Duino Elegies E-Book

Rainer Maria Rilke

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

With all his contradictions, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the fathers of modern literature and the Duino Elegies one of its great monuments. Begun in 1912 but not completed until 1922, they are 'modern' in almost every sense the word has acquired; yet Rilke was by temperament anti-modern, a snob and a romantic. He was devoted to the three A's: Architecture, Agriculture, Aristocracy. The Duino Elegies aroused real excitement among English readers when the now-dated Leishman/Spender versions first appeared in the 1930s. Stephen Cohn, the distinguished artist and teacher, has worked for over three years to complete this outstanding new translation. Peter Porter writes: 'Your translation must have grandeur, essential size in its component parts, and speed to catch the marvellous twists of Rilke's imagination.' He adds, 'Cohn has met all these requirements.' These versions show a rare empathy with the originals and an instinct for the right diction and cadence. They are, says Porter, 'the most flowing and organic I have read.'

Leseprobe

Duineser Elegien

Aus dem Besitz der Fürstin Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Preface by PeterPorter

Introduction

DieersteElegie

The First Elegy

DiezweiteElegie

The Second Elegy

DiedritteElegie

The Third Elegy

DievierteElegie

The Fourth Elegy

DiefunfteElegie

The Fifth Elegy

DiesechsteElegie

The Sixth Elegy

DiesiebenteElegie

The Seventh Elegy

DieachteElegie

The Eighth Elegy

DieneunteElegie

The Ninth Elegy

DiezehnteElegie

The Tenth Elegy

Notes

Copyright

I have been given very generous help in my work on the Elegies: by Ray Ockenden of Wadham College, Oxford; by Peter Porter; and by Corbet Stewart of Queen Mary College, London. I also wish to thank Parimal, from whose suggestion this whole project grew.

I dedicate this translation to my wife Laura, and to these friends and helpers.

S.C.

Preface

THEDuinoElegies, and indeed Rilke himself, are the victims of their own enormous success. Perhaps no poems in another European language have made so dramatic and sustained an impact on English-speaking readers in this century. But just writing that last sentence comes up with the rub: these echt-Deutsch poems, embodying perhaps the most remarkable leap of the German imagination since the heyday of Romanticism, are known to generations of their admirers in English translations of varying degrees of loyalty to the original. One must be fair about this – some poetry, even the most idiosyncratic, still lives in what you might call the sinopia of its ideas. The DuinoElegies and the poems of Cavafy are prominent examples of such a special shelf-life. The second point to stress is that the Elegies first gained currency in a version of quite special authority – that by Stephen Spender and J.B. Leishman – which has gone on being a steady seller since the Hogarth Press first issued it in the 1930s. Dozens of rival translations have appeared on the scene since this one, but none has replaced it in public esteem. Leishman had been translating Rilke throughout the 1930s and his and Spender’s success owes something to the timing of their publication: the Anglo-Saxon psyche was passing through one of its conversions – away from positivism and towards mysticism, you might say. True, Modernism had been imposed on the British and American consciousness by Eliot and Pound, but that movement was essentially French. Not everyone in these islands or in the States took kindly to such Frenchness, especially when it was filtered through scraps of Provençal and made Dante pre-eminent over Shakespeare, and it became decidedly quirky when the Cantos appeared on the scene. Rilke, dead prematurely in 1926, appeared in his newly-run-up English dress as a Messiah. Here was something different from the ‘aesthetic’ tones of Pound and Eliot: it was almost case-history poetry, it seemed to speak with the accents of Freud (an Austrian voice like the hardly-known Kafka’s or Musil’s). At the same time it was unswervably serious. Perhaps Rilke’s most noticeable stylistic tic to his English-speaking readers was his use of personification. This was not in itself new to English poetry – Shakespeare teems with it – but it amounted in Rilke’s verse, particularly in the DuinoElegies, to a new way of writing. As in dreams, things lost their hard edges, categories leaked into each other – landscape became anthropomorphic. Matched to Rilke’s Tarnhelm-like fluidity was a syntax at once magisterial and serpentine: the German genius for forming and reforming words like carriages coupled to an ever-changing train was turned from a dangerous bore to a newfangled attraction. Perhaps not since Milton or the Arnold of ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ had English readers encountered such a dragon’s-tail to a poem as the one which winds down at the end of the Fifth Elegy. Suddenly, German became the rage.

In Britain the 1930s was the age of Auden as well as the age of Rilke. The influence of Rilke on Auden is a complex subject. Concepts like ‘To settle in the village of the heart, / My darling, can you bear it?’ seem Rilke-like, and there is Auden’s tribute among the knowing couplets of ‘New Year Letter’.

And RILKE, whom dieDinge bless,

The Santa Claus of loneliness.

…

Then, as I start protesting, with

The air of one who understands,

He puts a RILKE in my hands.

‘You know the Elegies, I’m sure –

O Seligkeit der Kreatur

Dieimmer bleibt im Schoosse – womb

In English is a rhyme to tomb.’

Yet I suspect that the vogue for all things German, Berlin, boys, Brecht, Communism, the mesmerising progress of. Fascism, the cult of sun and undress – which Auden and Isherwood substituted for an obligatory admiration for that French culture which had previously been the intellectual mode among English writers – had more to do with Rilke’s popularity than any practical influence his poetry exerted on English poets. The irony of this popularity would not have been lost on Rilke had he lived to see it. He was, after all, a paid-up Anglophobe; he had lived in Paris and he admired French art. But once Rilke had conquered the Anglo-Saxon imagination his triumph never faltered, and has not done so to this day.

It is not my intention to write an essay on Rilke as a poet but rather to introduce Stephen Cohn’s remarkable English versions of the DuinoElegies. And yet, more must still be said about Rilke’s appeal to readers of English. Why have so many translators addressed themselves to the task of rendering him into English? A sort of new Rilke is reborn in English dress, one not always recognised by German-speakers. I have often mentioned my enthusiasm for Rilke’s poetry to Germans and Austrians only to receive in return their severe reservations about his stature and performance. Had I read Stefan George, Dehmel, Trakl, Morgenstern, Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Bobrowski, etc.? Rilke’s German is too difficult for us possessors of opera-German to be able to do more than read him haltingly in the original. But he is not the sort of poet you can consult like a table of logarithms – you must read him headlong, as his syntax and imagination demand that you do. So, willy nilly, you must read him in English. Here an important codicil to the great poetic will should be entered: if poetry is that which gets lost in translation, nevertheless poetic shapes are independent of the quiddities of language. The way Rilke dramatises the Gestalt, though new in English, is just as exciting in our tongue as it is in the German. Freud can do the same. Thus the job of the translator of Rilke is to seek the underlying structure of Rilke’s thought-and-feeling, and only then to cope with its clothing in words. Of course, this secondary task is baffling enough, since Rilke’s German is as rich and involved as a tropical jungle. Rilke’s case is, in this respect, different from Freud’s, of whom it has been said that he writes the most lucid German since Luther. Rilke’s language serves poetic insight and is not ideas-carrying prose. (Much German prose could be described as ideas-concealing.) It is that Rilke’s mind has got into our minds, and thence into our sensibility and language. Hundreds of poets who know little Rilke know ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ with its injunction, ‘You must change your life’, ‘The Panther’, ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes’, and the famous opening of the First Elegy. ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes’ must have been translated as often as Valéry’s ‘Le Cimetière Marin’ and frequently just as unsatisfactorily. Thus, when we tackle the DuinoElegies we are coming to terms with a set of chimerical shadows, the bits of Rilke which have got into our blood and worked in it like Auden’s ‘filter-passing predators’, as well as attempting a formidable technical task with language.

It has taken Stephen Cohn more than three years of hard work and constant revision to complete his translation. During this period I have had many sessions with him, going over certain passages again and again seeking eloquent English for Rilke’s elusive poetic vision. The real Rilke poem seems to hover before you like Plato’s already-existing ideal form. Conjuring it down on the page becomes the job of a shaman. One thing you cannot do – and some of Rilke’s translators have done it – is to find a loosely colloquial Procrustean form – say, unrhymed three-line stanzas – and pour all the protean poetry of the Elegies into these containers like a confectioner making sweets. Your translation must have grandeur, essential size in its component parts, and speed to catch the marvellous twists of Rilke’s imagination. Seeking an English form for each Elegy which reproduces the technical devices of the German will not work. On the other hand, the English should match the German at least in outline, and should not diminish or over-elaborate. Cohn has met all these requirements, in my view, and has added a natural eloquence of his own which makes his versions of the Elegies the most flowing and organic of those I have read. The rhythms are difficult: how to match Rilke’s ‘onwardness’ in a language which does not dovetail together as happily as German does. Grinding dissonances and rhythmical thumps are strong drawbacks in the Spender/Leishman translations. And he has made sense of those weird German yokings which if translated literally sound like Bedlam-in-the-computer in English. He has the first and most valuable of qualifications as a translator: he fell in love with the poems and wanted to remake them in his own diurnal language. German was his first tongue, and it is to that loved but rejecting culture he has returned on a pilgrimage in these translations.

There are notes on the translations provided at the back of this book, and I shall confine myself to making only a few points here. In the First Elegy, the translator’s solution to the conflict of possibilities when rendering the famous opening provides a key to his method throughout the poems. At no time is Rilke’s meaning betrayed, yet this meaning comes to us in a nimbus of light. Rilke is curiously argumentative for a poet, and Cohn gives him to us in his full combativeness, but never at the expense of that eloquence which is argument’s other. And there is no fudging of Rilke’s Angels: they are present in full Pentecostal dress. Nor are Rilke’s romantic exhortations denied their oracular bossiness. Strangeness is made natural but not neutered – you will find ‘the young man, the one sired by a neck on a nun’ in his proper place in the Fifth Elegy, and you will wonder at the beautifully gentle winding down at the end of this incomparable poem:

And suppose they found it;

suppose they found it with an audience around them

of the un-numberable and silent dead:

would not those dead then scatter

their last, their carefully-hoarded ever-kept-secret

coins of happiness – eternal legal tender –

upon that couple who at last

are truthfully smiling, upon that ineffable carpet

… finally stilled?

For the numinous Eighth Elegy – Rilke’s summoning of ‘the sadness of the creatures’ and of their beauty also – Cohn employs iambic pentameter, the most natural of English metres, since Rilke uses it too. English iambics sound different from German, but his matching is both felicitous and precise. The Tenth Elegy, the bitterest, finds him ready to catch Rilke’s humour, as in the ‘Sex Life of Money’ section. The apotheosis of this extraordinary poem is splendidly rendered.

No matter how many versions of the DuinoElegies you have you will need Cohn’s. I cannot quite parody Goethe and state that here the untranslatable is at last translated, but it is almost the case. These are fine poems in English, and they are Rilkean poems too. The Elegies belonged from the start to the German-speaking world and were not just the property of the Princess of Thurn and Taxis. We English-speakers have claimed them as a bequest to us as well.

PeterPorter

Introduction

ON A day in January 1912, preoccupied and pacing the bastions of Castle Duino, the wind howling and the Adriatic raging beneath him, Rilke seemed to hear a voice which called to him from the storm:

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?

Who, if I cried out, would hear me – among the Angel hierarchies?

He copied these words into his notebook and from this dramatic moment his life’s mission, as he saw it, truly began. The First and Second Elegies followed immediately, but the Elegy cycle was not to be completed until 1922. Rilke believed that the Elegies were his Auftrag: the work he had been given to perform in life. For ten bitter years it must have seemed that he might never complete them.

In the February of 1922, at the little Château de Muzot, in the Valais, during an amazing three weeks Rilke experienced a frenzy of achievement: he ‘completed’ the Elegies and then wrote the Elegie des Saltimbanques to replace the original Fifth Elegy. But in addition he began and completed the two sequences of the SonnetstoOrpheus; a total of 55 sonnets (as they now stand) which bear close relation to the Elegies. Rilke felt himself rewarded and achieved. He died soon after, on 29 December 1926.