Letters to a Young Poet (11 page)

The
Letter
as a whole envisages the displacement of the Christian mystery by the sexual mystery, of the cross by the genitals, and it culminates in the words ‘But why do we not belong to God from
this
point?' Like D. H. Lawrence, a convergence with
whose views he noted when reading a translation of the essay ‘On being religious' in 1924, Rilke imagines (longs for) a variety of religious experience in which we are not estranged from what in the letter to Kappus of 16 July 1903 he calls our ‘best possession'. In a letter written the month after the
Letter from the Young Worker
he even follows this thought with the idea that such a religion might inaugurate a return of the ancient gods, in a characteristically Rilkean inversion of the notion that Christ was the last of them:

The terrible thing is that we possess no religion in which these experiences, literal and tangible as they are (for, at the same time, so unutterable and so untouchable), may be raised into God, into the protection of a phallic deity, a deity that will perhaps be the
first
with which a company of gods might come over humankind again after so long an absence.

(to Rudolf Bodländer, 23 March 1922)

The word
Kreuzweg
is also used in the last of the
Sonnets to Orpheus
, in the phrase ‘the crossroads of your senses' (addressed to Orpheus). At this point where the senses cross, the poem says, ‘sense'
(meaning) occurs. The ‘secret' meaning of
Kreuzweg
(an open secret in the end) allows us to understand the crotch as a kind of sensorium, a percipient centre, and to see sexuality as partaking in all five usual senses as a vital element in our apprehension of the earthly. Orpheus becomes implicitly a sexual god (Rilke refers to him as a god rather than a demigod), and the
Sonnets
thus connect sexuality and poetry much as the
Letter from the Young Worker
does. This is all in keeping with insights first articulated in the
Letters to a Young Poet
. There Rilke had called sexual desire ‘a way of knowing the world', and had seen artistic and sexual experience as phenomena which were ‘really just different forms of one and the same desire and felicity'.

Charlie Louth 2011

The
Letters to a Young Poet
have been
translated many times before, but that is one mark of their importance. In part to justify a new translation, I have tried to keep pretty close to Rilke's actual wording, tracing in some degree his syntax and rhythms, and even keeping much of his eccentric punctuation. Since most of Rilke's language in these letters is marked by a great ease, it could well be that I have distanced myself from the
Letters
' original habitat. Another recent translation, Stephen Cohn's, takes a very nearly opposite course, and recasts the German into wholly new English sentences which sometimes bear little relation to the way Rilke is saying something; though of course, since its words feel easy and at home, it could be argued that they are in fact very close to Rilke's. No one translation will ever do in the end. For the
Letter
from the Young Worker
it seemed even more important to cleave to the form of the original, as the shifts in tone, the switches in and out of the colloquial and the often abrupt and unusual way of putting things are essential to the kind of text it is.

Stephen Cohn's versions of
Letters to a Young Poet
are available in Rainer Maria Rilke,
The Sonnets to Orpheus with Letters to a Young Poet
, tr. Stephen Cohn (Carcanet, 2000). As suggested in the Afterword, the
Sonnets to Orpheus
and the
Letter from the Young Worker
are closely related, and anyone wanting to read the
Sonnets
in English should probably turn to: Don Paterson,
Orpheus: A Version of Rilke's
Die Sonette an Orpheus (Faber, 2006). Rilke's correspondence can best be pursued in English by reading Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé,
The Correspondence
, tr. Edward Snow and Michael Winkler (Norton, 2006). Anyone wanting to find out more about Rilke's life has a choice between two large biographies: Donald Prater,
A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke
(Oxford University Press, 1986), and Ralph Freedman,
Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996); also useful is
The Cambridge Companion to Rainer Maria Rilke
, ed. Karen
Leeder and Robert Vilain (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

I should like to thank Monica Schmoller again for her excellent copy-editing.

Charlie Louth 2011

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This translation first published in Penguin Books (UK) 2011
Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2013

Copyright Insel Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 1929, 1933
Translation, afterword, chronology and notes copyright © Charlie Louth, 2011
Introduction copyright © Lewis Hyde, 2011

This English-language edition of
Briefe an einen jungen Dichter and Der Brief des jungen Arbeiters
published by arrangement with Insel Verlag Berlin.

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-141-96047-0