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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Rainer Maria Rilke developed one of the most singular poetic styles of the twentieth century. Visionary yet always anchored in the real world, his poems give profound expression to fundamental questions of love and death, of the chaos of the modern world as well as the spiritual consolation of art and nature.Change Your Life draws from across Rilke's career to offer a comprehensive view of his most essential poetry, featuring major selections from the great Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus alongside less frequently anthologised work. In these dazzling new translations by acclaimed poet Martyn Crucefix, Rilke's poems beguile with fresh insight and mystery.
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‘Crucefix’s version is substantial, powerful and necessary work. Readers may well fall in love with parts of it and regard the Crucefix Rilke as their life partner’
GEORGE SZIRTES ON MARTYN CRUCEFIX’S TRANSLATIONS OF THE DUINO ELEGIES
‘Crucefix’s translation will have, and keep, a place on my shelves where all the poetry lives’
PHILIP PULLMAN ON MARTYN CRUCEFIX’S TRANSLATIONS OF THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
CHANGE YOUR LIFE
ESSENTIAL POEMS
RAINER MARIA RILKE
SELECTED, TRANSLATED, AND INTRODUCED BY MARTYN CRUCEFIX
PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS
The rain running its cold fingers
down our windows, unseeing;
we lean back in deep armchairs
to listen, as if the quiet hours
dripped from a weary mill all evening.
Then Lou speaks. Our souls incline
one to another. Even cut flowers
in the window nod their utmost bloom,
and we are utterly at home,
here, in this tranquil, white house.
‘To Celebrate You’, unpublished, 1898?
The transformed speaks only to those who let go. All who cling on choke
Unpublished notebook entry, 1917
Rose, oh sheer contradiction, joy,
being no one’s sleep beneath so many
lids.
Epitaph, composed by Rilke for himself,
27th October 1925
for Debra Allbery—for first
pointing me towards Rilke
for Mario Petrucci—for
encouraging me to keep going
Contents
Acknowledgements
Some of these translations (or earlier versions of them) have appeared with the following journals and websites: Acumen, Agenda, Asymptote, Caduceus Journal, Long Poem Magazine, Magma, Modern Poetry in Translation, New Welsh Review, Other Poetry, The Fortnightly Review, Trespass.
Sonnets to Orpheus, I 24 was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in March 2011 in the Sunday Feature entitled ‘Amongst the Ranks of the Angels: Rainer Maria Rilke’. The producer was Julian May.
I am very grateful to all at Pushkin Press, especially Adam Freudenheim and Rory Williamson, for the opportunity to put this book together. Thanks are also due to Will Stone for originally and so generously offering to throw my hat into the ring and to Linden Lawson for her indefatigable eye for detail.
I am indebted to the Royal Literary Fund for awarding me fellowships at the British Library and the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, which enabled me to encourage the writing of others in a variety of forms as well as spend time working on these translations of Rilke.
The selections of my translations from Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus are slightly revised versions of those originally published by (and still in print with) Enitharmon Press in 2006 and 2012 respectively. In those publications, I thanked Stephen Stuart-Smith (and thank him again here for his kind permission to reprint). The Duino Elegies translation, in particular, was dedicated to Nick and Candy and all the Fine Arts people of the late 1990s.
There is no end to the particular debt I owe to two genuine Germanists: David Constantine and Karen Leeder. Other debts of conversation, consolation, casual chats and general encouragement remain due to Debra Allbery, Neil Curry, Hilary Davies, Clive Eastwood, Sue Hubbard, Valerie Jack, Joan Michelson, Mario Petrucci, Denis Timm, Tim Turner, James Wykes and Aprilia Zank.
Introduction
In Moscow, in May 1900, the Russian writer Sofia Schill observed ‘a thin young man of middle height wearing a queer felt hat and a jacket covered in pockets. [He was] as fair of skin as a girl; his nose and oval face were elongated; his large pale eyes gazed with the clarity of an infant’s… Nothing could have become him more than his little brown goatee.’1 This was the twenty-five-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke, during his second visit to Russia. At this point he had already published several books of poetry, but would later dismiss them as consisting of mere ‘cloudiness’. Twenty-six years on, the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva would write to Rilke, praising him and his work as constituting a veritable ‘topography of the soul’; in 1932, she set him up as nothing less than a ‘counterpoise’ to the accumulating horrors of the early twentieth century: ‘The earth will be forgiven for our times for the sake of Rilke, who lived in them. He could have been born only in our times because he is their opposite, because he is essential, because he is an antidote. That is what makes him our contemporary.’2
The poetry felt to justify elevating this thin young man to near-divine status is comprehensively traced in this new selection and translation of Rilke’s essential poetry. His reputation is that of a ‘pure’ poet, one whose sole aim was to express the nature of the world (both inward and outward) in evocative, lambent, musical language. Yet his life project was a more broad, passionate exploration of our loss of and potential recovery of wholeness of being. He writes of how we create deities from the ‘unwieldy and ungraspable forces’ of our own inner life which we then place ‘outside us’.3 As we forget the origins of these false gods, they come to exert a malign influence upon us. He felt the same sleight of perception had also been performed in our relationship with death so that, once externalized and similarly alienated, we come to see it as the contradiction, the adversary of all we love, of all we narrowly define by the term ‘life’.
Hence, we find ourselves living lives that are alienated and baffled, with our perceptions cramped and distorted by preconceptions. Rilke’s work hinges on his rejection of the illusory transcendent, his embracing of death as part of life itself and his consequent praising of the resultant, renovated, more expansive notion of our being in the world. Crucially, the language we use to describe and understand our lives does not escape suspicion: it too can be a source of delusion. So Rilke’s extraordinary poetic skills are progressively deployed as no mere vehicle of expression: his vision of the truth could not be articulated through conventional language but only as song: ‘Oh, Orpheus singing! Oh, tall tree in the ear!’
Rilke was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague in 1875. His father was a stolid, occasionally rough soldier-turned-railway-worker while his mother aspired socially and spiritually, with an almost manic devotion to the forms of Catholicism. His mother’s faith spurred the young man’s wariness of orthodox religion as well as his lifelong commitment to truth and honesty. She seems to have found some consolation in dressing her son in girl’s clothing. At the age of ten, the father’s influence packed him off to military school, but this proved an unmitigated disaster. Back in Prague, the young René, emerging from what he called an ‘unachieved childhood’, fell variously in love and took refuge in a facility for writing unremarkable poems, publishing collections almost annually through the mid-1890s.
The most important encounter of his life, in May 1897, was with the thirty-seven-year-old Lou Andreas-Salomé, already well known in German modernist circles for her philosophical and critical writings, her fiction and a book about her friendship with Friedrich Nietzsche. Lou transformed her lover’s handwriting, and his name (to Rainer). Rilke wrote how, under her influence, the world ‘lost its cloudiness for me, this fluid forming and surrendering of itself, which was the manner and poverty of my first verses; […] I learnt a simplicity […] I gained the maturity to speak of simple things’.4 He also came to sense the danger posed by what he called ‘the interpreted world’. By this he meant a world view shorn of all mystery (the one, of course, that most of us inhabit most of the time). Language, consequently, becomes narrowly instrumental, merely utilitarian, rather than capable of evoking the full mysterious truth, the oneness of being.
It was with Lou that Rilke travelled twice to Russia. There, he seems to have hoped to find a country living closer to Nature, a people who had not yet exhausted the wealth of their spiritual resources. These Russian experiences bore fruit in the poems he wrote in 1899 that became The Book of Monastic Life. In some, he adopts the persona of a Russian icon painter who, in the opening poem, hears the monastery bell ringing:
There! The hour inclines and stirs me awake
with its clear, metallic blow
[…]
I love all things—there is nothing too small,
but boldly I paint it on gold
Over the next five years, Rilke added two more collections of poems to Monastic Life (The Book of Pilgrimage [1901] and The Book of Poverty and Death [1903]), eventually publishing the whole in 1905 as The Book of Hours. Without doubt, this is Rilke’s first really significant work. By the end of his life, the Hours had outsold the now far more acclaimed New Poems twofold.
However, after their second Russian sojourn, Lou brought their relationship to an end and Rilke spent time at an artists’ community in Worpswede, in northern Germany, where he seems to have fallen in love with two women artists. Paula Becker eventually married Otto Modersohn and she died soon after giving birth to her child. Rilke’s 1909 poem ‘Requiem for a Friend’ is his moving meditation on her fate. In the end, it was Clara Westhoff whom Rilke married, and the couple had a daughter, Ruth. But married life, with its compromises and the responsibilities of parenthood, was not Rilke’s style. It was not long before he set off on the hard road of his chosen vocation, a solitary, artistic pilgrimage.
By 1902 he was working alone in Paris, a city which heavily influenced the third section of The Book of Hours, with its portraits of urban poverty, as well as his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It was also the opportunity to observe Auguste Rodin, the great sculptor, that drew him to the French capital. Rilke’s progress towards a poetic style that cultivated the ‘earthly’, the world of ‘things’, was well under way and, astonishingly, even as the Hours was being completed, he had also been writing the poems collected in 1902 as The Book of Images. Many of these poems still look back to conventionally religious subjects, but others foreshadow the New Poems in their steady, ‘earthly’, observations:
The evening is slowly changing its clothes,
held for it by a rim of ancient trees;
you watch: and the earth, growing distant, moves,
this slipping from you, this lifted to the skies;
Rodin’s methods of closely observing the real world fascinated Rilke and, in parallel, he became a more self-conscious labourer in the German language. In a poem like ‘The Panther’, the fruits of a more compact diction, a more supple syntax, and a lexis of more precise everyday words can be seen:
The lithe, smooth steps of his powerful gait
that, within the smallest of circles, spins round,
is like a dance of power about a point
at which an immense will stands, stunned.
The two volumes of New Poems contain works that can be held up as examples of what Rilke termed ‘art-things’. He wrote to Lou: ‘The thing is definite, the art-thing must be even more definite; removed from all accident, removed from ambiguity, released from time and given to space.’5 Roaming through Paris (including the city zoo and the Bois de Boulogne), Rilke found subjects in a gazelle, parrots, a swan, flowers, a burned-out house, fountains and other art objects. The New Poems are not merely studiedly objective (as is often said), nor are they subjective, but complicatedly both at once. Gazing at Rodin’s work, Rilke began to understand that a sculpture’s surface ‘consisted of an infinite number of encounters of light with the object […] and there were such places of encounter without end, and none where something was not happening. There was no emptiness.’6 In a Rodin sculpture—as he wished for in his own poetry—Rilke saw that ‘no part of the body was insignificant or slight: it lived’.7 This recalls the description of the surface of the ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, upon which, as an act of perception and an implied imperative, ‘there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.’
Rilke published almost nothing for a little over a decade following the appearance of the second volume of New Poems. In fact, though he seems to have felt it was a period of drought (and discussed it as such often in his letters), poems were being written and the years between 1910 and 1922 were also filled with much reading (of Friedrich Hölderlin especially) and translation work. The limits of an orientation towards the visual arts—as learnt at Worpswede, alongside Rodin, and powerfully deployed in the New Poems—are scrutinized, for example, in the poem ‘Turning Point’:
For there is, you see, a limit to looking.
And the world, so looked-upon,
wants to flourish in love.
What is now required, the poem implies, in addition to mere observation, is what he calls ‘heart-work’, a more conscious focus on the self-transformative, affective possibilities of the work of noticing.
The long-nurtured fruits of these cumulative lessons in observation, feeling, a provisional vision of life, poetic diction, and syntax are what burst from Rilke years later at Muzot. Much has been written about the inspired ‘hurricane of the heart and mind’ that resulted in the completion of both the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus in a few weeks of February 1922. The Duino poems are not elegies in any formal or traditional sense, but they dramatize the kind of loss that had always been Rilke’s subject: the necessary loss of our necessary preconceptions about the world, so that we can (if only passingly) experience with truth and honesty its ultimate nature as a wholeness of being. The angels who make brief appearances stand for all that we are not (yet might briefly glimpse). The lack of self-consciousness Rilke perceives in natural creatures—their capacity to see the Open without the screens of self-conscious reflection—proves to be an alternative way of critiquing the way we live. Attending to the natural world, to the earthly, enables us to gain greater distance from ‘interpretation’—the conceptual world—until, as the seventh Duino poem proclaims: ‘Simply being here is glorious!’
Applying lessons learnt from his predecessor, Hölderlin, Rilke understood that the only chance of preserving the sense of such glory is to be sure that no single particular interpretation of experience becomes fixed, is not taken as solely valid. The language of poetry itself becomes a way of circumventing interpretation, attaching ourselves to things, going out to the world, engaging ourselves with it, all the while retaining a sense of its inevitable provisionality. We are, then, to eschew the ‘wooing’ of angels, for the truth is ‘my call is always filled with leaving and against / such a powerful current [angels] cannot advance’. As the ninth elegy declares, ‘Here is the time for what can be said—here its home.’ The final poem, with its strange allegorical landscapes and personages, argues that ‘here’ must also encompass human death. Rilke wrote to his Polish translator: ‘Affirmation of life-AND-death appears as one in the “Elegies”… we must try to achieve the fullest consciousness of our existence, which is at home in both unbounded realms, inexhaustibly nourished by both.’8
Alongside what Rilke called the ‘gigantic white canvas’ of the Duino Elegies came the ‘little rust-coloured sail’ of the Orphic songs of the Sonnets to Orpheus.9 Rilke’s Eurydice was Vera Ouckama Knoop. In Munich, before the war, she had been a playmate of his own now neglected daughter. She was beautiful, a dancer, and attracted much attention through the ‘art of movement and transformation which was innate in her body and spirit’.10
