Duino Elegies E-Book

Rainer Maria Rilke

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 66

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The original English translation of Rilke's landmark poetry cycle, by Vita and Edward Sackville-West - reissued for the first time in 90 years 'The deepest mysteries of existence embodied in the most delicate and precise images. For me, the greatest poetry of the 20th century' Philip Pullman In 1931, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press published a small run of a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, in English translation by the writers Vita and Edward Sackville-West. This marked the English debut of Rilke's masterpiece, which would eventually be rendered in English over 20 times, influencing countless poets, musicians and artists across the English-speaking world. Published for the first time in 90 years, the Sackville-Wests' translation is both a fascinating historical document and a magnificent blank-verse rendering of Rilke's poetry cycle. Featuring a new introduction from critic Lesley Chamberlain, this reissue casts one of European literature's great masterpieces in fresh light.

Leseprobe

DUINO ELEGIES

RAINER MARIA RILKE

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY VITA SACKVILLE-WEST & EDWARD SACKVILLE-WEST

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LESLEY CHAMBERLAIN

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

‘Reissued for the first time in 90 years… Fascinating’

GUARDIAN

‘A real event’

EXBERLINER

Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroductionDUINO ELEGIESThe First ElegyThe Second ElegyThe Third ElegyThe Fourth ElegyThe Fifth ElegyThe Sixth ElegyThe Seventh ElegyThe Eighth ElegyThe Ninth ElegyThe Tenth ElegyOriginal Translators’ Note from the 1931 EditionMore from Pushkin ClassicsCopyright

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Introduction

When he died in 1926 Rainer Maria Rilke was the greatest poet in German. His reinvention of the lyric language had made the age-old themes of love, death and solitude strange and enchanting, and brought him readers all over Europe and across the United States. His translators into English met him, and his translator into Polish corresponded with him personally. Publishers clamoured to bring out his work, including the DuinoElegies, which was one of two final collections he published in his lifetime.

Born in Prague, then still part of the Austrian Empire, in 1875, Rilke led a difficult life. From 1901 he was married, with a child, but for the rest of his career he moved from rented address to address for the sake of his work. He was slight, mostly very short of money and worried 8about his health. On and off for many years he lived in Paris, but when that city exhausted him he travelled to quiet spots elsewhere in Europe. Once he went to Egypt. Invitations from wealthy well-wishers to stay in gentler circumstances were always welcome, and one of those refuges offered to him was the castle at Duino, on the Italian Adriatic coast near Trieste.

It belonged to the princely German Thurn und Taxis family, and after Christmas 1911 they left Rilke in solitude to practise his art in their bleak fortress, with just a couple of servants in tow. Filling his first days alone with correspondence and walks—he wrote many letters, which have also become part of his legacy—he suddenly found his mark, and by mid-February 1912 the first two of the ten DuinoElegies were written, and a third begun. It is because Rilke didn’t complete the cycle until 1922 (by which time he was staying in another castle) that the Elegies have come to be thought of as a late work and the culmination of his career. But they weave and develop many themes that preoccupied him for more than twenty years.

The opening lines are famous:

Who would give ear, among the angelic host,

Were I to cry aloud? And even if one

Amongst them took me swiftly to his heart,9

I should dissolve before his strength of being.

For beauty’s nothing but the birth of terror,

Which we endure but barely, and, enduring,

Must wonder at it, in that it disdains

To compass our destruction. Every angel

Is terrible.

Yet these well-known lines are relatively unfamiliar in the 1931 version by Edward and Vita Sackville-West. Though the Sackville-Wests were the first to publish a complete English translation,1 their book soon disappeared from currency, which the evident quality on display here shows to have been a mistake.

The first thing to note is how immediately intelligible and gripping these English lines are, giving the lie to Rilke’s reputation as a difficult poet. He needn’t be. The second is that here is a translation into blank verse, the most traditional and versatile of English metres. Straight away it carries the narrative forward, as poetry and confession and story. To my knowledge, all the later translators of the DuinoElegies through the twentieth century opted for a more modern-sounding free verse to accommodate Rilke’s rich and startling imagery. But Rilke was writing when literary forms—here more or less regular syllabic patterns—were still precious artistic resources. He took 10liberties with received templates, as all artists do. But the reader should know, and be able to feel, that the original DuinoElegies were intensely rhythmic and closely worked. Rilke’s aim, in part, was to create the feel of legends.

The ten poems vary one from another, and within themselves, and they overlap. The first and second, with their angelic motif, are deserved favourites. They evoke an ethereal life that might yet be ours but eludes our grasp even as we try to imagine it:

How strange it is to live no more on earth;

To make no further use of customs learnt;

No longer to attribute to the rose

Or anything of fair especial promise

A metaphor of human destiny.

So too the ninth and the tenth elegies settle readily in the memory, the ninth with its thunderous affirmation of living in the present moment, and the tenth with its haunting visit to the Land of the Plaints, people who may be other selves for all of us, since they have loved and lost. The third and fourth elegies, by contrast, are like fragments of intimate autobiography, sensual and tormented, but also faintly Proustian, as the poet remembers his mother. Rilke’s reworking in the fifth of Picasso’s Les11Saltimbanques, after he stayed in a grand Munich apartment where the original was hanging, is another monument within the cycle. It merges that tableau of resting acrobats with the memory of a troupe of street performers Rilke used to watch in Paris, and the result is a marvellous verbal tapestry in which the looping exercises the artistes perform are matched by the words on the page.

All the poems exude Rilke’s tender love of animals and his admiration for their superior skill in simple living, contrasted with our own. As he continues in the first elegy:

Every angel

Is terrible, and thus in self-control

I crush the appeal that rises with my sobs.

Of whom, alas, of whom shall we have need?

Neither of angels nor of men: already

The sagacious animals have found us out,

How little at ease we live and move

In this intelligible world.

Readers should also look out for Rilke’s love of buildings of all kinds, his homage to the materiality of stone, and his sense of place. He is interested in how we dwell on earth, and his descriptions of nature, village, town and 12home are continuous. We may not live at ease with ourselves, but the forms of shelter, and rest, and togetherness give some clues as to what we’re like. In truth there is not much togetherness in Rilke. Love is usually love that is over. Gestures in the direction of angels, or God, are not answered. But childhood is a memory of closeness and magic, and the young woman Plaint, who takes the poet by the hand at a funfair in the tenth elegy, is a memory of innocence and soaring imagination.

The DuinoElegies, so rich in detail and in their ever-shifting music, remind me of ten short symphonies by a single composer. They can probably be played in any order, though the tenth, which proposes a kind of resolution, has some entitlement to form an ending. The overarching mood brings Rilke’s Austrian compatriot Gustav Mahler to mind, and because in Mahler too can be found the beauty and the terror, the storms and the ethereal wistfulness which colour Rilke’s work, so the uneasy zeitgeist of the first two decades of the European twentieth century seems to announce itself.

How the Sackville-Wests came to be the work’s first translators into English is a multi-layered story of celebrities who knew each other and of two people who had a real gift for the task. Vita, novelist, short-story writer and prize-winning poet, was at the height of her career when 13