Rilke wrote the Letter while in the middle of his great late works, the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, both of which can be said to dedicate themselves to the earth. It was written in the pad that also contains drafts of the Tenth Elegy at the beginning and of the Fifth (the last to be written) at the end, and Rilke had by then completed the first part of the Sonnets to Orpheus and would shortly write the second. The validation of poetry it contains can be understood as a self-validation, and Rilke’s Orpheus is indeed in many ways a counter-figure to Christ, focusing on the ‘earthly’ and the ‘Here and Now’, words which are common to both the Letter and the Sonnets to Orpheus. That the Letter emerged from such a context, when anyone might have thought that Rilke was taken up with other things, points to the charge of necessity it carries, and this quality is audible in its every sentence, a hard, clear, uncompromising quality which does not eschew the colloquial or the direct but uses whatever means channel its energy best. ‘A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity,’ Rilke had written to Kappus in his first letter to him, and this one evidently did. Despite this he made no mention of the text in his correspondence.
Rilke seems to adopt the persona of the worker as a way of emphasizing that he is speaking out of the present, the ‘machine age’ (the worker is a factory-worker who spends most of his time behind a desk and is only rarely on the machines, but this doesn’t prevent him from referring to ‘my machine’). There is a comparable attention to modernity, to the machine and to technological advances like aeroplane flight, in some of the Sonnets to Orpheus. The worker’s first objection to Christ is that he belongs to another era: ‘The conditions he lived in were so very different.’ He wore a seamless garment whereas now clothes are bought off the peg, one size fits all. The worker/Rilke does not doubt the ‘core of light’ that dwelled in him, just as he does not want to do without God (the Letter is not anti-religious), but he thinks the time in which Christ was necessary is long over and that having served his purpose of bodying forth God he should have vanished, ‘without remainder’. Instead, he has become the focal point of a religion and has left the very palpable trace of the crucifix.
The ubiquity of the cross is something that Rilke regards as a misunderstanding: it was meant as a pointer beyond itself, to God, but has ended up getting in the way. Rilke begins a play on words here whose ramifications run outwards to other of his works in a kind of secret tracery that relates the Letter’s main preoccupations. He says that the cross was only a crossroads (a point to move on from rather than a destination), where the German word Kreuzweg means Way of the Cross as well as crossroads. Kreuzweg was a word Rilke was fond of, and it seems to have almost a private meaning for him. This is first intimated in a sentence from his book on Rodin: ‘The person who rises at night and softly goes to another is like a digger for treasure who wants to excavate the great and necessary happiness that lies at the crossroads of [the] sex.’ It is then reprised in an erotic poem of 1915: ‘Raised by you the god’s form stands / at the gentle crossroads beneath my clothes.’ The ‘gentle crossroads’ in these lines is the crotch, and instead of a cross there stands a phallic god, which the poem also refers to as a Herma. The Kreuzweg is not only a place of suffering, a Via Crucis, but a place of pleasure.
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
Translator’s Note and Further Reading
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
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
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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
Letters to a Young Poet Page 9