Sonnets to Orpheus and Letters To a Young Poet E-Book

Rainer Maria Rilke

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

Seitenzahl: 221

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

'They are perhaps most mysterious, even to me,' wrote Rainer Maria Rilke of the Sonnets to Orpheus, 'in the manner in which they arrived and imposed themselves on me - the most puzzling dictation I have ever received and taken down.' Rilke, born in Prague in 1875, died at Valmont near Montreux in the last days of 1926. His Sonnets to Orpheus may appear comparatively simple, even casual, at first reading, but they are crammed with content which resonates far beyond the familiar legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. The Sonnets have an astonishing range which takes in the Singing God and his beloved Eurydice; legend in general, along with time, flight and change; architecture, music and dance; animals, plants, flowers and fruits. They ask to be read by the ear and by the inner eye as much as by the intellect. The Sonnets were 'taken down' during a very few weeks in 1922 - weeks in which the poet also brought his Duino Elegies to completion. In them, Rilke partly identifies himself with Orpheus. The young dancer Vera, for whom the Sonnets are inscribed, taken so young into the Underworld, becomes Eurydice. A tension which adds life to Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus comes through a paradox. Rilke's was a deeply inward, introspective nature, but in the Sonnets he succeeds brilliantly in looking out from his isolation: in making poetry from material which lies in an important sense 'outside'. Rilke's ten letters to the young officer-cadet Franz Xavier Kappus, written between 1903 and 1908, were later published as Letters to a Young Poet. By now the letters have become a part of literary folklore. They contain insights which are as profound today as when they were written, almost a century ago.

Leseprobe

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Sonnets to Orpheus

translated by Stephen Cohn

with

Letters to a Young Poet

translated by Stephen Cohn introduction by Peter Porter

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Sonnets to Orpheus Die Sonnette an Orpheus

Introduction

Sonnets Part One

Sonnets Part Two

Bibliography

Notes Part One

Notes Part Two

Letters to a Young Poet

Introduction by Peter Porter

Preface by Franz Xaver Kappus

The Letters

Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Xaver Kappus

Chronology 1903–1909

 

Also from Carcanet

Copyright

Acknowledgements

I wish once more to thank Peter Porter and Ray Ockenden who generously gave their time and their talent in working on the Sonnets.

David Luke was kind enough to read a draft of the Letters to a Young Poet, and his notes on my text were of great help to me: my thanks to him also.

SONNETS TO ORPHEUS

Introduction

Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regarde-moi qui change!

Après tant d’orgueil, après tant d’étrange

Oisiveté, mais pleine de pouvoir,

Je m’abandonne à ce brillant espace,

Sur les maisons des morts mon ombre passe

Qui m’apprivoise à son frêle mouvoir.

– Paul Valéry, ‘Le Cimetière marin’

‘I find an infinite grace in the fact’, wrote Rilke to his Polish translator Witold Hulewicz, ‘that I was permitted to fill both these sails with the same breath: the small rust-coloured sail of the Sonnets as well as the huge white canvas of the Elegies.’

The year 1922 saw the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses (500 copies were incinerated by the US Post Office), Paul Valéry’s Charmes and Edith Sitwell’s Façade. It was also Rilke’s own great year, in which the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus were both completed. They were published in the following year.

He had begun his work on the Elegies in 1912, at Castle Duino on the Adriatic. Over the years Rilke came more and more to regard them as his life’s-project, his Auftrag or ‘commission’. Between 1912 and 1915 and at various locations he worked on poems in the projected cycle; at Duino itself, at Ronda in the south of Spain, in Paris, and lastly in Munich during the First World War. From this time on his work on the Elegies virtually came to a halt and even Rilke sometimes doubted if he would succeed in completing them. The July of 1921, an exceptionally scorching summer, saw the poet for the first time installed in the primitive Château de Muzot, near Sierre in the Swiss Valais. It was the year in which Rilke had come face to face with the verse of Paul Valéry and had made a translation of ‘Le Cimetière marin’. His encounter with the French Symbolist signalled a new beginning: ‘one day I read Valéry and I knew that my waiting was over’.

Leased for him through the kindness of a benefactor, Werner Reinhart, the little Château de Muzot was perhaps the closest that the poet had ever come to having a home of his own. Dating from the thirteenth century, it is in feeling and scale more a tall manor-farmhouse than what anyone might expect of a ‘château’ – a ‘tower’ of great character, dark in tone and with a stepped gable. Here at Muzot during an explosion of inspired and frenzied creative activity, Rilke succeeded in completing the great structure of the Duino Elegies.

He was also, to his own surprise, ‘given’ the two parts of the Sonnets to Orpheus. ‘They are’, wrote Rilke later, ‘perhaps most mysterious, even to me, in the manner in which they arrived and imposed themselves on me – the most puzzling dictation I have ever received and taken down. The whole of the first part was transcribed by me in one single breathless act of obedience… with not one single word in doubt or needing to be changed.’

The Sonnets of Part 1 were written between 2 and 5 February 1922: twenty-five poems, one of which was later replaced by 1: XXI, the little Kinderfrühlingslied. A twenty-sixth poem, the present 1: XXIII, was later added to Part 1. Between 15 and 23 February Rilke completed the twenty-nine poems of Part 2. The same month of February saw not only the genesis of the Sonnets and the completion of the Elegies, but also the arrival of a further twenty-five poems which seem, as one would expect, to belong to the ‘family’ of the Sonnets. During the same period Rilke found time to write the ‘Brief des jungen Arbeiters’ (the highly controversial ‘Worker Letter’) and also some substantial private letters, including three to Lou Andreas-Salomé.

The return to his work on the Elegies had meant that, initially at least, Rilke had had to retrace his steps and to undertake a kind of day-dream journey to the point in his past life at which that work had been abandoned. The image of the traveller pausing and turning to scan the landscape which has already been left far behind him occurs arrestingly in the Eighth Elegy. But here in the Sonnets there is preponderantly the sense of something different at work, the feeling that we are hearing the voice of a Rilke who suddenly finds himself, perhaps to his own surprise, standing in the very centre of his own and the world’s living present and gazing around him; sometimes in dismay but also often in delight at being himself alive and living in that present, in that world. The Sonnets possess a special openness and lightness, a wind blows through them and their air is fresh to breathe. In the Neue Gedichte, too, the young Rilke under the example of Rodin had started to look at the things, animals and people in the world outside himself with a new freshness, a new surprise, and to make poetry from his looking: an immensely introverted young artist who had at last learned the trick of looking out from the self. In the Sonnets something similar is happening: Rilke seems again to succeed, this time in a slightly different way, in escaping from and transcending the closed box of self. It is as if the Singing God had handed him a key.

Both the Elegies and the Sonnets are difficult poetry, though they are not impenetrably so. Rilke’s Neue Gedichte seem incomparably more accessible but there is no reason why we should not value one kind of poetry for its clarity and another, equally, for its mysteries. In the final year of his life, Rilke wrote to his publisher Anton Kippenberg asking to be sent copies of the Elegies and the Sonnets interleaved with plain paper, so that he could work on an interlinear text – to the Sonnets in particular – for his own use and for the use of certain of his friends. Rilke came only gradually to understand the difficulties presented by the Sonnets and to realise that there are lines in them that are almost incomprehensible without the help of some exegesis. And yet Rilke’s own discursive commentaries can make the poetry seem even more hermetic than before – often his explanations are like prose-poems in their own right, and difficult prose-poems at that.

It is best to stay cautious in ‘explaining Rilke’. In his first letter of 1903 to Franz Xaver Kappus, the officer-cadet ‘young poet’, the twenty-seven-year-old Rilke wrote to his nineteen-year-old disciple: ‘there is nothing which touches works of art so little as does the language of criticism…Few things are in fact as accessible to reason or to language as people will generally try to make us believe. Most phenomena are unsayable, and have their being in a dimension which no word has ever entered; and works of art are the most unsayable of all – they are mysterious presences whose lives endure alongside our own perishable lives…’ In a later letter he returned to this theme: ‘Works of art are infinitely solitary, and nothing comes so little near them as does criticism. It is love alone that can grasp them and hold them and do them justice.’

Having entered Rilke’s caveat, I shall nevertheless again grasp the nettle. Rilke’s Sonnets are built around the Orpheus legend already taken up by him in the magnificent ‘Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes’ of the Neue Gedichte. The story of Orpheus is perhaps based on the life of an actual historical figure, that of a Thracian follower of the cult of Dionysus. According to the legend he married Eurydice, a Dryad or tree-nymph, who was later bitten by a serpent and died. Orpheus valiantly descended to the Underworld to intercede for her return to the land of the living, and by his music so charmed Pluto and Persephone, the guardians of Hades, that they were persuaded to release her. But a condition was imposed that Orpheus should not look at his wife during the journey from Hades back to the world above. Orpheus, momentarily forgetting the prohibition, turned during the journey and looked at Eurydice. Thereupon Eurydice was banished forever to the Underworld; eternally lost to Orpheus by a moment’s inattention on his part.

In the end Orpheus was attacked and torn to pieces by the Thracian Maenads. One explanation provides motive for the murder by claiming that he had interfered with the women’s worship; another says that it was the revenge of the women for the embittered misogyny of the singer since he had been deprived forever of his Eurydice. In versions of the legend, the head and lyre of Orpheus proved indestructible and the head, still speaking, floated down the river Hebrus to be buried finally at Lesbos. According to Aeschylus and Euripides the charm of the song of Orpheus was so potent that it drew trees, wild beasts, and even rocks into its spell.

The Orphic legend later grew into a religion which gained adherents and took root in Attica and the south of Italy in the sixth and seventh centuries. The Oxford Classical Dictionary provides this summary:

Orpheus is connected with Apollo; he is even sometimes said to be his son. The reason is that both laid stress on purifications and righteousness. Orphism implies legalism of ritual and life, mysticism of cult and doctrine, a speculative cosmogony and an anthropogony which emphasised the mixture of good and evil in human nature; it contributed to the transformation of the Underworld into a place of punishment. It made the individual in his relation to guilt and retribution the centre of its teaching…In the classical age it was despised; only Pindar and Plato understood its great thoughts. It sank down to rise again with the recrudescence of mystic ideas in a later age.

Vera Ouckama Knoop, the daughter of acquaintances of Rilke’s, to whom the Sonnets are dedicated as a memorial, died of leukaemia during 1919. She was nineteen years old when she died. Rilke had seen her dance when she was little more than a child and he had been impressed and moved by her talent. Vera’s mother, Gertrud Knoop, later sent Rilke an account of her daughter’s fatal illness which he read in 1922 on the first day of the new year. By a tragic symmetry, Rilke himself was also to die of a leukaemia which, bafflingly, had not been diagnosed by his doctors until a month before his death on 29 December 1926. The theme of ‘those who die young’ had long been of special concern to Rilke, as evidenced in several of the Elegies and also in his three Requiem poems: for the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker; for Wolf von Kalkreuth, a young poet who had committed suicide at the age of nineteen; and for the nine-year-old Peter Jaffé.

The Sonnets to Orpheus are fundamentally poems of invocation, however successfully they may sometimes masquerade as ‘discourse’. As we read them it becomes ever clearer that Rilke in part identifies with Orpheus, while the figure of Vera merges with that of Eurydice, among the Shades. Keeping company with these identifications is Rilke’s celebration of the semi-divine Orpheus in his eternal vocation as originator of song, open-mouthed, inspired, indestructible, his singing head and still-sounding lyre surviving the stoning and tearing of the Maenads. For ‘song’ we may read ‘art’, the currency in which Rilke believed absolutely and to which he devoted his life with steadfastness and courage. It is not for nothing that Rilke’s elegiac poetry is often found to be commemorative of artists and it is worth wondering if the narcissistic and terrible angels of the Duino Elegies do not perhaps represent the artists whose monomania and narcissism can at times seem both more and less than human. Rilke had had exceptional opportunities to study artist-monsters when he stayed at the artists’ colony at Worpswede, and especially perhaps during the many fragile months in which he acted as secretary to Auguste Rodin, at Meudon.

The Elegies are dedicated to Marie Taxis, the Sonnets inscribed as a memorial to the young Vera. The story of the young dancer and the details of her illness and death were certainly among the elements from which the Sonnets grew, but neither Vera’s story nor the Orpheus legend alone seems to lie at the heart of the Sonnets in any straightforward or literal fashion. Perhaps the Sonnets to Orpheus are charged above all with the poet’s own thirsty curiosity about the nature of destiny, of a human life, whether Vera’s short life or that of Rilke’s friend Paula Modersohn-Becker or, indeed, his own relatively short life. Perhaps there is a special wish to understand the ways in which destiny might become even more complex and extended when it is the destiny of ‘a dancer’ or of ‘a singer’ – for there the Doppelbereichhas to take on yet another dimension, and ‘experience’ has to work both for itself and for much more than itself.

Of the form of the Sonnets, Rilke wrote:

I keep always refer ring to them as sonnets. They are perhaps the freest and most transfigured verse that might be understood as belonging to this form – usually so quiet and consistent. But it was the very task of transforming the sonnet, of picking it up and, as it were, taking it along on the run, without destroying it, that was in this instance my particular problem and my project.

The rhyming-schemes here differ little from those of the Neue Gedichte of fourteen years before, of which many are sonnets or near-sonnets. Rilke often switches from abba to cdcd, or from abab to cddc, in the octaves. The sestets contain either two or three rhymes. Rilke makes free use of the permutations permitted by these ground rules, but his rhymes fit with deadlock accuracy. In his metre he allows himself greater freedom, but none that by present-day standards would seem over-indulgent. There are tetrameters, pentameters, some hexameters and, very rarely, fourteeners. His rhythms are predominantly trochaic or dactylic and there are a number of long-liners that pick up and echo the rhythms of the Duino Elegies. Six sonnets, all in Part 1, make use of ultra-short lines which Rilke has borrowed from the French Symbolists. Rilke’s rhythms support the content as well as carrying the sheer sound and movement of his poetry; nowhere more so than in the Sonnets to Orpheus. Part of the Auftrag of translation here might be to make lines that move in a manner that respects Rilke’s own pace and ear.

One should not make too much of the many apparent similarities between Elegies and Sonnets. It is probably almost inevitable that similar language, similar images, should occur again and again across the two works – and this seems especially so when we reflect on the galloping pace at which this poetry was written. There is a misleading sense of familiarity in reading the Sonnets for one who already knows the Elegies, and vice versa: their language, language in the deeper sense, is to some extent the same. But there is less reliable cross-elucidation given than one might expect, and the two works in the end reveal that they are less interconnected than they seem at first. Eudo Mason has suggested that we are justified ‘in considering the Sonnets to Orpheus as quite distinct from the Duinese Elegies and in going in some respects beyond them’. It is a difference of ends where the means are often strikingly alike. To compare Elegies with Sonnets is interesting and rewarding – but it will not prove enormously helpful in ‘discovering’ the poems. What will invariably give such help is to read the poems; then to allow them a little time to settle; then to read them again. Conversely, Rilke’s lines can remain stubbornly reticent if one tries to wring meaning out of them as one wrings out washing.

It would be a misjudgement to believe that the Sonnets are in any way ‘less’ than is the great project of the Duino Elegies. Although some of them are slight, although a few of them may seem underworked, there is a wonderfully accurate congruity between Rilke’s own innocent, circumspect, complex, and endlessly paradoxical nature and the image, presented by legend and folklore, of the Singing God. The Orpheus material is as if heaven-made for Rilke: ‘Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes’ in the Neue Gedichte seems already charged with the lyric conviction triumphantly present in the Sonnets. The Sonnets are far lighter in tone than the Elegies, the outward as against the inward stroke of Rilke’s pendulum, diastole against systole, lyrical, and on the whole affirmative in comparison with the predominantly more oppressive and gothic Elegies. Part 1 of the Sonnets keeps something of the mood of the Neue Gedichte of 1907 and 1908, while Part 2 contains poetry closer to the Elegies; closer thematically, in complexity, and in the occasional difficulties of interpretation. But no sooner has this observation been made than the many exceptions to it come into sharp focus.

Although Rilke himself regarded the Elegies, too, as poetry of affirmation, they begin with a cry in the wilderness and their final image is one of descent – wenn ein Glückliches fällt. The Sonnetsbegin with the ‘tall tree in the ear’ and conclude with World as we know it from the Book of Genesis, our own planet with its stable land and its moving waters.

The Duino Elegies have been described as ‘a project of being’. Such a project may have been what Rilke himself intended but is not necessarily the dimension in which the work has most to offer. The voice of the Sonnets, too, changes from invocation to legend and sometimes to homily. As moralising, preaching, there is matter that must seem contradictory or inconsistent, and even some that may be found offensive. Rilke is infinitely to be valued as a poet: as a preacher, too, he can be brilliant – but he is far less reliable in that role. However, a poem truly a poem (in Wahrheit singen…) will always contain more than can be preached and more than can be explained – both more and less than any overt message – so that poetry to some extent stays independent even of its own propaganda.

Works of art, as well as being ‘infinitely solitary’ (which might also mean ‘self-complete’), can find their form and even their content partly through chance. It is a wonderful and teasing truth that poetry’s power of invocation, its music, story, images, illuminations, everything of real importance, may be owed to the relatively unimportant conventions of rhythm or rhyme. What seems profoundly true of Rilke is that the best of this poet is to be found in the stuff of the poetry; in the nature of its language and of something almost beyond language, its fabric, cadences and imagery, sound and progression. Not discourse. Mystery.

 

STEPHEN COHN

Sonnets Part One

Sonnette Erster Teil

I

Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung!

O Orpheus singt! O hoher Baum im Ohr!

Und alles schwieg. Doch selbst in der Verschweigung

ging neuer Anfang, Wink und Wandlung vor.

Tiere aus Stille drangen aus dem klaren

gelösten Wald von Lager und Genist;

und da ergab sich, daß sie nicht aus List

und nicht aus Angst in sich so leise waren,

sondern aus Hören. Brüllen, Schrei, Geröhr

schien klein in ihren Herzen. Und wo eben

kaum eine Hütte war, dies zu empfangen,

ein Unterschlupf aus dunkelstem Verlangen

mit einem Zugang, dessen Pfosten beben, –

da schufst du ihnen Tempel im Gehör.

I

A tree rose up – O apogee of rising!

Now Orpheus sings, all hearing’s tallest tree.

And nothing speaks but signals in the silence,

new births and transformations, come to be.

From nests and earths deep in the melting wood

the silence and its creatures hastening here

stay hushed not out of cunning, not from fear

but eagerly to hear what must be heard.

No impulse now to bellow, howl or roar

and no roof there to shelter such a horde.

Where nothing but the merest refuge was,

answering only to the blackest need,

a tunnel entrance propped by trembling spars –

you built them their own Temples of the Ear!

II

Und fast ein Madchen wars und ging hervor

aus diesem einigen Gluck von Sang und Leier

und glänzte klar durch ihre Frühlingsschleier

und machte sich ein Bett in meinem Ohr.

Und schlief in mir. Und alles war ihr Schlaf.

Die Bäume, die ich je bewundert, diese

fühlbare Ferne, die gefühlte Wiese

und jedes Staunen, das mich selbst betraf.

Sie schlief die Welt. Singender Gott, wie hast

du sie vollendet, daß sie nicht begehrte,

erst wach zu sein? Sieh, sie erstand und schlief.

Wo ist ihr Tod? Oh, wirst du dies Motiv

erfinden noch, eh sich dein Lied verzehrte? –

Wo sinkt sie hin aus mir?…Ein Madchen fast…

II

A girl, an almost-girl, she bade farewell

to all the twinned delights of song and lyre

and in spring-gauzes, half ethereal

she made herself a bed within my ear

and slept in me and all things were her sleep:

the spaces, meadows, tangible and real,

all trees I ever gazed on, every shape

and every wonder I myself could feel.

She slept the World – How, God of Song, did you

create her never to desire awakening?

Was she set here only to sleep, to dream?

Where is her death? Can you not find the theme,

her requiem, before your songs decay?

Almost a girl where does she drift away?…

III

Ein Gott vermags. Wie aber, sag mir, soll

ein Mann ihm folgen durch die schmale Leier?

Sein Sinn ist Zwiespalt. An der Kreuzung zweier

Herzwege steht kein Tempel für Apoll.

Gesang, wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr,

nicht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes;

Gesang ist Dasein. Für den Gott ein Leichtes.

Wann aber sind wir? Und wann wendet er

an unser Sein die Erde und die Sterne?

Dies ists nicht, Jüngling, daß du liebst, wenn auch

die Stimme dann den Mund dir aufstößt, – lerne

vergessen, daß du aufsangst. Das verrinnt.

In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch.

Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. EinWind.

III

A God can do it. Mankind cannot press

boldly through the narrow lyre and follow:

our nature is double – where the heart’s ways cross

no-one can build a temple to Apollo.

To sing as you teach song needs no desire,

no courtship of something the heart

in its own time may finally acquire.

Singing is being. Easy for the God.

When might we be? When will he turn around

the earth and stars to face our mortal being?

Not this, young lover, though your love may force

your mouth to open wide to give it voice.

Forget how once you sang. True singing

is whispering; a breath within the God; a wind.

IV

O ihr Zärtlichen, tretet zuweilen

in den Atem, der euch nicht meint,

laßt ihn an eueren Wangen sich teilen,

hinter euch zittert er, wieder vereint.

O ihr Seligen, o ihr Heilen,

die ihr der Anfang der Herzen scheint.

Bogen der Pfeile und Ziele von Pfeilen,

ewiger glänzt euer Lächeln verweint.

Fürchtet euch nicht zu leiden, die Schwere,

gebt sie zurück an der Erde Gewicht;

schwer sind die Berge, schwer sind die Meere.

Selbst die als Kinder ihr pflanztet, die Bäume,

wurden zu schwer längst; ihr trüget sie nicht.

Aber die Lüfte…aber die Räume…

IV

O you tender ones – will you wander

in the gentle breath not breathed for you?

Your cheeks in passing put it asunder –

blowing as one wind when you pass through.

O you blessed ones, sanguine and hale,

you who seem born to the heart’s own world,

let the smile behind weeping forever prevail –

a bow to all arrows; each arrow’s gold.

Teach yourselves not to be fearful of sorrow,

offer it back to the weight of the Earth –

to the sheer weight of mountains and seas!

Trees that we planted as children now grow

into burdens too heavy to bear;

yet there are spaces, still there’s the breeze…

V

Errichtet keinen Denkstein. Laßt die Rose

nur jedes Jahr zu seinen Gunsten blühn.

Denn Orpheus ists. Seine Metamorphose

in dem und dem. Wir sollen uns nicht mühn

um andre Namen. Ein für alle Male

ists Orpheus, wenn es singt. Er kommt und geht.

Ists nicht schon viel, wenn er die Rosenschale

um ein paar Tage manchmal übersteht?

O wie er schwinden muß, daß ihrs begrifft!

Und wenn ihm selbst auch bangte, daß er schwände.

Indem sein Wort das Hiersein übertrifft,

ist er schon dort, wohin ihrs nicht begleitet.

Der Leier Gitter zwängt ihm nicht die Hände.

Und er gehorcht, indem er überschreitet.

V

Build no memorial but let the rose

blossom each year according to his pleasure;

for this is Orpheus – each metamorphosis

as this thing, or as this. We need not measure

different names for him: all song is Orpheus

now and forever. Now near – now far again.

And if for some few days he can surpass

the rose’s lifespan – how much has been given!

Although he awaits the parting anxiously

he has to fade from us to make us see.

He is already where we cannot pass

for every note of his exceeds our being.

His hands slip through the lyric fence, transgress.

His whole obedience rests in his excess.

VI

I