Poems to Night Read online

  POEMS TO NIGHT

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Edited, Translated and with an Introduction by Will Stone

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  I believe in Night…

  rilke

  (from The Book of Monkish Life, 1899)

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  List of Poems

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Poems to Night

  Poems to Night: Drafts

  Further Poems and Sketches around the Theme of Night

  Biographical Notes

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  LIST OF POEMS

  Poems to Night

  The Siblings

  When your face consumes me

  Once I took into my hands

  From face to face

  Look, angels sense through space

  Did I not breathe out of midnights

  So, now it will be the angel

  Away, I asked you finally to taste my smile

  Strong, silent, candelabra placed

  Out of this cloud, see: the one that so wildly obscures

  Why must one go out and take alien things

  But for myself, when I find myself back in the cities’

  Straining so hard against the powerful night

  Overflowing skies of squandered stars

  Where I once was, or am: there you are treading

  Thoughts of night, raised from intuited experience

  Often I gazed at you in wonder. I stood at the window begun yesterday

  I want to hold out. Act. Go over

  Ah, from an angel’s touch falls

  Is pain – as soon as the ploughshare

  You who super-elevates me with this

  Lifting one’s eyes from the book, from the close and countable lines

  Poems to Night: Drafts

  Isn’t there a smile? See, what is there

  Turned upwards to the nourishing one

  Why does the day persuade us

  (To the Angel)

  How did I hold out this face, that its feeling

  When I feed on your face this way

  Only now, at the nocturnal hour, am I without fear

  Further Poems and Sketches around the Theme of Night

  Now the red barberries are already ripening

  From a Stormy Night

  Night of the Spring Equinox

  Stars Behind Olives

  Nocturnal Walk

  Urban Summer Night

  Moonlit Night

  Like the evening wind

  At night I wish to converse with the angel

  Night Sky and Falling Star

  Love the angel is space

  From the Periphery: Night

  Strong star, without need of support

  What reaches us with the starlight

  Earlier, how often, we stayed, star in star

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to acknowledge the generous assistance of Brigitte Duvillard, Director of the Fondation Rilke in Sierre, who arranged a residence at the Villa Ruffieux in the Château Mercier above Sierre during June/July 2019, to enable me to work on these translations. I should also like to express my gratitude to writer and critic Bruce Mueller in San Francisco for his valuable contributions around Rilke’s biographical details, travel itineraries and publishing history. Lastly, I must give fulsome thanks to Linden Lawson, friend and editor, whose suggestions and editorial input have proved invaluable and have served to maintain this translator’s foothold at precarious moments on the path.

  *

  These translations were realized with the assistance of the Fondation Rilke, Sierre, Switzerland.

  INTRODUCTION

  At the end of 1916, Rainer Maria Rilke presented the writer Rudolf Kassner, his friend and confidant, with a notebook containing twenty-two poems which bore the title Gedichte an die Nacht (Poems to Night). These poems, linked by the recurring theme of night, were copied out in Rilke’s hallmark meticulous hand. Ernst Zinn, compiler of Rilke’s Sämtliche Werke (Collected Works) [Insel 1992], tells us in his notes that the Poems to Night were written between January 1913 and February 1914. What makes them significant is that they were created at the same time as Rilke’s most renowned work, the Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies), whose eighth elegy Rilke dedicated to Kassner, and reveal correspondences to its genesis as well as anticipating its structure and ushering in new psychic and linguistic territories. In fact, Rilke had originally considered adding the night poems to form a second section of the Elegies.

  Themes and ideas which run through the Elegies are also to be found in the Poems to Night; yet unlike the Elegies they are more actively hermetic, as if enfolding into themselves and thus demanding of the reader an even greater concentration. The Poems to Night possess the aura of a clandestine text, and resist any assured interpretation. Despite their centrality to Rilke’s spiritual trajectory, their transcendental disguise, that cosmological searching for the self, has ensured they have remained at the outer margins of his oeuvre, where the poetry-reading public rarely travel. Having said that, a good number of the Poems to Night have been translated over previous decades by a range of translators, especially the poem sometimes known as “The Great Night”, which begins with the line, “Often I gazed at you in wonder”. However, the twenty-two poems have never appeared in English before in their entirety, as they were transcribed for Kassner, but only as odd poems or at best in modest groupings in selections of Rilke’s poems. Thus they have never been read as a sequence from beginning to end contained in one volume, nor have a number of ancillary poems and fragments by Rilke on the subject of night dating from different periods been assembled as here, in a supplementary section.

  The Duino Elegies were conceived and initiated at Castle Duino on the Adriatic coast north-west of Trieste, where Rilke was a guest of Princess Marie of Thurn und Taxis. The first two elegies were composed early in 1912, and through 1913 Rilke laboured on the material which would become the third, sixth and tenth elegies. The first of the Poems to Night were composed in Spain in January and February 1913, but most were written later that same year. It is no surprise to learn that in the autumn of 1913 Rilke was completing the third elegy, which he had begun in 1912 and which shares motifs and elements with the Poems to Night and occupies the same nocturnal realm. After the third elegy Rilke struggled to maintain his creative momentum, a state of stasis that was greatly exacerbated in autumn 1914 by the ensuing conflict in Europe. However, care must be taken not to oversimplify the correlation with the Elegies and to see things that may in fact not be there, for although the meaning of night in the Poems to Night appears sometimes to echo that of the angel in the Elegies, at other times in the poems it seems to suggest an altogether different permutation. The reader, then, should approach these poems with an awareness of their ambivalence, of seeming variances of thought, interrelating surges of the objective and subjective which cannot be readily explained, other than by a few detractors as caprice.

  In his Poems to Night, as elsewhere, Rilke is not philosophizing per se, but loosing strands of thought and ideas that ebb and flow and finally affix to the vertebrae of his lyricism, gifted to us as images; however, this poet studiously eschews any final declaration, any coherent position. Neither is Rilke a poet who
offers an absolute poetry, something visibly constructed from a purely metaphysical design. Instead of a system or framework there is only a noble bid for transcendence beyond a finite reality through fluid and pliable poetic utterance, and the arcane aura, the almost organic indecipherability that seems to cloak the Poems to Night, serves to underline this. But the Poems to Night do not only possess a spiritual linkage to the Duino Elegies: it can also be argued that they look backwards, first to the existential desolation of Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910) and still further to the presence of the angel in Das Stundenbuch (The Book of Hours, 1905).

  As Anthony Stephens suggests in his Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Gedichte an die Nacht”: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1972), the period of the Poems to Night is principally one of crisis for their author. Stephens explains that Rilke’s journey to Spain at the end of 1912 had initially appeared to provide the inspiration and energy he needed to make a dash for the summit of the Elegies, begun earlier that same year; but for reasons which are unclear there was a collapse in confidence, a breaking of the spell, and by the time Rilke wrote the first of the Poems to Night in Ronda in the new year of 1913, he was dispiritedly confined to base camp and a sense of dislocation and despair had set in. Stephens explains that most of the subsequent poems were written in Paris, however: “The city itself does not figure in the poems. Rather, it becomes a place of isolation, a kind of no-man’s-land in which the relation of self to world is explored without the rich allusiveness and décor of the Duino Elegies and Die Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus). There is the ‘Ich’, the night, the angel, the ‘Geliebte’ (The Beloved) and very little else.” Stephens posits that the period of the Poems to Night ends when Rilke met Magda von Hattingberg, or, as she was known to him, Benvenuta, early in 1914. In the poems to Benvenuta, Rilke seems consciously to reject the atmosphere of those of the previous year, and yet the darker material in the essay Puppen (Dolls), written in February 1914, tells a different story. The precise nature of Rilke’s creative configuration in this period remains contradictory and elusive. For example, the poem “Wendung” (“Turning Point”), written in June 1914, has been seized on as proof that Rilke was announcing a new beginning, but this may well be premature. Unfortunately, the sudden trauma of the war three months later means we will never know whether Rilke would have exploited this new beginning, celebrated in that poem and in his more upbeat letters to Benvenuta, or not. What cannot be doubted is that Rilke’s personal crisis was extenuated and compounded by the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. Like many European writers that August, such as his friend Stefan Zweig adrift in Belgium, Rilke was trapped in Bavaria as the once-fluid borders rapidly solidified and he was unable to return to France. Paris and his possessions were out of reach and Rilke relocated to Munich, leaving everything behind in the French capital, including valuable manuscripts and books. In September 1915 he was horrified to learn that they had been sold and dispersed. The psychic strain he suffered in this period is manifest in his correspondence of the time, as well as in the few short texts he dedicated to the war. Yet even in 1915, as the destructive scale of the conflict sank in, Rilke managed to compose the fourth elegy and gamely sought to restore the creative impetus of 1913. This period of disorientation, self-doubt and incertitude lies behind the presentation of the Poems to Night to Kassner, as Rilke seeks to reassure a long-standing friend of the continuation of his creative endeavour even amidst the protracted periods of silence and inactivity, the brutal disconnection within the European family as nationalist jingoism strangled pluralism and tolerance. The metamorphosis Rilke regarded as necessary to extricate himself from this depressing period of limited cultural interaction and inner stagnation is famously elucidated in the ninth elegy, “What, if not transformation, is your deepest purpose.”

  With the Poems to Night Rilke offered Kassner a provisory cycle of poems whose mesmerizing sublimity, lyrical reach and spiritual complexity seem to point to the aspiration for a new thematic collection on the lines of The Book of Hours or Das Buch von der Armut und vom Tode (The Book of Poverty and Death, 1905). The presence of night had haunted the poet since his earliest experience of Paris, the period of the Neue Gedichte (New Poems, 1907) and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and was still vital during Rilke’s final months in the Valais, as can be seen in the second part of this collection. Rilke’s work has a clear antecedent in that of Hölderlin, but also draws on Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night, 1800) by Novalis, that most mystical of German Romantic poets. In these six prose poems interspersed with verse, Novalis celebrates night as a means to gain entry to a higher realm in the presence of God. But although Rilke’s own hymns to night evoke his forebear, it is important to remember that Rilke is a poet writing in the era of modernism, only a year before the most murderous war in history swept away a generation and already God had been declared extinct, or at least absent without leave. Rilke treats night as the ultimate terrain for self-becoming, or rather self-securing. The vastness and unknowable nature of night is placed against the individual’s finiteness, where the self is constantly threatened with losing purchase on that greater being which binds us as humanity. We underestimate the spiritual governance of night at our peril. However, other factors come into play: the darker hue of Rilke’s poetic material was also certainly influenced by his recent peregrinations in Spain. Rilke set off to explore the historic locations of Spain in the hope of bridging the impasse in his creative inspiration, but the encounter with a strange land only served to increase his sense of alienation; “for every journey, above all one through Spain, demands a certain inner equilibrium, but at every moment the world breaks in on me, into my very blood, and all around is strangeness, an unrelenting strangeness.” Rilke’s willed immersion in its turbulent history and dark legends, his close readings of the Spanish mystics as well as the crucial encounter with the Koran, bled into the poems and fused into the arcane boundless depths of night. In Ronda, a place he had never even heard of and visited on a whim, he finally achieved the balance he sought and began to write; the result was the first of the Poems to Night, in terms of chronology, the so-called “Spanish Trilogy”, created between December 1912 and January 1913, whose Part I begins, “Out of this cloud, see: the one that so wildly obscures”.

  Unlike the grander, more declarative Elegies, the Poems to Night tend hypnotically to reiterate a symbolic theme, a single meditation, through variant images around the mystery of being and the sense of man becoming exposed to the higher lessons of this mystery, and his self-becoming enabled through mastery of the resulting space. Night appears in manifold guises as this space expressly reserved for transcendence, as a force of nature, as helper to man, a guide, a seer. Night itself becomes the visionary from history:

  Does the night not blow cool,

  splendidly distant,

  moving across the centuries.

  But night is also threatened by humankind, as here in the opening poem:

  And night has withdrawn into the rooms

  like a wounded beast, in pain through us.

  The Poems to Night begin to feel like something closer to an incantation, with its endless invocation of space, angel, stars, mouth, moon… images reconstituting, overlapping and morphing. The German word for face, Gesicht, is most prominent but slips in and out of various meanings, sometimes seeming closer to “features” and at other times “face”, a restless equivocation which Rilke appears to have encouraged throughout. Klaus E. Bohnenkamp, editor of the most recent German edition of Gedichte an die Nacht (Insel Verlag, 2016), sees the angel as bridge between the self and night’s cosmic enclosure: “In the Poems to Night the angel acts as an anthropomorphic figure, link and mediator between human, night and world space.” But perhaps the real mediator between self and night is the poem itself, as noted by Charlie Louth in his Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford Uni
versity Press, 2020). Of the poem “Overflowing skies of squandered stars” he interestingly suggests: “The poem is a membrane between the self and the night, a tentative contour or interface which in trying to make out a possible relation, in seeking to situate our place in the world, creates not a ‘revelation of being’, but an ‘aperture upon being’.” Infinite as the night and stars, the desire of man and of the shadowing angel travel in constant flux, moving towards and away from one another, in perpetual momentum, each serving to shape their role in the mystery of the unknown.

  Night has a long history of being commonly ascribed to states of religious or mystical consciousness, yet it exists right there before us, making its presence known with unswerving reliability, and for Rilke it represents a celestial gateway or enacting space between inner and outer reality, or the enclosure within which the self may, if courageous enough, extend from the earthly. As mentioned previously, the idea of night as space for transcendence can be traced back to The Book of Hours as a state of inwardness around man’s proximity to God, or to Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images, 1906), where night is exulted as the location or the moment when a sublime connection between the self and the external world is forged. But time has elapsed between these earlier collections and the period of the Elegies; Rilke has experienced Paris, the modern metropolis, and written his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and there is a radical shift in his vision of his own existence, his attitude towards God and the objective world. Rilke is not writing in the period of Romanticism or on the back of it: his demanding master is always a modern consciousness. Having said this, we cannot know the extent to which the poet’s own life course and its mental challenges infected the imagery of the Poems to Night, as Anthony Stephens affirms: “For by and large we simply lack precise knowledge of what correspondences or differences there may be between the poems. We cannot determine to what extent a poem such as ‘The Great Night’ may be a factual record of a single ‘existential moment’, whether it is an amalgam of a large number of different personal experiences or to what degree any actual experience may have been modified by the poetic imagination to produce what we encounter in the poem.”*