Reading Rilke (12 page)

Leishman is sappy. MacIntyre is insipid. Pitchford has never heard of Vietnam. Poulin’s “heavenly” is an instant improvement over “bless” and “bliss.” I don’t think Rilke means the fruits of consolation to be exotic—strange, yes, even alien—though it is their trees that are faraway and foreign. These poems, these fruits, are strange because they are unbidden. And Eden was long ago closed for repairs. Spiers replaces the word “what” with the word “which”—why? However, her “unpetaled flower cups” seems the most natural and least forced. In German, the prepositional march from
in
to
an
through
aus
is terribly important, and yet Poulin (alone) ignores it. One is tempted to resort to the kind of explanation I just warned about: Where, in what beautifully cared-for gardens, on what inspired trees, from what gently unpetaled flower cups do these unexpected fruits of consolation ripen?

If we had been choosing chocolates, this last one would have been a jelly. “Forever mercifully drenched” indeed. Let’s put its partly bitten body back and try another piece just a little earlier in the row: 11, 13.

This is one of the great sonnets, one of the most typically Rilkean in theme, too, one of the most moving—Epictetus might have penned it—and a poem quite impossible to translate. There is first of all the contrast between “ahead” and “behind,” which MacIntyre and Poulin retain, but at their peril because the idea is really best expressed simply as Leishman does: “Anticipate all farewells.” Four “winters” follow, and in the last line, three
über
s. All five of our contestants
put in every one of these winters, some more smoothly than others (Poulin is clearly first), but Leishman, always fearless, forces two “outs” into the final line of the quatrain, though the strain is such that the poem sweats. No Sweat is clearly Poulin’s motto, and for the
Sonnets
it is clearly a good one. His thought is clean and direct, and the positive poetry of that thought is simply allowed to have its effect. MacIntyre bungles things badly, arriving at a rhyme with a line so long it circles the moon, reducing his rhythms to those of poor prose, and badly bollixing the meaning. It is high time we closed the book on him.

“Be dead forever in Eurydice—” the following quatrain begins. What can that mean? Possibly: since you looked back and cost her her chance at resurrection, then you ought to “Remain with Eurydice in the realm of death.” Mitchell interprets the lines plausibly: “Be forever dead in Eurydice—more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song,” although that’s not exactly Rilke’s wording. What to do?

Anticipate all farewells, as if they were behind you

like the winter that’s just past, for among winters

there will be one so relentlessly winter

that in overwintering it your heart will be readied to last.

Remain with Eurydice in the realm of death—rise there

singing, praising, to realize the harmony in your strings.

Here—among pale shades in a fading world—

be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

Be—but nonetheless know why nothingness

is the unending source of your most fervent vibration,

so that this once you may give it your full affirmation.

To the store of copious Nature’s used-up, cast-off,

speechless creatures—an unsayable amount—

jubilantly join yourself and cancel the count.
⁶

I hate “vibration/affirmation” but, so far, I haven’t been able to improve on it. This triplet is tough to render in reasonably uninflated English.

For every poet we attempt to translate, certain adjustments will have to be made, equivalences found, sacrifices accepted; and we shall have to decide in each instance (whether the poet is Valéry or Hölderlin, Vallejo or Montale—whether the issue is rhythm, verse form, figures, sound, or wordplay—ambiguity, syntax, idea, or tone—diction, subject, weight, ambition—secret grief, overmastering obsession) just what element is so essential that a literal transcription must be aimed at; what we dare to seek certain equivalences for instead; when we can afford to settle for similar general impressions and effect; how to unpack the overly compacted; and what must be let go, unless luck is with us, in order to achieve the rest—that rest which must add up to greatness; and in the case of Rilke, I think, the poetry of idea must come first, the metaphors he makes out of the very edge and absence of meaning, the intense metaphysical quality of his vision (as unphilosophically developed as it yet is); while tone and overall effect would be next—in the
Elegies
that prophetic grandeur some of his translators are not convinced of—Rilke’s hubristic ambition, the vanity of “the seer”—and in the
Sonnets
the quick hot Heraclitean quality of a flame in which others have been unwilling to hold their hands without wincing (11, 12):

Will transformation. Be inspired by the flame

where a thing made of change conceals itself.

then the figures, so essential, and some sense of Rilke’s rich verbal music, complex wordplay, and intricate complicities of suggestion; so that reaching the last factor, I think I’d be ready, in most cases, to give up his verse forms first.

Most of the translators of the
Elegies
and the
Sonnets
do their homework and offer useful notes. There are certainly many clues to the meaning of Rilke’s poems to be found in his letters. Above all, nearly every poem is a version of many poems that have been written before it, and of many more to follow. This is one reason why Rilke is given to poetic outbursts. These sudden outpourings are summations: the regathering, reclenching, and releasing of a fresh fistful of former themes, images, motifs, emotions, ideas.

Yet in several significant instances, scholarship has failed to warn translators away from errors. The most outrageous of these occurs in the first quatrain of a very famous sonnet from
New Poems
, “Torso of an Archaic Apollo.” In a footnote in his
Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Works
,
⁷
Leishman explains that in Germany and Austria the word
Kandelaber
“was the usual word for a streetlamp: not for the comparatively short post with a single square lantern, but for the much taller and more elegant sort with two globes, each suspended from either end of a wide semicircular crosspiece. Gas lamps, in which the main supply was turned on by means of a long pole and ignited from a small, perpetually burning bypass, had not yet been replaced by electric. Rilke had already used the word in the poem ‘Night Drive.’ ”

This news comes too late to help C. F. MacIntyre, who is forced into contortions:

Never will we know his fabulous head

where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened. Yet

his torso glows: a candelabrum set

before his gaze which is pushed back and hid …

Even Leishman concentrates on the second part of his information (how the gas is turned down), instead of on the shape of the lamps, with their semicircular, hence skull-like, crosspiece and their eye-shaped globes. He writes, omitting mention of the
Augenäpfel
:

Though we’ve not known his unimagined head

and what divinity his eyes were showing,

his torso like a branching street-lamp’s glowing,

wherein his gaze, only turned down, can shed

light still.

My own effort tries, perhaps too hard, to justify itself:

Never will we know his legendary head

where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened. Yet

his torso glows as if his look were set

above it in suspended globes that shed

a street’s light down.

The temptation to push past Rilke’s German into the Platonic poem itself, the poem no one can write without resorting to some inevitably distorting language, is sometimes irresistible. One should never go, I think, quite all the way, yet a little flirting, some heavy petting, may sometimes be more than a pleasant indulgence. Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, or the gods may succeed. To do so, the translator has to say to the reader:
forget the fact that the poem belongs in its body as utterly as you do in yours; listen to what’s going on behind my tongue, in my mind where the Muse was, in your mind where the Muse is. Try to realize the presence of Apollo’s decapitated head, its absent eyelight shining down upon the fragment that is its torso. See how complete this desecrated stone is, although it has no face, no smile, once upon a time tight curls of hair maybe, now armless, no longer wearing its inoffensive little phallus like a bit of fatter pubic hair, its well-muscled legs once extending into a firmly footed stance. They are the same bodily implements you have, reader (excepting, sometimes, the sex), without the necessity to imagine them, and none of them stone. Yet, lo and behold, that absent look, that vanished smile, is bright, and burns your eyes as you perceive its shine, flashing from this broken body to confront your inner incompleteness and condemn it. Are you as real as this ancient, battered remnant of statue? Change, then. Change your life.

Never will we know his legendary head

where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened. Yet

his torso glows as if his look were set

above it in suspended globes that shed

a street’s light down. Otherwise the surging breast

would not thus blind you, nor through the soft turn

of the loins could you feel his smile pass easily

into the bright groins where the genitals yearned.

Otherwise this stone would not be so complete,

from its shoulder showering body into absent feet,

or seem as sleek and ripe as the pelt of a beast;

nor would that gaze be gathered up by every surface

to burst out blazing like a star, for there’s no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.
⁸

As the
Elegies
argue: the beauty of perfection, when we are granted the doubtful good fortune to grasp it, announces the reappearance of our fearful conviction that we are, in both the soul and body of our being, so much less.

INHALATION IN A GOD

The
Duino Elegies
were not written; they were awaited. They were intended to be oracular and inspired. Their Being was to be beyond the poem. They are addressed first to the poet and then, as if over his shoulder, to the rest of us. Their language, like the radiance of the Angels so frequently invoked, streams forth from an ego, an “I,” only to return again as a “you.” They are, in that sense, enclosed, and if the reader resists the enclosure, he will never realize their nature. The
Elegies
are like the Angels in another way, then: they have only an inside. Which is the same as saying, “Their form is imaginary.”

They came to him as if they already existed—all ten—the way a mural might exist; but he sees, at first, only bits and pieces, obtains a brief glimpse, only to have them covered again. They come numbered. They arrive in shards with little tags as if they had been taken out of a dig and carefully brushed off by dutiful students.

Their arrival was inevitable. The surprise was when.

To my mind, the most persuasive explanation of the phenomenon we are pleased to call “inspiration” (pleased because we like mysteries, we like to think ourselves chosen) is the one offered us by the mathematician Henri Poincaré in a little essay, “Mathematical Creation,” frequently reprinted from his illuminating book
Foundations of Science
.

The ground must be there. The ground is an individual’s genetic facility with the medium. But we must not be mistaken about what this facility is. Poincaré is at pains to point out that an inborn knack with numbers (a ready memory for such operations) has little to do with mathematical creativity. Nor does the ability many have to pick up languages as if the languages were thumbing a ride (again, a ready memory, a gift Rilke also had) give promise of poetry or playwriting or any other creative work. The ground Poincaré is speaking of is the ability to make fruitful connections between otherwise unlinked elements of the medium—mathematical connections in his case—resemblances, parallels, analogies—which constitute the synthesizing side of the science or the art; as well as the analytic aspect—the ability to discern deep differences among things as apparently similar as twins.