The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (31 page)
Read The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Online
Authors: Rainer Maria Rilke
Für Erika, zum Feste der Rühmung
Taube, die draußen blieb, außer dem Taubenschlag,
wieder in Kreis und Haus, einig der Nacht, dem Tag,
weiß sie die Heimlichkeit, wenn sich der Einbezug
fremdester Schrecken schmiegt in den gefühlten Flug.
Unter den Tauben, die allergeschonteste,
niemals gefährdetste, kennt nicht die Zärtlichkeit;
wiedererholtes Herz ist das bewohnteste:
freier durch Widerruf freut sich die Fähigkeit.
Über dem Nirgendssein spannt sich das Überall!
Ach der geworfene, ach der gewagte Ball,
füllt er die Hände nicht anders mit Wiederkehr:
rein um sein Heimgewicht ist er mehr.
Translating poems into equivalent formal patterns is to some extent a matter of luck, or grace, and this is especially true of rhymed poems. Rilke called rhyme “a goddess of secret and ancient coincidences” and said that “she is very capricious; one cannot summon or foresee her; she comes as happiness comes, hands filled with an achievement that is already in flower.” Some of my favorite Rilke poems never got beyond a rough draft, because that sweet goddess refused to make even the briefest appearance. Otherwise I would have included: from
The Book of Pictures
, the tender and funny “Annunciation,” in which the angel Gabriel is so moved by Mary’s ripening beauty that he forgets what he was sent to announce;
from
New Poems
, “Woman in Love” (“Die Liebende”), a deeply awed, Brahmsian love song to the night; and from
The Sonnets to Orpheus
,
I
6
,
9
,
10
,
12
,
19
;
II
1
,
12
,
16
, and
18
.
I have included the selections
from
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
not to discourage readers from experiencing the novel in its entirety, but to show the power of these excerpts as prose-poems. With their density of texture, their metaphorical richness, and the strength and subtlety of their rhythms, they don’t seem out of place among Rilke’s greatest verse.
The German text is that of the standard edition (
Sämtliche Werke
[SW], Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1955–1966), except for two lines in the Fifth Elegy, where I have followed the Thurn und Taxis manuscript and the first edition.
Letters excerpted and translated in these notes can be found in the following collections (except where otherwise noted):
Briefe aus den Jahren 1902–1906.
Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1930.
Briefe aus den Jahren 1907–1914.
Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1933.
Briefe aus Muzot, 1921–1926.
Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1937.
Briefe.
Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1950.
Rainer Maria Rilke und Marie von Thurn und Taxis: Briefwechsel.
Zürich/Wiesbaden: Niehans & Rokitansky Verlag und Insel Verlag, 1951.
Rainer Maria Rilke/Lou Andreas-Salomé: Briefwechsel.
Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1952.
Rainer Maria Rilke/Katharina Kippenberg: Briefwechsel.
Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1954.
Briefwechsel mit Benvenuta.
Eßlingen: Bechtle Verlag, 1954.
Briefe an Sidonie Nádherńy von Borutin.
Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1973.
Briefe an Nanny Wunderly-Volkart.
Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1977.
THE BOOK OF HOURS
(1905)
I began with Things, which were the true confidants of my lonely childhood, and it was already a great achievement that, without any outside help, I managed to get as far as animals. But then Russia opened itself to me and granted me the brotherliness and the darkness of God, in whom alone there is community. That was what I
named
him then, the God who had broken in upon me, and for a long time I lived in the antechamber of his name, on my knees. Now, you would hardly ever hear me name him; there is an indescribable discretion between us, and where nearness and penetration once were, new distances stretch forth, as in the atom, which the new science conceives of as a universe in miniature. The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns relationship [
statt des Besitzes lernt man den Bezug
], and there arises a namelessness that must begin once more in our relations with God if we are to be complete and without evasion. The experience of feeling him recedes behind an infinite delight in everything that can be felt; all attributes are taken away from God, who is no longer sayable, and fall back into creation, into love and death. It is perhaps only this that again and again took place in certain passages in the Book of Hours, this ascent of God out of the breathing heart—so that the sky was covered with him—, and his falling to earth as rain. But saying even that is already too much.
(To Ilse Jahr, February 22, 1923)
[I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice]
(Berlin-Schmargendorf, September 24, 1899)
[I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all]
(Berlin-Schmargendorf, September 24, 1899)
THE BOOK OF PICTURES
(First edition, 1902; second edition, 1906)
Lament
(Berlin-Schmargendorf, October 21, 1900)
Autumn Day
(Paris, September 21, 1902)
Evening
(Undated: 1902/1906; perhaps Sweden, autumn 1904)
The Blindman’s Song
(Paris, June 7, 1906)
This and the following three songs are part of a ten-poem cycle called
The Voices.
To want to improve the situation of another human being presupposes an insight into his circumstances such as not even a poet has toward a character he himself has created. How much less insight is there in the so infinitely excluded helper, whose scatteredness becomes complete with his gift. Wanting to change or improve someone’s situation means offering him, in exchange for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered. If at any time I was able to pour out into the mold of my heart the imaginary voices of the dwarf or the beggar, the metal of this cast was not obtained from any wish that the dwarf or the beggar might have a less difficult time. On the contrary: only through a praising of their incomparable fate could the poet, with his full attention suddenly given to them, be true and fundamental, and there is nothing that he would have to fear and refuse so much as a corrected world in which the dwarfs are stretched out and the beggars enriched. The God of completeness sees to it that these varieties do not cease, and it would be a most superficial attitude to consider the poet’s joy in this suffering multiplicity as an esthetic pretense.
(To Hermann Pongs, October 21, 1924)
The Drunkard’s Song
(Paris, June 7/12, 1906)
The Idiot’s Song
(Paris, June 7, 1906)
The Dwarf’s Song
(Paris, June 7, 1906)
NEW POEMS
(First Part, 1907; Second Part, 1908)
Do the
New Poems
still seem so impersonal to you? You see, in order to speak about what happened to me, what I needed was not so much an instrument of emotion, but rather: clay. Involuntarily I undertook to make use of “lyric poetry” in order to
form
not feelings but
things I had felt
; every one of life’s events had to find a place in this forming, independently of the suffering or pleasure it had at first brought me. This formation would have been worthless if it hadn’t gone as far as the
trans
-formation of every accidental detail; it had to arrive at the essence.
(To “une amie,” February 3, 1923)
The Panther
(Paris, 1903, or possibly late in 1902)
In addition to the panther in the Jardin des Plantes, Rilke was probably remembering a small Greek statue of a panther (or tiger).
In his studio in the rue de l’Université, Rodin has a tiny plaster cast of a tiger (antique) which he values very highly: C’est beau, c’est tout [It’s beautiful, it’s everything], he says of it. And from this little plaster copy I have seen what he means, what antiquity is and what links him to it. There is in this animal the same kind of aliveness in the modeling; on this little Thing (it is no higher than my hand is wide, and no longer than my hand is) there are a hundred thousand places, as if it were something really huge—a hundred thousand places that are all alive, active, and different. All this just in plaster! And the representation of the prowling stride is intensified to the highest degree, the powerful downward tread of the broad paws, and simultaneously that caution in which all strength is wrapped, that noiselessness.
(To Clara Rilke, September 27, 1902)
In Rodin’s studio there is a cast of a panther, of Greek workmanship, hardly as big as a hand (the original is in the medallion collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris). If you look from the front under its body into the space formed by the four powerful soft paws, you seem to be looking into the depths of an Indian stone temple; so huge and all-inclusive does this work become.
(
Auguste Rodin
, 1902, SW 5, 173)
The Gazelle
(Paris, July 17, 1907)
Yesterday I spent the whole morning in the Jardin des Plantes, looking at the gazelles. Gazella Dorcas, Linnaeus. There are a pair of them and also a single female. They were lying a few feet apart, chewing their cuds, resting, gazing. As women gaze out of pictures, they were gazing out of something, with a soundless, final turn of the head. And when a horse whinnied, the single one listened, and I saw the radiance from ears and horns around her slender head.… I saw the single one stand up, for a moment; she lay right down again; but while she was stretching and testing herself, I could see the magnificent workmanship of those legs (they are like rifles from which leaps are fired). I just couldn’t tear myself away, they were so beautiful.
(To Clara Rilke, June 13, 1907)
1.6,
songs of love:
Possibly a reference to the Song of Solomon, which, in the translation that Rilke used, frequently compares the beloved to a gazelle.
The Swan
(Meudon, winter 1905/1906)
The Grownup
(Paris, July 19, 1907)
There is an insightful study of this poem in Geoffrey H. Hartman’s
The Unmediated Vision
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954).
l. 4,
the Ark of God:
The ark of the tabernacle, Exodus 25.
Going Blind
(Paris, late June 1906)
Before Summer Rain
(Paris, early July 1906)
Written after a visit to the Château de Chantilly.
l. 6,
Saint Jerome
(ca. 347-ca. 420): One of the four great Doctors of the Western Church, noted for his asceticism and pugnacity. Rilke may have been thinking of the Dürer engraving, dated 1514.
The Last Evening
(Paris, June 1906)
Dedication,
Frau Nonna:
Rilke’s friend Julie Freifrau von Nordeck zur Rabe-nau, whose first husband was killed in the battle of Königgrätz, July 3, 1866, at the age of thirty-one.
l. 14,
shako:
“A military cap in the shape of a truncated cone, with a peak and either a plume or a ball or ‘pompom.’ ” (OED)
Portrait of My Father as a Young Man
(Paris, June 27, 1906)
This poem, written three months after Josef Rilke’s death, describes
the fine colored daguerrotype of my father that was taken when he was seventeen, just before his departure on the [Austrian army’s] Italian campaign. Those first, naive photographs could be so movingly real—this one gives you the impression that you are looking at him through his mother’s eyes, seeing the beautiful young face in its solemn, barely smiling presentiment of bravery and danger. In my childhood I must have seen it once among my father’s papers; later it seemed as though it was missing for years—useless to ask where it had gone. Then, after he died, I found it among the possessions he had left behind, framed like a miniature in antique red velvet, intact—and I realized how unutterably it had taken form in my heart.
(To Magda von Hattingberg, February 11, 1914)
Self-Portrait, 1906
(Probably Paris, spring 1906)
Spanish Dancer
(Paris, June 1906)
Tombs of the Hetaerae
(Rome, early in 1904)
Hetaerae:
Courtesans.
Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes
(Rome, early in 1904)
According to Ovid: After Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife, died of a snakebite, the poet descended to the land of shadows to retrieve her, and held the whole underworld spellbound by the beauty of his song.
Neither the dark queen
nor the lord who rules the underworld could deny
what he in his song had asked for, and they called
Eurydice. She was there among the shades
just recently arrived, and now walked toward them,
slowly, the wound still fresh upon her ankle.
Orpheus took her, with the one condition:
if he should turn to look at her before
they had passed the dismal valleys of Avernus,
the gift would be revoked.
They climbed the path
through the deep silence, wrapped in total darkness.
They had almost reached the rim of the upper world
when he, afraid that she might slip, impatient
to see her bright, beloved face, looked back:
and in an instant, she began to fade,
reaching out, struggling desperately to hold on
to him, or to be held; but her hands could grasp
nothing but thin air. She didn’t blame
her appalled husband for this second death
(how could she blame such love?) and, calling out
a last
Farewell!
, which he could barely hear,
she vanished.
(Ovid,
Metamorphoses
X, 46 ff.)
Hermes:
The messenger of the gods and the guide (
psychopompos
) who took the souls of the dead to the underworld.
l. 15,
in the blue cloak:
In Homer, dark blue is the color of mourning.
