When I Go Read online

  He moved to Paris, first in 1902, then again in 1905, where he worked as informal secretary for the sculptor, Auguste Rodin. The position did not suit him. The two men admired each other, but fought and disagreed and suffered miscommunications.

  However, it was during these years that Rilke began, with Rodin’s prompting, to serve his poetry by observing the world. He thought about this as an exercise of “saying” the world of things, scrupulously avoiding personal reaction, Victorian-style symbolism, and anthropomorphism. Instead, he entered the world of the thing while simultaneously retaining his own humanity and giving the “thing” its own existence.

  This is a simple idea which I find very hard to explain. I rely on the metaphor of the mirror to understand it: the world is a mirror, and the poet took it upon himself to look into it honestly. The poems of this period, published in a volume called New Poems, were called Dinggedichte, “thing-poems.” With this publication, he made his mark on the history of literature, firmly breaking with the Romantics he had grown up reading.

  Until late 1915, in spite of chronic melancholy, he had already completed at least three of his most famous cycle of poems, the Duino Elegies. But the darkness and humiliation of WWI plunged him into deep emotional and creative despair. He stopped work on the Elegies, renounced German culture and language, which angered many of his supporters, and moved to French-speaking Switzerland, in the Canton of Valais.

  There, a benefactor set him up at Muzot, a small stone house. It was ancient, drafty, and isolated. But it was here that his long and tortured silence finally broke open in an incredible ten-day outburst that resulted in the completion of the Duino Elegies and a whole new series of poems, the Sonnets to Orpheus.

  It was February 1922. He knew immediately after completing these two cycles that his position on the literary map was forever secured. In the four years that remained of his life, he wrote 325 poems and about 75 fragments and dedications in French.

  5. Rainer Maria Rilke, Fifty Selected Poems: Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. C. F. MacIntyre (Berkeley: University of California, 1941), 16.

  6. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Unknown Rilke: Expanded Edition, trans. Franz Wright (Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1990), 9, 10.

  Why French?

  How can it be explained that a mature poet, who at that time of his life had an unexcelled power over his native language, would give up his own perfected instrument to try another?7

  Perhaps his personal breakthrough and widespread acclaim caused something inside Rilke’s being to relax, because it was then that he began to write seriously in French. The switch was quite abrupt, like a visual artist leaving behind the oil paints to take up watercolors. Rilke grew more and more outspoken in his enthusiasm for the French language, especially following encouragement by French poets André Gide and Paul Valéry. Biographer Donald Prater writes that “he compared French with ‘a beautiful vine ripened over the centuries’ and cultivated according to well-defined laws: a language with a clarity and sureness which his own was far from having achieved.”8

  Translator Willis Barnstone says that, once translated, a poem becomes an orphan stripped of its history. If that’s true, the poems in this book are doubly orphaned because Rilke wrote in his second language while ignoring the heavy historical context of centuries of French literary tradition.

  There are at least two instances where Rilke spoke directly about why he switched to French late in his life. Following the political turmoil of WWI, he wrote: “How very much I hate this people [the Germans] . . . Nobody will ever be able to claim that I write in their language!”9

  Second, he considered a handful of French words uniquely beautiful by their untranslatable nature, including “orchard,” and “palm.” In the title poem of his series, “Orchards” [Vergers], he begins this way:

  Perhaps, dear borrowed language,

  I’ve been emboldened to use you because

  of the rustic word whose unique domain

  has taunted me forever: Verger.

  In addition, we can imagine the healing effect on Rilke of the rolling hills, vineyards and hospitality of the Valais. He’d completed his greatest works at Muzot, his first real home, a place of refuge where he was to live out his remaining years in spite of a life-long habit of restlessness.

  This French-speaking region of Switzerland seemed refreshingly untouched by the war. He was so enamored of the place that he even changed his citizenship. He planted roses, he walked the lanes through the vineyards, he watched and wrote about the wind and sky.

  I suspect there may be one more partial answer to the question, “Why French?”: Rilke’s relationship to a woman named Elisabeth Dorothée Kossowska, known by the nicknames Baladine, Merline, or Mouky. Like Rilke, she had a Germanic background and for political and philosophical reasons that closely aligned with Rilke’s, came to reject that culture. Their passionate exchange of letters in French (published in Zürich in 1954) filled the intervals between their meetings and would last until the end of his life.

  Some have claimed that French, for Rilke, was a mere game or language exercise, but I don’t believe it, given the quality of the poems. Rilke’s French was good. He rarely made errors, and like any poet or literary figure, puts his mark on the language and expands it, adds to it his own flavor. Nor does his French sound or feel like German, though some critics disagree. He was not unduly influenced by any particular French author, in spite of his close relationship with Paul Valéry whose poems he translated at the time he was producing his French poems. He was praised by Valéry, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau. Liselotte Dieckmann writes: “A bold originality characterizes Rilke’s poems; he shows a mastery of the adopted language which he uses freely as an instrument of genuine poetic expression.”10

  Dieckmann also says this: “The poet was forced, by the nature of his relationship to the new language, to write simple poetry; and at the same time, the trend towards simplicity appears as the natural relief after the overwhelming task which the Elegies had put before him. A feeling of happy relaxation goes through the French poems; . . . The French language, besides being a new instrument for the poet, has the advantage over the German language of offering a simplicity of style as well as of verse form without becoming trite or overly plain.”11

  This corresponds with what I persistently felt as I translated the French poems. I sensed no literary baggage; there was a light feeling to them, even when the subject was melancholy, even gloomy.

  Lastly, we should perhaps be asking whether the question “Why French?” really matters. Americans, especially writers and linguists, who have spent time in Europe, know that competency in other languages is not unusual there.

  During an exchange of letters between Rilke and Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, she writes: “Dear Rainer, Goethe says somewhere that one cannot achieve anything of significance in a foreign language—and that has always rung false to me . . . Writing poetry is in itself translating from the mother tongue into another, whether French or German should make no difference . . .”12

  7. Liselotte Dieckmann, “Rainer Maria Rilke’s French Poems,” Modern Language Quarterly 12 (1951) 321.

  8. Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 363.

  9. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life, trans. Ulrich Baer (New York: Random House, 2005), xix.

  10. Dieckmann, “Rainer Maria Rilke’s French Poems,” 321.

  11. Ibid., 328.

  12. Art Beck, “Essay: How Not to Review a Translation,” Your Impossible Voice, http://www.yourimpossiblevoice.com/essay-not-review-translation.

  Translation Priorities

  Translation is gratitude to language.13

  The difficulty of translating Rilke will cause the heart of any Rilke translator—and there are many, though not of the French poems—to lurch with recognition,
affection and dread. To give a specific example, “The Doe” [La Biche], begins, in French:

  Ô la biche: quel bel intérieur

  d’anciennes forêts dans tes yeux abonde;

  combien de confiance ronde

  mêlée à combien de peur.

  Literally: “Oh, the doe: what a beautiful interior / of ancient forests in your eyes abounds; / how much round confidence / mixed with how much fear.” To begin with, there is the Ô and the quel, followed by two occurrences of combien, all of which lend a tone of breathless drama. I acknowledge the Romantic style of Rilke’s poetic heritage, but there are other ways to convey urgency in this poem. Personally, I am far more interested in the fact that this poet sees a deer and offers us a unique perspective on the mystery inherent in its being.

  Gary Miranda, a translator I admire, gave us a marvelous new version of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. In his afterword, he says this, on the pesky subject of Ô: “. . . a modern American reader has far less tolerance for ‘O’ than a European reader of Rilke’s day, and one has to assume that Rilke would have been sensitive to that fact had he been writing for a modern American audience. So, if you’re aiming to approximate the original experience for a modern audience, you’re going to have to jettison some of those Os. This is just one reason that it’s always seemed silly to me to talk about a definitive translation. Definitive for whom?”14

  In addition to the issue of overly heightened drama, I spent a long time contemplating the deceptively simple word choices in this poem. The most obvious translations did not offer the best poetry. Case in point: the French word intérieur, “interior” or “inside”: the more I studied this poem, the more I felt that this word stuck out and gave the line a scientific tone that clashed with the simplicity and darkness of a Grimm’s fairy-tale forest, glimpsed by the poet in the black eyes of the doe.

  I wrote version after version, and finally tried not using the word “interior” at all while retaining the concept. This required rearranging the lines a bit, and including the idea of “inside” with the quieter preposition “in,” and by adding the adjective ”deep.” As for the drama of the original, my hope is that I have transferred that feeling to the third and fourth lines of the verse, using the short and emphatic “shot through” and “utter fear.”

  Doe, the deep, ancient beauty

  of forests flows in your eyes,

  circles of trust shot through

  with utter fear.

  My priority in translation is that the poems must be poems in English. I conformed almost without exception to Rilke’s line and stanza breaks, and I gave a good amount of attention to rhythm. For Rilke, rhyme and meter represented pleasurable constraints.

  But translating his exact rhymes was never my goal; in my view this tended to distort these short verses beyond poetic tolerance. I am satisfied with (the sometimes accidental) resonances such as those between “doe” and “deep,” and “forests” and “flows.”

  In general, I have emphasized flow and content, striking what I perceived to be a balance between the numerous difficulties of translation. I did not want to adhere so strictly to accuracy that I would end up performing, so to speak, an operation that killed the patient.

  My goal was to communicate musicality through occasional and oblique rhymes, loose internal rhymes, repeating vowel sounds, and rhythmic patterns. These poems are a vast and intricate house, and rather than guide you on a tour of all its nooks and crannies, I hope I have merely held open its door, offering a fresh journey of discovery aided by language.

  13. Nancy Naomi Carlson, as overheard at the 39th annual conference of the American Literary Translators’ Association, 2016.

  14. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. Gary Miranda (Portland, OR: Tavern, 2013), 66–67.

  The Journey

  Now you must go out into your heart / as onto a vast plain.15

  Rilke was absolutely opposed to any form of analysis, psychological or otherwise. He rejected the budding field that Sigmund Freud was advertising and some of his friends promoting. Yet, he was ahead of his time, because, through pure intuition, he found a natural affinity between psychology and spirituality that has become mainstream in our modern culture.

  Many of his writings sound as though they could have come from a book of Buddhist or Taoist teachings. Ulrich Baer tells the story that in 1908, Rilke’s wife (with whom he stayed friendly) sent him Speeches by Gotama Buddha. Rilke closed it almost as soon as he had opened it, not because he disliked the ideas he found in the book, but, according to Baer, because he experienced a “shudder of recognition,” intuiting that the ideas were too close to his own.

  So, Rilke followed the deep river of his thought without asking why or how. In much the same way, I translated his poetry without knowing how to translate.

  My journey through these poems has imparted not only lessons in translation, but lessons in life. Getting behind Rilke’s messages and meanings required me to read the poems deeply, many times over. I would take each one in turn, copy it out by hand, and go for a long walk to memorize it and get the rhythms in my body.

  During the most intense periods of translation, I felt I was not translating at all, but writing poems with the guidance of a wise person who’d given me some ideas about what I should say. This process also had the effect of planting seeds from which my own, original poetry grew.

  I can’t help being continually amazed at how skillfully Rilke held the extremes of spirituality and physicality in one hand. His eyes took in the outer world, and whether it was panther, rose or embroidered shawl, those observations enriched his inner life. In his worldview, nature becomes its own powerful, multi-faceted being that does not exist for our benefit, but has the effect, if we allow the mirror to work on our psyche, of deepening and nourishing us.

  The subjects Rilke treats in these poems are alive with profound history, intricate rhythms, loves and preferences, none of which are completely known either by the poet or by us. There is freedom in this, and the possibility of union between humanity and something higher.

  The integration of the spiritual and physical realms has always held intense interest for me, and there is no better context in which to experience this coming together than in wild nature.

  Each August, I help facilitate a two-week wilderness experience for a group of women who are questing for a new life. We mark turning points such as divorce, the departure of children to college, the end of child-bearing years, or even, simply, a birthday. Though each woman’s goal is personal, life in the wilderness requires community and careful attention to the physical plane. Our concerns revolve around eating, sleeping, staying warm; fuel, water, safety. Solitude is an important component of this rite of passage, for in the face of these situations we are all fundamentally alone.

  Rilke, it is well known, cherished his solitude and wrestled with his inner demons through the process of contemplating the simple, every-day objects of his life—the painting above the mantle or the water jug and drinking glass. He did not deny the body, as the Romantics had done.

  Ulrich Baer says: “Rilke finds evidence of a connectedness to larger, cosmic patterns within our physical, bodily existence. How we breathe, eat, sleep, digest, and love; how we suffer physically or experience pleasure.”16

  It turns out the two poles of concern, physical and spiritual, do not work against each other. The mundane becomes sacred and the sacred mundane. That which we see, sees us. Watching an ant can change a life. Fetching a drink of water can quench the soul. The act of writing a poem confirms the poet’s as well as the subject’s existence in equal measure, as it confirms creation throughout all time.

  I feel undying gratitude to Rilke, my teacher from the beyond. His voice has scarcely diminished in volume since his death ninety years ago this month. Here it is, with us again, the same and brand new, showing us the way to live with our longi
ng and to see, albeit slowly, into our true selves.

  S.P.

  Medford, Oregon

  December 2016

  15. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Penguin, 2005), 133.

  16. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life, trans. Ulrich Baer (New York: Random House, 2005), xxiii.

  1

  Roses

  Still—in a way—nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.1

  One of the myths that circle around Rilke concerns the cause of his death. In cutting roses from his garden at Muzot for his newest love interest, he was pricked by a thorn, which turned into a nasty infection.

  Biographer Ralph Freedman writes: “For ten days both hands were unusable, after which he caught an intestinal flu with a high fever. It is unlikely that the thorn itself caused Rilke’s death, as is romantically assumed, but it may well have triggered attacks from which, in the end, he did not recover.”2

  Rilke harbored distrust of doctors and hospitals, and suffered unnecessarily before a rare form of leukemia took his life in December 1926. He is buried in the village church at Raron, in Valais.

  Whatever part roses may have played in Rilke’s demise, it is especially poignant that, in this series of twenty-seven poems, Rilke expresses a passion to live the creative life. At the time of their writing, death was not yet sitting on his shoulder. Death remains a theme, an abstraction.

  The Roses orbit around beauty and life-force like perfumed petals around a stamen, making me a bit dizzy with ecstasy and optimism whenever I read them. I feel like the “Round Rose”: “Doesn’t it make you dizzy. . . /to spin and spin upon your stem . . . ?”