Reading Rilke (9 page)

All in all, then, Leishman must be accounted the most adequate, and perhaps even the only acceptable, version: he has roughly the right meter (unlike Poulin or Young, for instance); he keeps the same sequence of words (unlike MacIntyre, Boney, Poulin, Miranda, and Hammer/Jaeger), especially retaining the Germanic
Engel Ordnungen
; he maintains the proper tone (unlike MacIntyre, Poulin, and Young); he has the correct interpretation (unlike Behm, Poulin, Miranda, Hammer/Jaeger, and Oswald); even if one might reasonably complain that “angelic” in English carries too many inappropriate connotations. Although Poulin gets generally bad marks, and Young and Hammer/Jaeger are pretty awful, MacIntyre’s “shout” seems to me to be the most jarring mistake.

Now we reach that “and” which Poulin was in such an unseemly hurry to get in:
und gesetzt seibst, es nähme einer mich plützlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem stärkeren Dasein
.

The strength of the Angels is not the strength of Hercules, who could lift even Antaeus from the earth (although we are offered a wrestler’s image), but consists in the louder
da
of a superior
Dasein
. The Angels are what the poet would be if he could free himself from human distraction, if he could be indifferent to the point of divinity, absorbed in himself like all noumena are, and at one with the work and the world of the work, its radiant perfections, like those twice luminous worms which glow with the added glory of their own phosphorescence: the lower light flouncing outward like a shout, the higher—that rare instreaming Rilkean light—swirling toward its source like water softly down a drain. Thus the friendliest hug of these Angels would be more than anyone could bear.

Most of the hands here hold the right cards, but few know how to play them. Leishman, otherwise excellent, reflecting the sibilance of the German, has the poet “fade in the strength,” the wrong preposition for this phrase, though the clearly right one for the wrapped-within sense of the original. Behn tries “fold,” perhaps for that reason. Nevertheless, Leishman’s image is too wrestlerish. The other temptation is to be too amorous about the embrace. The Angel is not out to crush us, as Miranda has it, nor is he seeking a confidant, as Oswald and MacIntyre intimate
(“took me close to the heart,” “took me suddenly to his heart”), nor is he showing, by this gesture, some emotional warmth, which a word like “embrace” suggests. Behn’s “exalt” comes out of nowhere.

Why the heart? To hear it beat, one presumes, to feel the power of the Angel’s actuality, against which our own becomes insignificant. In Behn’s and Poulin’s versions, we “vanish.” In Garmey/Wilson and in Hammer/Jaeger we “dissolve.” In MacIntyre, Boney, Oswald, and Flemming we “perish,” though Cohn says flatly, “die.” Elsewhere we are “consumed” or “crushed.” No … Actually, we are compared. Young is right, then, to be in that mode, but he uses both “I couldn’t survive” and “shrivel,” a word I suspect is somewhat sexual. Gass is going to go with Leishman’s “fade” yet try to suggest something other than muscle as the reason. However, Gass’ “completer” is an interpretation. Already we can detect, in at least Behn, Garmey/Wilson, Boney, Miranda, and Cohn, a serious musical insensitivity. The utterly fatuous religious tone of “were I gathered to the glory” forces me to hope that, for this translator, the hunt is over.

Finally:
Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen, und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht, uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich
.

We have barely begun our labors when we strike a passage which will warn us of the difficulties to come. The fifteen of us
have already trampled over the poem’s fresh snow, veering this way and that, and starting fearfully at the least thing. Now we have to stop “translating” and ask ourselves just what in the world the poet can mean. German obscurities and English obscurities do not rhyme.

Beauty is an objective attribute, terror is a subjective state. We must not identify them, or even claim they are “close,” as Cohn does. Beauty cannot be the start or the beginning of a feeling, then, nor does it cause terror the way a coldcauses a cough. Nevertheless, when we see beauty we know that we shall feel terror shortly. It announces it. That’s why I used the word “approach.” Now, however, I think less of that selection, and, pushing the Annunciation imagery, I prefer to say that “Beauty is the herald of a Terror we’re only just able to bear.”

When the voice spoke the first line to him, Rilke had nearly completed his
Life of Mary
cycle, and his head was naturally full of the flutter of angel wings. Yet it is
his
barrenness that is overcome, not hers, and the angels who occupy the
Elegies
will not resemble any Mary may have known.

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote that “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.” Men are routinely blinded by the divine. Or they swoon. Or go mad. In this case, “it” disdains to destroy us. Rilke’s vague pronouns, with their indefinite and ambiguous referents, are exasperating. Angels are the nearest we’re ever going to get to pure Being. They resemble Leibniz’s monads more than things-in-themselves. It is the intense reality of the Angels (signified by their Beauty) which terrifies us, casts us in the shade. What we adore is the indifference of the Angels, because they aren’t about to clasp us to their “bosom.” They will simply provide the opportunity for us to make the frightening comparison of their reality with ours.

Angels can’t be terrible. Pot-holed roads are terrible. Times are terrible. The roast is terrible. Terrifying, yes … terrible … 
no. “Awesome” is also a word being given the teenage treatment, but I think it is still possible to say “awesome,” and not mean the noise from an electrolouded band.

Beauty, in Angels and elsewhere, is the revelation of a wholly inhuman perfection, for art, as Rilke wrote, goes against the grain of nature and transcends man. Just as, in Plato, any apprehension of the Forms is achieved through a deadly separation of the rational soul from the influence of the body, so in these
Elegies
a glimpse of such purity is possible only by means of a vertiginous breach in the self as might be made by a mighty quake of earth—one which can close as abruptly as it opened. Poulin’s thought that it is scorn which might kill us strikes me as mistaken, since it is the sovereign remoteness of Beauty itself which prevents our destruction. “Kill” is metaphysically quite the wrong word, and its use suggests a basic failure on the translator’s part to appreciate the momentous oracular tone of these mysterious and magnificent poems.

Leishman improves on his first try by replacing “Each single,” which is redundant anyway, with “Every.” We should certainly pay attention to what Leishman does because he has established his authority already; nevertheless, the elisions here (“For Beauty’s [is] nothing but [the] beginning of [a] Terror”) don’t help the flow of the line at all, although for awkwardness, what could surpass the swan-like wobble of Flemming’s “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure and are awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us”? MacIntyre also suffers from contractions, while Poulin continues to go for the colloquial, doubling “because,” inserting the contraction, lowering the language, letting a line end slackly with “with.” Prose has begun to creep over some versions like a vine. Gass, as usual, wants both the terror and the awesomeness of the Angels, but the “awesomeness” in Boney is awful. Behn, Hunter, and Cohn have already begun writing their own poem.
“Misted”? “Infant”? “Meagre”? May the Muses hurry them to their reward.

To this point the translators’ task has been reasonably easy—which has not prevented a number of them from creating special difficulties of their own the way a drunk will bend the straightest road; and we may be at least allowed the suspicion that it is the translator’s side of the equation which won’t—which refuses to—total agreeably. Many translators do not bother to understand their texts. That would interfere with their own creativity and with their perception of what the poet ought to have said. They do not wish to become the trumpet through which another’s breath blows, and indeed the English horn often overcomes its notes, so we hear
it
, not Wagner, so it’s “its” sweetness which overcomes us, the way a rich syrup tops a sundae, and we easily miss the cool refinements of line and composition beneath the hot thick flow of tone.

And they would rather be original than right; they insist on repainting the stolen horse; “it’s my translation,” they say as they sign it, as if their work were the work of art. How should we fare if printers did the same, putting out their own
Lost Paradise
, their personalized versions of
As You Prefer It
? Love and honor to the shameless thief—one who doesn’t care where his horse came from, or even if it looks like another’s, so long as it runs in the money.