Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonnette an Orpheus) comprises 55 sonnets in two series. The first series (Erster Teil) contains 26 poems; the second (Zweiter Teil), 29. Poet and translator Willis Barnstone provides a breezy but comprehensive 97-page narrative introduction to this celebrated work of high modernism and shows how Rilke’s sonnet sequence weaves together numerous strands of Rilke’s turbulent life, poetic aspirations, and aesthetics.
Many readers agree that Sonnets to Orpheus embodies Rilke’s visionary power at its peak and represents the zenith of his technical skill as a versifier. Critics have admired the sonnets’ various ways of resonating with and departing from conventions established by earlier modernist sonneteers, including Charles Baudelaire and Paul Valéry (whose “Graveyard by the Sea” Rilke intensely admired). Formally, their variety is noteworthy, especially to readers of German who can appreciate the stunning ways that Rilke’s metrical and musical patterns complement the ideas expressed by the words.
The work takes up Roman poet Ovid’s story of the love of Orpheus for Eurydice (in Metamorphoses, 8 A.D.) and endows it with new significance, emphasizing the durable relevance of their momentous destinies. The two sequences together are dedicated “as a monument for Vera Ouckama Knoop,” who is the Eurydice to Rilke’s Orpheus. Vera, a childhood friend of Rilke’s daughter, Ruth, grew to be a talented dancer, musician, and fine arts draughtsman, whose death in young womanhood so startled and troubled Rilke’s feelings about the transience of human life and the transcendence of spirit that, as he later put it in a letter to his Polish translator (Witold Hulewicz), his agonized creative response felt to him as though terrifying angels were “dictating” these poems to him (see Duino Elegies).
Between February 2 and 5, 1922, “he had completed, in order, without altering a line, all but one of the twenty-six poems that would form the First Part” (Snow, Sonnets, x). Between the 5th and the 11th of the month, unblocked by the gift of the sonnets, Rilke completed the Duino Elegies; and between February 11 and 23, “he had produced twenty-nine more sonnets, which he arranged (moving the last poem written to the beginning of the sequence) to form a matching group” to the first series (Snow xi).
Several influences found their way into Rilke’s creative crucible for Sonnets to Orpheus. As early as 1920, Rilke’s close friend Elizabeth “Merline” Klossowska had given him a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and upon departing from Rilke’s château for the 1921 Christmas season, she had pinned above his desk a postcard of Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano’s painting of Orpheus making music under a tree. On January 1, 1922, Vera Knoop’s mother wrote to Rilke, recounting Vera’s death from leukemia and enclosing a 16-page diary that Vera had written during her last days (Barnstone 68). Rilke had just finished translating some of Michelangelo’s exuberant erotic sonnets. But the main source of the Sonnets was Rilke’s capacity to render clearly—and to his satisfaction, at last—his latest revelations and his oldest convictions about the relationship of life to art.
What Rilke achieved in Sonnets to Orpheus cannot be described; it must be experienced. Barnstone, all the same, has this to say in the introduction to his translation: Rilke “makes the disappeared dancer more than a paradigm… She is his and our intimate cosmos, in and around us. And he draws on the two existences of Eurydice, the early talented dream child and the young dancer… who is snatched away by mindless, eroding time” (76).
Rilke’s mystical, pantheistic poetry—here especially—sings with joy to Eurydice and to Orpheus, to the timeless accomplishment of lives lived joyously and creatively, and to the everlasting quality of true music, once it has been heard. The sequence’s final poem (II:XXIX) ends with an affirmation of being in eternity: “Und wenn dich das Irdische vergass, / zu der stillen Erde sag: Ich rinne. / Zu dem raschen Wasser sprich: Ich bin”—which Poulin renders as “And if the earthly has forgotten / you, say to the still earth: I flow. / To the rushing water speak: I am” (Poulin 194–195).
Bibliography
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. Bilingual edition. Translated by A. Poulin Jr. Boston: Mariner Books, 2005.
———. Sonnets to Orpheus. Bilingual edition. Translated by Willis Barnstone. Boston: Shambhala, 2004.
———. Sonnets to Orpheus. Bilingual edition. Translated by Edward Snow. New York: North Point Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
Categories: German Literature, Literature, World Literature
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