Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell (1982; this edition Vintage, 1989)

Roll #8 gives me 1645, which is the last of four Rilke selections. I fall back to the first: “Selected Poetry (including the Duino Elegies).” Bloom specifies that he means the collection translated by Stephen Mitchell so that’s what I bought, brand new at Barnes & Noble. It doesn’t look brand new anymore, see above, because it was shuttled around in various bags and eventually had wine spilled on it – how literary! It had the opportunity to get so beat up because I took a long time with it.

It took a long time.

Here follows some stuff I wrote months ago while I was still in the middle of reading it. Even though I wasn’t yet finished, it’s written in the past tense because I thought it would serve as the basis for my eventual entry here… which I suppose it is now doing, but only in quotation marks. Or rather, between these horizontal lines:

This was heavy going, not because anything was obscure, but because real emotional understanding of the poems required me to find my way to his philosophical head-space at every sitting, and that often wasn’t a place I wanted to go. He was talking about the big issues – life, death, and meaning – and seeing them in a cold, modern, sober way… but without the consolations of sobriety! He writes about the terrifying indifference of the real world, and the ways we hide from it and create our own homely ideas of beauty and meaning (same as Camus, same as many people in the past hundred fifty years) – but he writes about these seemingly post-Romantic ideas from within a resolutely Romantic framework. The indifference of the universe and the painful absoluteness of death and the illusions under which we live – all this stuff is treated via gods and visions and mythic figures, and all of it is made extremely personal to the poet. The life of the writing is emotional struggle, cast in basically religious terms. To the Romantic mind, this indifference of the universe to human affairs is absolutely shattering – almost incompatible, really. It’s pretty much the exact antithesis of the Romantic, which tells us that the emotions of the individual should be the basic frame of reference. Seems like once you can see the forest for the trees, that will inform the way you talk about trees. But Rilke is constantly in both frames at once, determinedly writing about what’s outside the cave but only in the language of shadows. He writes about philosophy but never lets the pain out of sight. That’s why it was hard reading – because to be comprehending it meant finding my way back to that pain.

It didn’t seem like I was being brought toward pain because Rilke specifically thought that was the right way to think about these things – it just seemed like the only way he was capable of thinking about them.

The Plague moved me because it was a vision of how life must extend beyond the losing battle against meaninglessness. Rilke only offered (me) a sort of update on the creepy old 19th-century Tod und Verklärung type attitude: that only when we admit defeat, when we surrender to philosophical death, only then will the portals of transcendent beauty be opened to us. And the saints and Orpheus and a nymph with a vase and the whole gang will all be there. I get what he’s saying, and he’s saying it better than almost anyone else I’ve ever read – but all that Tristan und Isoldery is a serious distraction.

I guess what I’m really saying is: the standard task of adjusting for the work’s period/culture of origin was in this case burdensome because the subject matter is too important to me. As period pieces, as art, these are very beautiful and I was deeply, truly, impressed by them. As communication from human to human about life, there’s a bit of a generation gap, and so the lecture started to grate. Because the meaning of life is still a sensitive subject. As in I KNOW, MOM, yes, we’re still trying to figure out how to think about death! Enough about Orpheus, Mom! Nobody talks that way anymore! I’m going to my room.

Rilke’s most famous poem has him (or you, really) looking at an “archaic torso of apollo” and as the poem ends, realizing in a flash “You must change your life.” Yes, this is what art can do to a person. But Rilke’s art does not – it seems to me – endeavor to do for me what the torso did for him. His art is not an example to show us the way (or even, like the torso, simply shame us) – it’s a picture of him, looking about at the world in very fine-grained consternation. And yes, we all have reason to look about in consternation – the struggle and the frustration are there for all of us – but he paints that struggle with such fervor and craft that you’d think he thought he was getting something done other than just naming it.

This art is exquisitely put together, of great aesthetic value, serious-minded, has every reason to exist, but can’t really do anything for me. It doesn’t offer me any solace or advice, and it also doesn’t slap me hard in the face with something I’ve been denying. It takes things that I know, that are difficult and sad, and simply works them toward beauty. But beauty itself isn’t in such short supply in this world that I personally need to seek it out in the form of things that are merely difficult and sad.

This was a rewarding reading experience in that I was exposed to it and it is admirable, and that it is one of the well-made things that’s out there on this earth, and now I’ve seen it. But it was not rewarding in re: my soul, and if not that, why couldn’t it have been about pirate treasure? I hope my next book is about pirate treasure.

I even edited out a bunch of it, if you can believe that.

Anyway, I’m afraid I must now go on to say still more, because the preceding was written before I had properly finished with The Duino Elegies, Rilke’s acknowledged masterpiece and the star attraction of the book. Their 60 pages took me much longer than the rest of the book because they are that much richer; they are worked out at greater length and depth than anything else here. Though some of the above was written in response to the first of the ten elegies, by the time I was done I felt they actually addressed my complaints; they felt like a hard-earned opening out of Rilke’s worldview, exactly the “reach beyond” that I had felt was lacking. There was a sense that his ego had finally dropped out of view and that he was writing to save the world rather than to show off. This is indeed a fine line, in the arts, but crossing it makes all the difference. In his really excellent introduction, Robert Hass writes that some of the early poems “just slightly… tend to congratulate the poet and his reader for having feelings and experiencing beauty.” I appreciated his having said it. The Duino Elegies, however, read deeply, cannot be confused with self-promotion; they are a heartfelt effort to grapple with weight and to do a philosophical service. And there really is no reading them shallowly. That, again, is why this took so long.

I must admit to having lost touch with the depths of these poems in the months since I made the effort; I’m flipping through them now to refresh my memory but it’s not an experience so easily refreshed. What I retain is a sense of a rich, savory melancholy, converting to and from deep thought. A bit like this – (which, good lord, was destroyed in a fire last week??!!) – but a really superb visual mood analogue is this painting, about which one of the Elegies was explicitly written, back in a time when to see this tremendously famous Picasso, you had to be lucky enough to know the lady who owned it and be invited to stay in her living room, staring at it, while you work on a poem.

Stephen Mitchell, who we last encountered as someone whose translation of Gilgamesh I didn’t read, has here done a job of translation that I would call “good.” The English is readable, unpretentious, and conscientiously enough matched to the German, which appears opposite, that one can more or less easily read the originals using the translation as guide. Which is what I considered myself to be doing. However, Mitchell’s efforts to exactly preserve the meaning of complicated interlocking ideas are, on occasion, both overly apparent and unsuccessful. Untranslatably elegant German conceptual arrangements are rendered in solutions that are often ambiguous, in ways I don’t think he foresaw. There were quite a few places where I had to retranslate the German myself before I realized that he intended some meek little “as” or “for” to function as a crucial logical connector. There was also at least one place where, on translating it myself, I realized that he had gotten something wrong in the meaning; the speaker rather than the addressed was the actor in a sentence, or something of that sort. Also – and it’s probably too much to ask – but his English is not actually beautiful. When the ideas were rich and intimate I wanted to be surrounded by rich and intimate sound; sorry, only on the German side of the page. The English feels like it has been worked out carefully rather than fluidly. It reads like exactly what it is; a great poet translated by a smart, touchy-feely guy who likes translating.

This is a fine and admirable volume and I’m not saying I think there are better translations out there to be had.

This has been long enough. There is much more to be said about Rilke but I’ll either say it in the comments when people write in to complain, or we’ll all just agree to let it go unsaid.

As for the sample poem. One of the last things Rilke wrote (“May or June 1925”), and one of the last things in this book, is this odd “trilogy,” which as you’ll see from the subtitle, he wrote expressly with the intent that it would be set to music by Ernst Krenek, then 25 years old. Krenek did it the next year, only a few months before Rilke’s death. Don’t know what Rilke thought of the settings, but as they were the ultimate realization of his wishes for these poems, it’s odd – at least to me – that they are far far more difficult to come by than the text itself, which is in every bookstore. So I’m putting them up here even though it’s a copyright violation; again my justification is that the fairly exclusive readership here puts a very real limit on the potential scope of damages to Universal Edition, which I estimate at $0 if not less. When this site gets featured on the news, I’ll take it down, along with the Absil.

The score.

That’s my scan of the New York Public Library copy. It seems to be a first edition, and judging by the pencilling on the cover, someone seems to have at one point taken it to the 15th floor (of the Steinway Building?) to the office of the League of Composers to give to Mrs. Reis so that Mr. Bamberger could play from it during the concert. That is, the concert on February 27, 1938 at the Cosmopolitan Club, at which Mr. Krenek himself played his Suite for Piano. Too bad they didn’t get him to sign this score while they had him there. This opus has been recorded; you can buy this or this if you want to hear it. Or just listen to the samples from the first link to get an idea.

Anyway, the score contains the German; here’s Mitchell’s English. For what it’s worth, this is hardly one of the most successful (or ambitious) poems in the collection, but it is very much characteristic. I think it shows up Mitchell’s weaknesses, too. Krenek does a reasonable if dated job of trying to make something respectful and intelligent out of it but he illustrates the text too literally, and overall misses the pensive quality that seems essential to Rilke. His opening page comes the closest, I think.

O LACRIMOSA
(trilogy for future music of Ernst Křenek)

I

Oh tear-filled figure who, like a sky held back,
grows heavy above the landscape of her sorrow.
And when she weeps, the gentle raindrops fall,
slanting upon the sand-bed of her heart.

Oh heavy with weeping. Scale to weigh all tears.
Who felt herself not sky, since she was shining
and sky exists only for clouds to form in.

How clear it is, how close, your land of sorrow,
beneath the stern sky’s oneness. Like a face
that lies there, slowly waking up and thinking
horizontally, into endless depths.

II

It is nothing but a breath, the void.
And that green fulfillment
of blossoming trees: a breath.
We, who are still the breathed-upon,
today still the breathed-upon, count
this slow breathing of earth,
whose hurry we are.

III

Ah, but the winters! The earth’s mysterious
turning-within. Where around the dead
in the pure receding of sap,
boldness is gathered,
the boldness of future springtimes.
Where imagination occurs
beneath what is rigid; where all the green
worn thin by the vast summers
again turns into a new
insight and the mirror of intuition;
where the flowers’ color
wholly forgets that lingering of our eyes.