Many readers consider Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien), which Rilke completed in 1922, not only his most accomplished poetry, but also, plausibly, the most perfect lyrical sequence of the 20th century. So well crafted are the 10 poems that constitute the Duino Elegies that many bilingual readers consider the German effectively untranslatable. Too much of their elegiac brilliance gets lost because a large part of their genius reposes in the German language itself, which Rilke molds and touches with pathos and fire in ways that have not been equaled, some say, ever.
If the challenge of translating the Elegies is daunting, their inspirational value to poets is so great that dozens of translations of the whole and many more of its parts have been attempted and published. They have been called “dramatic inner monologues of pathos and gleaming imagery” (Barnstone 66); and they certainly do represent the luminous, visionary outpouring of a vibrant poetic ego seeking immortal truths.
Rilke began composing his Elegies in 1911, while he was a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis and staying at Duino Castle, her cliffside Italian retreat, but according to his letters, he did not work on the poems in earnest, or as a set, for another 10 years—not until well after the Great War. Before the war, he crisscrossed Europe, staying for spells in Capri, Rome, Florence, Leipzig, Munich, Paris, Vienna, and many other places. After the war had been in progress for some time, he volunteered for military service and served in the Austrian army for several months in 1916 (though not in combat), before he was honorably discharged for poor health.
Following the war’s disruptions, he wanted to find someplace to settle and work. In 1921 he negotiated with prosperous friends to help him afford the rent of the run-down (but once imposing) Château de Muzot in the Swiss Alps. He settled into his picturesque stone house by the Rhône with one of the last of his romantic partners, the painter Elizabeth Dorothée Klossowska (the separated wife of art historian Erich Klossowski). Klossowska, who signed her paintings “Baladine,” was “Merline” or “Mouky” to Rilke. Theirs was a passionate and profoundly harmonious relationship: together the lovers renovated the building and furnished it, tending to its grounds and gardens and setting up the poet’s workspace. Although he did not know it, by then he was suffering from the leukemia that would end his life in 1926.
When Merline had to leave for the 1921 Christmas season, Rilke welcomed the solitude and began what he called “wrestling with the angels”: it was his chance to return to and finish the poetic sequence begun in 1911 and destined to become the Duino Elegies. Left to himself after 40-some years of living the creative life, after a long and varied series of wondrous affairs of the heart, after living through the despair of the war, after having met and befriended so many of the giants of European art and literature, Rilke was not only ready to be visited by inspiration—he felt possessed.
At first, some of his 55 Sonnets to Orpheus began to pour out of him. He felt their arrival as “dictations” and as insights “entrusted” to him by terrifyingly beautiful, angelic powers. These “angels” were not those of Judeo-Christian lore, but presences that embody themselves, he thought, in immortal poetry. The creativity unleashed by producing the Sonnets to Orpheus spilled over and generated the Duino Elegies as well.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Overall the Duino Elegies appear to be freely associative (though they are carefully assembled) and teem with images and intertextual references, which makes them difficult to summarize fairly. But each one embodies a particular poetic project and entertains an aspect of the poignancy of human life that the poet hopes he can net with luxuriant allusions and figurative language.
The First and Second Elegies (the only two actually begun at Duino) are impassioned meditations on the very conditions of creativity. In the First Elegy the poet exclaims that “das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen” (beauty’s nothing / but the start of terror we can hardly bear) (Poulin 5) and adds, “Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich” (Every angel’s terrifying) (Poulin 5).
Lines 26 through 53 of the First Elegy survey an evocative list of the daily sources of inspiration (seasons, stars, waves, playing a violin through an open window, longing, a hero, and so on) that a poet passes up, distracted by other aspects of life. The section ends with a comparison of the poet to an arrow that must be parted (freed) from the string (likened to the poet’s beloved) that launches it if the arrow is to realize its truest purpose.
The rest of the poem touches on voices, recollections, and legends whose subtexts all signify that it is the eternal spirits that invest true poetry, for even angels (the eternal spirits themselves) “often can’t tell whether / they move among the living or the dead” (“Engel [sagt man] wußten oft nicht, ob sie unter / Lebenden gehn oder Toten”) (Poulin 10–11).
The Second Elegy is a paean to those eternal spirits that are the poet’s truest inspiration. The poem begins by repeating the line “Every angel’s terrifying.” He calls these dangerous spirits “fast tödliche Vögel der Seele” (Almost deadly birds / of [the] soul) (Poulin 12–13), but knows he must seek and encounter them because, like the touch of a lover, they represent “a pure duration” and “the promise of eternity” (Poulin 17).
The Third Elegy considers the true source of passion and its relationship to myths and natural history, making the claim that “uns steigt, wo wir lieben, unvordenklicher Saft in die Arme”—“when we love, / a sap older than memory rises in our arms” (Poulin 22–23).
The Fourth Elegy delves into the connections between people, their affections and hostilities, the hopes and thwarted expectations of parents and children, the sorrow of bereavements, the winter of the spirit, the difficulties of communicating these realities honestly and truly because “ist unbeschreiblich” (l. 85); it is, at bottom, indescribable.
The Fifth Elegy, dedicated to Frau Hertha von Koenig, was inspired by Picasso’s painting Les Saltimbanques, which she owned; in this meditation Rilke compares Picasso’s standing acrobats to lovers and wonders whether, if an audience could see the astonishing acrobatics of lovers’ emotions, it would toss its coins of happiness to them.
The Sixth Elegy (a complex skein of metaphors) in essence compares heroes (and, by implication, poems) to figs—and since figs come from trees and heroes have mothers, the poem compares the creation of poetry to the miraculous powers of wombs and to the transformative functions of the roots, branches, flowers, and leaves of the fig tree. The poem, like the proven hero, once having achieved its happy feat, becomes something different and quite unexpected: “stand er am Ende der Lächeln,—anders” (stood at the end of smiles, someone else) (Poulin 44).
The Seventh Elegy invokes the terrifying angel of the first elegy and, while addressing it by name, variously announces the poem’s central theme: “Love, the world exists nowhere but within. / Our life is lived in transformation. And diminishing, the outer world vanishes” (Poulin 51).
The Eighth Elegy is dedicated to Rudolf Kassner, an Austrian philosopher with whom Rilke profoundly disagreed over what is the essential psychic orientation of human beings. Rilke’s poem is a meditation on his own yearning for an unlimited openness toward experience, the capacity to face and move into the universe directly and frontally. The poem ends in protest against Kassner’s defensive cautions—and with a question: “Wer hat uns also umgedreht . . . ?” (Who turned us thus?)
The Ninth Elegy is a bittersweet paean to living, to being, to each individual’s once—for, as Rilke puts it, our having been on Earth is irrevocable: “irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrufbar” (Poulin 60).
The Tenth Elegy gives form to a parabolic lesson taught by the allegorical figure whom Rilke calls Lament, who leads the poem’s hero to the source of joy (“die Quelle des Freude”), which is flowing through a gorge far below, and about which Lament says, “Bei den Menschen / ist sie ein tragender Strom” (ll. 101–102) (For men it is a basic river). The poem ends epiphanically on the counterintuitive but joyful realization that, in such a place, it is lucky to fall: “wenn ein Glückliches fällt” (Poulin 76).
In a letter dated November 13, 1925, Rilke wrote to his Polish translator, Witold Hulewicz, intimating that the personal outpouring of the Duino Elegies embodied a sort of manifesto, which the Sonnets to Orpheus realized (Snow, Sonnets xvii–xviii). In form, though, nothing could be further from what we might like to think of as a manifesto. The Duino Elegies symbolize—using a deeply personal idiom; they do not proclaim. But Rilke’s comment does indeed prod us to appreciate significant differences between the two masterpieces that Rilke produced in a paroxysm of inspiration within the single month of February 1922.
Translations of the Duino Elegies include those of Martyn Crucefix (Enitharmon Press, 2007), Graham Good (Ronsdale, 2005), Mirando Gray (Far Corner Books, 1982), Robert Hunter (Hulogosi Communications, 1993), G. K. Knight (Henry Regnery, 1961), J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (Hogarth, 1952), C. F. MacIntyre (University of California Press, 2001), Stephen Mitchell (Shambhala Press, 1996), A. Poulin, Jr. (q.v.), Edward Snow (q.v.), and David Young (W. W. Norton, 2006). Many lovers of Rilke’s poetry argue vehemently about the flaws and virtues of the various translations; scholars consider Poulin’s renditions the most reliable, but readers who do not know German would be well advised to compare several translations.
Bibliography
Gass, William H. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Paulin, Roger, ed. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Riverside, California: Ariadne Press, 1996.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. Bilingual edition. Translated by A. Poulin, Jr. Boston: Mariner Books, 2005.
———. Duino Elegies. Bilingual edition. Translated by Edward Snow. New York: North Point Press/Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000.
———. Sonnets to Orpheus. Bilingual edition. Translated by Edward Snow. New York: North Point Press/Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2004.
Categories: British Literature, German Literature, Literature
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