Reading Rilke (7 page)

But habits die hard; nothing utterly passes. Life patterns see to it that actions, attitudes, conditions, return—the painter, Baladine Klossowska, is replaced by the poet, Marina Tsvetaeva, for instance, and Rilke’s early connection with Russia reappears when Marina’s first letter arrives. His name, she said, was a poem in itself. That was a good start to an epistolary love affair similar to all the others except in acceleration. Marina drew him out and on. Into another elegy, one he named for her. How could she know that this was not a good omen?

It was not time which did him in, for he had years ahead of him. It was not the women, for he eluded them. It was leukemia, the cancer that kills children, the cancer that claimed his daughter’s playmate Wera Knoop; an illness of the blood we know now is most often borne by our genes, and is therefore the death sent by our ancestors: the ragged core of a sweet apple to erupt—sore and swollen—in the poet’s mouth. It was indeed Rilke’s proper death (if there is any that’s proper), running like
fire through his veins, just as he had written, ostensibly addressing God, “and if you set this mind of mine aflame, then on my blood I’ll carry you away.”

Refusing narcotics in order to keep a clear head, the better to confront his illness, Rilke wrote letters to friends describing his agony, a few lines of verse too, no longer French, inscribed on flyleafs. He also composed his testament in which he begged his intimates, should his faculties be dimmed, to prevent any priestly intervention when his soul “moved into the open.”

Symbolic hopes were held out against his sickness like talismans. A three-hundred-year-old goat willow, planted in the courtyard of the von Salis castle because the willow’s Latin name was
Salix caprea
, and hence a suitable emblem for the family, had miraculously restored itself by driving a new root down through its rotten trunk from an upper branch; and Rilke copied “The Willow of Salenegg” into the guest book of that house. Could he reroot too? That was in August. He would die at the year’s end. But his thought then would be of the pain that was passing like a filament through all the other aches and angers of his life. Rilke admonishes us not to confuse the illnesses of childhood, for instance, which were respites, even subterfuges, with those of dying. In a little notebook, he wrote his final lines:

Come on in now, you last of the pains I will admit,

incurable, into my body’s web.

As my spirit burns—see—I burn

in you; the wood no longer can deny

its agreement with the flame you’re flaming.

You burn me, but I inside your burning burn.

My present mildness, in your ferocity, will be

not of here but there, most hellishly.

I climbed this pyre, faggots piled to fearful heights,

convinced I’d never sacrifice

my soul’s uncounted sum to gain a future.

Am I still he who—unacknowledged—burns here?

I’ll not call my memories to burn nearby me.

O life—outside me—Oh to live you.

And I aflame. Known now to none.
²⁴

TRANSREADING

In a translation, one language, and one particular user of that language, reads another.

Mit gelben Birnen hänget

Und voll mit wilden Rosen

Das Land in den See,

If I am reading Friedrich Hölderlin’s German in German, the language will be trying to understand itself. Out of the number of words which German offers, Hölderlin has chosen these, and I can let them ring in my head as if heard. “With yellow pears hangs / And full with wild roses / the land in the lake.” Easily said, less easily understood, because the order of the words is—well—wild as the roses are.

These lines, first of all, send me to experience. I remember how, when heavily fruited, the fruit tree’s branches are bowed; and I remember how, in the clear fall light, flowers, bushes, trees are oddly reflected in still water as if actually upside down, and directly beneath themselves, an optically odd apparition. Then I may read the poem’s title (“Hälfte des Lebens”) again, and realize that the pears and their image are halves of one real, unreal whole.

The land, heavy with fruit and flowers, hangs down into the
lake, where object and reflection are joined. I ask myself why the natural order is interrupted. Shouldn’t it be: “With yellow pears, and full of wild roses, the land hangs down into the lake”? But then the word
hänget
wouldn’t hang.

Every line of fine literature forms a secure, seemingly serene, yet unquiet community. As in any community, there are many special interests and the groups which promote them; there are predominating concerns, persistent problems; and, as in the psyche of any individual, or in the larger region of the body politic, there are competing aims, anxieties, habits, anticipations, perplexities, memories, needs, and grievances. When the line is a good one, their clamor is stilled because its constituents are happy, their wants appeased, their aims fulfilled.

When the line is a good one, there is a musical movement to its meaning which binds the line together as if it were one word, yet at the same time articulating, weighing, and apportioning the line’s particular parts the way syllables and their sounds and stresses spell a noun or verb, while throwing down a pattern of rhythm and meaning like a path to be pursued deeper into the stanza, and resonating with what has preceded it, if anything has. These are not naturally harmonious functions: looking forward, listening back, uniting and differentiating.

Half of life has been lived. Heavy with its succulent fruit, that life looks down upon its future, but it is a future in which this present, now past, can only be remembered. The reflection in the water resembles reality almost exactly, yet it is just that—a picture. And you and I then, adopting the poet’s position, can halve ourselves to see what we are now as well as what we shall become: illusory.

What a beautiful idea: earth, solid and settled, flesh rosy and trim, life full and accomplished, altering into water, into remembrance, into image.

Ihr holden Schwäne,

Und trunken von Küssen

Tunkt ihr das Haupt

Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.

Upon this water swans are swimming so calmly the reflection of the land they float upon is undisturbed. “You lovely swans, and drunk from kisses you dip your heads into the holy sobering water.” There is another interruption of the normal order here which exactly parallels the first (“and full with wild roses”). It is the habit of swans to do a bit of necking, and bill dipping too. This information comes to us from some swan watching. That the swan (most notable for its raucous, peacock-like scream) is supposed to sing a sweetly accepting song at the point of death is handed down to us from myth.

It is likely that English speakers will have already read Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole,” which opens upon a similar landscape and at the same time of year.

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

And there is no reason at all why we should have to forget, reading Hölderlin, everything we know that came after him. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

Rilke’s extraordinary Leda poem will get written later, as well
as his charming though more modest lyric titled simply “The Swan.”

We struggle through the undone and the yet-to-do

as though our legs were shackled, hobbling on and on

with the awkward waddle of the swan.

And dying—to lose our footing on the ground

we daily counted on to hold us—

is like the anxious swan’s surrender

to the water which receives him with all honor,

drawing aside like a curtain in the wind,

receding wave on wave to shape his wake,

while he, stately, still, remote, assured,

majestically indifferent and composed,

condescends to glide.
¹

In the
Elegies
Rilke won’t find death likely to offer such easy sailing. There will be much undoing to get done, much past life to leave.

Hölderlin’s swan, sailing between earth and water, its own image riding beside it, and drunk with the kisses which convey the primeness of life, sobers itself by sipping from the cup of consequence: that the first half of one’s history will linger on in the second half only in recollection.

Translating is reading, reading of the best, the most essential, kind. The adjective “gracious” barely hides what the German is franker about—the poem’s religious allusions—for the swans are dipping their heads
ins heilignüchterne Wasser
. That
heilignüchterne
is one helluva word. Christopher Middleton, in his fine version, says “you gracious swans” and then ends “into the holy lucid water,” while Michael Hamburger, in his equally
excellent try, writes “you lovely swans” to close with “into the hallowed, the sober water.” “Gracious,” unfortunately, doesn’t mean “graceful,” and “graceful” doesn’t mean “full of grace” anymore. But if the swans are lovely (as I’m certain they are), they’re only lovely, which isn’t enough. The cool fall water will have a sobering effect, to be sure, but I’m not convinced it should be like a splash in the face. I don’t dare do “holy sober” either. There’s no place for that kind of pun in this poem. So I’m going to take a chance and push the religious undertones up a little. And I have to remember to hold off on hanging the land.

With yellow pears, the land,

and full of wild roses,

hangs down into the lake.

You graceshaped swans,

drunk from kisses,

you dip your heads

into the holy solemn water.

The swans are graceful and lovely, and the water is lucid and sobering and solemn, hallowed and holy. In this case, one does not “opt,” but one must choose.
²

It’s been frequently said that translation is a form of betrayal: it is a traduction, a reconstitution made of sacrifice and revision. One bails to keep the boat afloat. However, we don’t have to give up everything. Neither swans themselves, nor their symbolic significance, is uniquely German. We won’t have to replace them. The season and its meaning, the reflective power of a pond: these things are easily retained. The central ideas of the stanza, provided we have a proper hold on them, can be transported without loss. When the poem asks a question, we can ask one; when it asserts or describes or avows, we can follow. The general shape of the sonnet can be repeated too, but
the poem does not want to be squeezed into its form like an ill-fitting suit; it hopes to flower forth in fourteen lines as if all its genes said, “Bloom.” The sonnet shape is as powerful as a right-wing religious group, however, conservative to the core, and snooty to boot. The meter wants to march five abreast across the page, arm swinging smartly up to strike the chest, eyes must move right at the right time; rhyme waits like a tympanist, sticks poised above the paper and the tightened lines it would make resonate; alliteration wants to twist the tongue as much as assonance would soothe it; there is the short word which sounds long, like “oboe,” and the thin tight-lipped ones like “pit,” to be played against those of generously open ends like “oboe” again, and of course, “Ohio,” as well as words long in print but short of sound, or hissies such as “Mississippi,” lovely liquids like “hallelujah,” and undulating beauties such as “Alabama.”

Moreover, the right sorts of sacrifice are essential. We had better lose the poem’s German sounds and German order, because we are trying to achieve the poem Hölderlin would have written had he been English. We can’t make it move too smoothly and go whistling along. Here is my version of its closing seven:

Where shall I, when

winter’s here, find flowers,

and where sunshine

and shadows of earth?