where the images that the world presents to him seem so much like a bad play that he swears he’d prefer a real puppet theater and imagines himself as a kind of demented critic who refuses to leave the theater until something happens:

  Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart’s

  curtain? It rose: the scenery of farewell.

  Easy to recognize. The well-known garden,

  which swayed a little. Then the dancer came.

  Not him. Enough! However lightly he moves,

  he’s costumed, made up—an ordinary man

  who hurries home and walks in through the kitchen.

  I won’t endure these half-filled human masks;

  better, the puppet. It at least is full.

  I’ll put up with the stuffed skin, the wire, the face

  that is nothing but appearance. Here. I’m waiting.

  Even if the lights go out; even if someone

  tells me, “That’s all”; even if emptiness

  floats toward me in a gray draft from the stage;

  even if not one of my silent ancestors

  stays seated with me, not one woman, not

  the boy with the immovable brown eye—

  I’ll sit here anyway. One can always watch.

  Or the Tenth, which envisions adult life as an especially tawdry carnival:

  And the shooting-gallery’s targets of prettified happiness,

  which jump and kick back with a tinny sound

  when hit by some better marksman. From cheers to chance

  he goes staggering on, as booths with all sorts of attractions

  are wooing, drumming, and bawling. For adults only

  there is something special to see: how money multiplies, naked,

  right there on stage, money’s genitals, nothing concealed,

  the whole action—educational, and guaranteed

  to increase your potency …

  This anger is probably part of the reason why the Elegies took ten years to complete. Rilke seems to have needed, desperately, the feeling of freedom which he found only in open, windy spaces—Duino, Muzot.

  Wandering the empty Sunday-morning warren of streets off Boulevard St.-Michel, remembering how passionately Rilke had argued that the life we live every day is not life, I began to feel that looking for him in this way was actively stupid. There was another friend with us, a Dutch journalist named Fred, who was hungry and could not have cared less where Rilke ate breakfast. It was Fred who asked me if I knew the name of the woman who had loaned Rilke a room in Duino Castle. I did. She was Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe. Trying to imagine what it would mean to have a name like that discouraged me from thinking I would ever understand Rilke’s social milieu. It signified a whole class of people, seen at a distance like brilliantly colored birds, which had been wiped out by the First World War. Fred was in Paris to interview the Rumanian writer E. M. Cioran, who has been called “the last philosopher in Europe,” about the new European peace movement. He pointed out to us the little garret, tucked like a pigeon coop under the roof of a building just off the Place de l’Odéon, where Cioran lives and works, as if he hoped that it would serve as a reasonable substitute, or would at least drag us back to the present. For it was clear that my friend Richard was also looking for something that the memory of his student days in Paris had stirred in him. He had lost some map in his head and felt personally anxious to retrieve it.

  And it was clear that he wasn’t going to find it. The transience of our most vivid experie
nce is the burden of another of Rilke’s complaints, the one in the Second Elegy where he compares humans with angels:

  But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we

  breathe ourselves out and away; from moment to moment

  our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume. Though someone may tell us:

  “Yes, you’ve entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime

  is filled with you …”—what does it matter? he can’t contain us,

  we vanish inside him and around him. And those who are beautiful,

  oh who can retain them? Appearance ceaselessly rises

  in their face, and is gone. Like dew from the morning grass,

  what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish

  of hot food. O smile, where are you going? O upturned glance:

  new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart …

  alas, but that is what we are. Does the infinite space

  we dissolve into, taste of us then?

  We abandoned the search, standing in front of a bar called King Kong, where Richard may have had breakfast in a former life of the establishment twenty years before and Rilke fifty years before that. The morning had begun to warm up, and the streets filled with people. Like many other young artists at the turn of the century, Rilke was drawn to Paris, and there, under the tutelage of Rodin, he began to be a great writer in the poems of Neue Gedichte, but he didn’t altogether like the city, either its poverty or its glamour, both of which shocked him at first and saddened him later. It was hard, watching the street come alive with shopkeepers, students in long scarves, professors in sleek jackets solemnly lecturing companions of the previous night who walked shivering beside them, shoppers already out and armed with that French look of fanatic skepticism, not to set beside the scene the annihilating glimpse of the city in the Fifth Elegy:

  Squares, oh square in Paris, infinite showplace