Reading Rilke Read online

  Also by William H. Gass

  FICTION

  Omensetter’s Luck

  In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

  Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife

  The Tunnel

  Cartesian Sonata

  NONFICTION

  Fiction and the Figures of Life

  On Being Blue

  The World Within the Word

  The Habitations of the Word

  Finding a Form

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1999 by William H. Gass

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.randomhouse.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Gass, William H., [date]

  Reading Rilke : reflections on the problems of translation / by William H. Gass.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-8041-5092-7

  1. Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875–1926—Translating. 2. Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875–1926. Duineser Elegien. 3. Translating and interpreting. 4. Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875–1926. 5. Authors, German—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PT2635. I65Z

  831′.912—dc21

  98-50291

  v3.1

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO HEIDE ZIEGLER WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE.

  Self-Portrait from the Year 1906

  The distinction of an old, long-noble race

  in the heavy arches of the eyebrows.

  In the blue eyes, childhood’s anxious

  shy look still, not a waiter’s servility

  yet feminine, as one who endures.

  The mouth made as a mouth is, wide and straight,

  not persuasive, yet not unwilling to speak out

  if required. A not inferior forehead,

  still most comfortable when bent, shading the self.

  This, as a countenance, scarcely configured;

  never, in either suffering or elation,

  brought together for a real achievement;

  yet as if, from far away, out of scattered things,

  a serious and enduring work were being planned.

  “Selbstbildnis aus dem Jahre 1906,” Paris, Spring 1906

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Poems Translated in the Text

  Other Than the Duino Elegies

  Acknowledgments

  Lifeleading

  Transreading

  Ein Gott Vermags

  Inhalation in a God

  Schade

  The Grace of Great Things

  Erect No Memorial Stone

  The Duino Elegies of Rainer Maria Rilke

  Notes

  Bibliography

  POEMS TRANSLATED IN THE TEXT

  OTHER THAN THE DUINO ELEGIES

  Self-Portrait from the Year 1906

  Selbstbildnis aus dem Jahre 1906

  Rilke’s epitaph

  Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch

  The Bowl of Roses

  Die Rosenschale

  from In Celebration of Myself

  Mir zu Feier

  A Youthful Portrait of My Father

  Jugend-Bildnis meines Vaters

  Parting

  Abschied

  III. 6–7 of The Book of Hours

  Das Stundenbach

  Autumn

  Herbst

  Autumn Day

  Herbstag

  To Music

  An die Musik

  The Lace, 11

  Die Spitze, 11

  Buddha

  Buddha

  The Panther

  Der Panther

  Rilke’s last poem, untitled

  The Swan

  Der Schwan

  Put My Eyes Out, 11.7 of The Book of Hours

  Lösch mir die Augen

  Sonnets to Orpheus, 1, 3

  Sonnets to Orpheus, 1, 1

  Sonnets to Orpheus, 1, 2

  Sonnets to Orpheus, 11, 13

  Torso of an Archaic Apollo

  Archaïscher Torso Apollos

  Lament

  Klage

  The Spanish Trilogy, 1

  Die spanische Trilogie

  The Great Night

  Die grosse Nacht

  Requiem for a Friend

  Requiem für eine Freundin

  Sonnets to Orpheus, 11, 1

  Sonnets to Orpheus, 11, 29

  Sonnets to Orpheus, 11, 12

  Blue Hydrangea

  Blaue Hortensie

  Sonnets to Orpheus, 1, 13

  Turning-Point

  Wendung

  Death

  Der Tod

  Tell Us, Poet, What Do You Do?

  Oh sage, Dichter, was du tust?

  “Man Must Die Because He Has Known Them”

  “Man muss sterben weil man sie kennt”

  Puppet Theater

  Marionettentheater

  Sonnets to Orpheus, 1, 5

  Sonnets to Orpheus, 1, 15

  The Death of the Poet

  Der Tod des Dichters

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Heide Ziegler, to whom this book is lovingly dedicated, spent much of her valuable time and energy discussing with me the meanings of the Duino Elegies, giving me valuable background information, advising me on strategies, correcting many of my mistakes (impossible to catch them all), and patiently reading and rereading my revisions. This book is half hers. No doubt the better half.

  I am also indebted to all those who, before me, have tried to find their way through these difficult poems, and beaten a better path … a path from which, so often, I fear I have strayed.

  Early versions of a few of these poems were published in The American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, and River Styx. The first three Sonnets to Orpheus, Part 1, were published in The Chelsea Review. I have also cannibalized from texts published in The Nation and in The Philosophy of Erotic Love, a collection from the University of Kansas Press edited by Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgens.

  The poet himself is as close to me as any human being has ever been; not because he has allowed himself—now a shade—at last to be loved; and not because I have been able to obey the stern command from his archaic torso of Apollo to change my life, nor because his person was always so admirable it had to be imitated; but because his work has taught me what real art ought to be; how it can matter to a life through its lifetime; how commitment can course like blood through the body of your words until the writing stirs, rises, opens its eyes; and, finally, because his work allows me to measure what we call achievement: how tall his is, how small mine.

  LIFELEADING

  Open-eyed, Rainer Maria Rilke died in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926. The leukemia which killed him had been almost reluctantly diagnosed, and had struck like a storm, after a period of gathering clouds. Ulcerous sores appeared in his mouth, pain troubled his stomach and intestines, he slept a lot when his body let him, his spirit was weighed down by depression, while physically he became as thin and fluttery as a leaf. Since, according to the gloom that naturally descended on him, Rilke’s creative life was over, he undertook translations during his last months: of Valéry in particular—“Eupalinos,” “The Cemetery by the Sea”—and composed his epitaph, too, invoking the flower he so devotedly tended.

  ROSE, O PURE CONTRADICTION, DESIRE
/>
  TO BE NO ONE’S SLEEP BENEATH SO MANY LIDS.

  The myth concerning the onset of his illness was, even among his myths, the most remarkable. To honor a visitor, the Egyptian beauty Nimet Eloui, Rilke gathered some roses from his garden. While doing so, he pricked his hand on a thorn. This small wound failed to heal, grew rapidly worse, soon his entire arm was swollen, and his other arm became affected as well. According to the preferred story, this was the way Rilke’s disease announced itself, although Ralph Freedman, his judicious and most recent biographer, puts that melancholy event more than a year earlier.

  Roses climb his life as if he were their trellis. Turn the clock back twenty-four years to 1900. Rilke is a guest at Worpswede, an artists’ colony near Bremen, and it is there he has made the acquaintance of the painter Paula Becker and his future wife, Clara Westhoff. One bright Sunday morning, in a romantic mood, Rilke brings his new friends a few flowers, and writes about the gesture in his diary:

  I invented a new form of caress: placing a rose gently on a closed eye until its coolness can no longer be felt; only the gentle petal will continue to rest on the eyelid like sleep just before dawn.1

  The poet never forgets a metaphor. Nor do his friends forget the poet’s passions. Move on to 1907 now, when, in Capri, Rilke composes “The Bowl of Roses,” beginning this poem with an abrupt jumble of violent images:

  You’ve seen their anger flare, seen two boys

  bunch themselves into a ball of animosity

  and roll across the ground

  like some dumb animal set upon by bees;

  you’ve seen those carny barkers, mile-high liars,

  the careening tangle of bolting horses,

  their upturned eyes and flashing teeth,

  as if the skull were peeled back from the mouth.

  Bullyboys, actors, tellers of tall tales, runaway horses—fright, force, and falsification—losing composure, pretending, revealing pain and terror: these are compared to the bowl of roses. Rilke has come from Berlin, where his new publisher, Insel Verlag, has been distressed to discover that Rilke’s former publisher plans to bring out The Book of Hours as well as a revised Cornet. This does not get the new alliance off to a smooth and trusting start. Moreover, Rilke is broke again. During 1906, the poet had been bankrolled by his friend Karl von der Heydt, who twice generously deposited funds in Rilke’s Paris bank, but Rilke’s habit of staying in deluxe hotels and eating (modestly) in expensive restaurants, his dependence upon porters and maids and trains, had left him holding nothing more than his ticket to Alice Faehndrich’s Villa Discopoli on Capri. Von der Heydt sent him some supplementary funds eventually, but not before making a face. Perhaps these unpleasantries account for the poem’s oddly violent and discordant opening.

  But now you know how to forget such things,

  for now before you stands the bowl of roses,

  unforgettable and wholly filled

  with unattainable being and promise,

  a gift beyond anyone’s giving, a presence

  that might be ours and our perfection.

  More than a bowl was set before him. Though the New Year was approaching, the island was abloom with winter roses, and Rilke’s cottage, on the grounds of the villa, was covered with them.

  Living in silence, endlessly unfolding,

  using space without space being taken

  from a space even trinkets diminish;

  scarcely the hint there of outline or ground

  they are so utterly in, so strangely delicate

  and self-lit—to the very edge:

  is it possible we know anything like this?

  And then like this: that a feeling arises

  because now and then the petals kiss?

  And this: that one should open like an eye,

  to show more lids beneath, each closed

  in a sleep as deep as ten, to quench

  an inner fire of visionary power.

  And this above all: that through these petals

  light must make its way. Out of one thousand skies

  they slowly drain each drop of darkness

  so that this concentrated glow

  will bestir the stamens till they stand.

  The rose is a distilling eye. It gathers light and filters it until the concentration is powerful and pure, until its stamens become erect. If the rose is not a poem, the poem is surely a rose.

  And the movement in the roses, look:

  gestures which make such minute vibrations

  they’d remain invisible if their rays

  did not resolutely ripple out into the wide world.

  Look at that white one which has blissfully unfolded

  to stand amidst its splay of petals

  like Venus boldly balanced on her shell;

  look too at the bloom that blushes, bends

  toward the one with more composure,

  and see how the pale one aloofly withdraws;

  and how the cold one stands, closed upon itself,

  among those open roses, shedding all.

  And what they shed: how it can be light or heavy,

  a cloak, a burden, a wing, a mask—it just depends—

  and how they let it fall: as if disrobing for a lover.

  E. M. Butler, whose Rilke of 1941 was the first biography of the poet to appear in English, writes:

  There is no doubt that roses cast a spell upon Rilke. Monique Saint-Hélier recounts how he once sent her some fading flowers to die with her [sic—Butler means “to die in her company”], because he was going away. His description of a vase of falling roses in Late Poems represents him as keeping them in his room until they were really dead, when he embalmed their petals in books and used them for pot-pourri. Rilke’s roses were always explicitly in enclosed spaces: in death-bed chambers, in his study at night, in rose-bowls, bringing summer into a room, bestrewing the chimney-piece as they shed their petals. And even in his garden at Muzot, they seemed to be clad in pink silk boudoir-gowns and red summer dresses, like carefully tended and cherished, fragrant and fragile hothouse blooms.2

  The poet collects the world inside himself as the rose gathers the light of the skies, and there he intensifies it until the phallic element of the flower dominates the symbol. Eventually the rose bestrews itself. Petals, like poems, leave their tree. The beautiful unity the rose once was now becomes a fall of discoloring shards; yet these petals can help us see to another part of the world as through a stained-glass window.

  What can’t they be? Was that yellow one,

  lying there hollow and open, not the rind

  of a fruit in which the very same yellow

  was its more intense and darkening juice?

  And was this other undone by its opening,

  since, so exposed, its ineffable pink

  has picked up lilac’s bitter aftertaste?

  And the cambric, is it not a dress

  to which a chemise, light and warm as breath,

  still clings, though both were abandoned

  amid morning shadows near the old woodland pool?

  And this of opalescent porcelain

  is a shallow fragile china cup

  full of tiny shining butterflies—

  and there—that one’s holding nothing but itself.

  Later, in the August of an emptied Paris, Rilke will compose a poem about the interior of the rose: it is first an Inside awaiting its Outside, then a bandaged wound, at last a lake full of the sky’s reflection. When the rose is blown and the petals part, they fill, as if fueling for the journey, with inner space, finally overflowing into the August days, until summer becomes ein Zimmer in einem Traum—a room in a dream. But it is “The Bowl of Roses” which remains Rilke’s great rose-poem.

  And aren’t they all that way? just self-containing,

  if self-containing means: to transform the world

  with its wind and rain and springtime’s patience

  and guilt and restlessness and obscure fate

/>   and the darkness of evening earth and even

  the changing clouds, coming and going,

  even the vague intercession of distant stars,

  into a handful of inner life.

  It now lies free of care in these open roses.3

  It would be tempting to organize Rilke’s biography around such themes, because the themes are there: the significance of the rose, the mirror, the unicorn, the puppet, the fountain, or the pathos (as for Poe) of the death of a young woman; his increasing “belief” in animism (that all things, as well as the parts of all things, are filled with life); the notion that we grow our death inside us like a talent or a tumor; that we are here to realize the world, to raise it, like Lazarus, from its sullen numbness into consciousness; that differences are never absolute, but that everything (life and death, for instance) lies on a continuum, as colors do; that we are strangers in a world of strangers; that simple people have a deeper understanding of their existence than most, and an insight into the secret rhythms of nature. These themes are like tides that rise and fall inside him, as if he were just their bay and receptive shoreline.

  Rilke’s parents had lost a daughter the year before they begot René (as he was christened); hoping for another daughter to replace her, and until he was ready to enter school, his mother, Phia, got him up girlishly, combed his curls, encouraged him to call his good self Sophie, and handled him like a china doll, cooing and cuddling him until such time as he was abruptly put away in a drawer. Later, with a mournful understanding that resembled Gertrude Stein’s, Rilke realized that someone else had had to die in order to provide him with a place in life.

  There is a photograph of four-year-old “Sophie” standing by a table upon which, unaccountably, a black-and-white dog is crouching. Atop “her” long hair a hat in the shape we call pillbox has been rakishly placed, and her high-topped shoes rise from a strongly patterned rug as if they were part of its design. She is wearing a pleated white skirt, a white tunic with a big bow at the neck, and white socks which peek out of those shiny shoes.