Reading Rilke

by William H. Gass

  Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.

  Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.

  And without feet I can make my way to you,

  without a mouth I can swear your name.

  Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you

  with my heart as with a hand.

  Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.

  And if you consume my brain with fire,

  I’ll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.3

  I feel that the tone of my version is fiercer, more ardent, but it is perhaps more a love poem now than a religious one.

  Put my eyes out: I can still see;

  slam my ears shut: I can still hear,

  walk without feet to where you were,

  and, tongueless, speak you into being.

  Snap off my arms: I’ll hold you hard

  in my heart’s longing like a fist;

  halt that, my brain will do its beating,

  and if you set this mind of mine aflame,

  then on my blood I’ll carry you away.4

  It will usually take many readings to arrive at the right place. Somewhere amid various versions like a ghost the original will drift. Yet our situation is no different if we are trying to understand English with English eyes. Hardy begins his great poem about love rendered-as-rhyme with this nine-liner:

  If it’s ever Spring again,

  Spring again,

  I shall go where went I when

  Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen,

  Seeing me not, amid their flounder,

  Standing with my arms around her;

  If it’s ever Spring again,

  Spring again,

  I shall go where went I then.

  Try “translating” Hardy’s English into your own. “I shall go where I once saw the moor-cock and his mate splash down, locked in one another’s wings. I notice them but they do not see me standing nearby with my arms around my own beloved.” I must not omit the awkward beauty of the refrain, “I shall go where went I when,” and any change I make will reinforce the rightness of the original. If I lose the rhymes, I lose the poem, for there are four in a row before the couplet, and then three more returns of the initial sound. There is a reason for this rhyme scheme which Hardy subsequently reveals.

  If it’s ever summer-time,

  Summer-time,

  With the hay crop at the prime,

  And the cuckoos—two—in rhyme,

  As they used to be, or seemed to,

  We shall do as long we’ve dreamed to,

  If it’s ever summer-time,

  Summer-time,

  With the hay, and bees achime.

  To read with recognition (not just simple understanding) is to realize why the writer made the choices he or she made, and why, if the writing has been done well (suppose I’d said “well done”?), its words could not have been set down otherwise. Our translations will make a batch of botches, but it will not matter, crush them all into a ball and toss them to the trash. Their real value will have been received. The translating reader reads the inside of the verse and sees, like the physician, either its evident health or its hidden disease. That reader will know why Hardy couldn’t come right out and say: “Someday we’ll have a roll in the hay.”

  EIN GOTT VERMAGS

  What lover of poetry has not read the story? Rainer Maria Rilke, that rootless poet whom we’ve followed like a stray for so long we know the smell of his heels, has been lent the offseason use of the Castle Duino by the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe. The place is huge and stern, alternately menacing and boring, too austere even for a soul sold on austerity. Rilke, as sensitive to weather as a vane, also found the climate trying. Yet it was economical. It spoke to him only of work. Nevertheless, the poet would have preferred Capri. Duino it was.

  Pent up there by a bitter Adriatic winter and, more willingly, by the stones of the place itself, he continues to be deserted by his Muse so that he feels barren, arid of spirit, yet driven deeply into himself like a stake meant for his own heart. Sterile as a wooden cuckoo, then, and surrounded like the sea below him by a loneliness which has for months embarrassed his much prized solitude with occult visitations and handmade sex, shaming and humiliating him, the Poet has had—this fateful morning—to deal with an annoying business letter he feels asks too loudly for its answer. Preoccupied, he walks along the precipitous edge of the Duino Castle cliffs, his head bent into a bright wind which buries his breath. Then … then, like the rattle in a hollow gourd, he hears in his head what will one day be the celebrated question with which the Elegies are at last to announce themselves: Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?

  Or (in the presence of any poet is it possible to say the phrase?)—in other words:

  Leishman. (1939/60) Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?

  Behn. (1957) Who, if I cried out, would heed me amid the host of the Angels?

  MacIntyre. (1961) Who, if I shouted, among the hierarchy of angels would hear me?

  Garmey/Wilson. (1972) Who, if I cried, would hear me from the order of Angels?

  Boney. (1975) Who of the angelic hosts would hear me, even if I cried out?

  Poulin. (1977) And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic orders?

  Young. (1978) If I cried outwho would hear me up there

  among the angelic orders?

  Miranda. (1981) What angel, if I cried out, would hear me?

  Mitchell. (1982) Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?

  Flemming. (1985) Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?

  Hunter. (1987) Who, though I cry aloud, would hear me in the angel order?

  Cohn. (1989) WHO, if I cried out, might hear me—among the ranked Angels?

  Hammer/Jaeger. (1991) If I did cry out, who would hear me through the Angel Orders?

  Oswald. (1992) Who, if I cried out, would hear me then, out of the orders of angels?

  Gass. (1998) Who, if I cried, would hear me among the Dominions of Angels?

  In so many other words …

  When, in 1975, Ingo Seidler presented his “Critical Appraisal of English Versions of Rilke” to a Rilke Centennial at Wayne State University,1 he remarked on “the astonishing bulk of available English versions” of Rilke’s work in print, at least according to publishers’ catalogues. “Five complete translations of the Duino Elegies are listed” (Leishman to Boney, in my enumeration), and Professor Seidler says he knows “of at least another two.” What must he think now when my catalogue (surely not exhaustive) finds without trying fourteen complete versions as well as many incomplete ones? Nor of course are the Elegies the sole target of the translators, who have given us new renderings of Rilke’s fiction (both novels and stories), his published poetry, his uncollected poems, his early plays, his journals, his ventures into French verse, as well as many of his countless letters.

  If I receive some petty request in the post (can’t we imagine our poet peevishly complaining as he picks his way down the narrow path to the bastions?), even a nag from a nobody, good manners compel me to respond; its silliness will occupy my thoughts like a game of cards; but if I were to entreat the higher powers, cry out from my soul, pray to the so-called gods for my poetry to be returned to me, for a little rain after this long drought, whom would my words reach?

  No one. The mountains of the heart entertain no echo. The Abyss does not respond. Heaven is as indifferent as the land. The ocean holds no intermission.

  But the voice, of course, is not heard as the poet’s own. It comes from the clean wind, the bora, burning his face like the sun, and it has the same elemental force, the same cold grip, as the streaming air which would lift him like a leaf and whirl him away over the glare of the sea.

  Thus it is not the fastidious, fussy little person of the petitioner who wonders these words (it is everybody’s elemental outcry); and although address
ed to the Angels, it is as if the Angels spoke them, because their meaning is not common, small, or mean—earthbound—as most of our fears and worries are, most of our thoughts, hopelessly human as we are; hence the poem which appears like the wind in our ear must have all the fundamental mystery and breathtaking grandeur we feel whenever we encounter that simple, plain, and pure correctness about the nature of things which only the gods possess.

  These are not poems, then. These are miracles. And they must seem miraculous … Ein Gott vermags.

  Well, can we make up our minds? does the poet cry or shout or, again, cry out? aloud? and do the angels fail to hear or heed or listen to him? How deep is their indifference? The cry is surely an inward cry, a cry to heaven as empty as the air, a cry blown out like a flame. Why write “cry out” then?… to avoid any sense of sniveling. Yet this cry, in a few lines, will include the child’s. In any case, it is scarcely so crude as a shout. And the Angels, more self-absorbed than Narcissus, will not hear, let alone listen, not to say heed. Nor are they l.c. angels, smallish, cupid-like. They surpass Gabriel, who has to fetch, toot, and carry. What then does this dissonant clamor from the tents of the translators come to?

  My version has striven for a more euphonious line and has tried to reflect the hierarchy which Ordnungen suggests by invoking one of the arrangements associated with the traditional conception of angels, namely their division into seraphim, cherubim, thrones—dominations, virtues, powers—principalities, archangels, angels; but Behn’s and Boney’s “hosts” are entirely too churchy, while MacIntyre’s “shout” and again Behn’s “heed” are simply misinterpretations.

  As for that preposition: is it to be “among the Angelic orders,” “amid” them, “from” them, or “in” or “out” instead? Hammer/Jaeger’s “through” is simply bizarre. Poulin wants the angels not only to “hear” but to “listen,” while Behn requires obedience. The nature of Rilke’s Angels is such, as the Elegies will indicate as they proceed, that although they might find themselves in an order, they would never arrange it, no more than the stars might design their constellations. The hierarchy isn’t theirs, even if Mitchell and Flemming would have it so. Boney and Miranda want to single out an angel like a calf from the herd, while Hunter and Hammer/Jaeger bump “order” and “Angel” awkwardly together. Cohn’s expression “ranked Angels” sounds ludicrous in English (Angel A, Angel B …).

  No one has tried to mimic the wenn-denn division—a discretion which was no doubt wise, though Oswald puts in one of them while incidentally doubling his “out” (“Who, if I cried out, would hear me then, out of the orders of angels?”). Poulin’s rendering is oddest of all, because the initial “And” implies a prior speech, an earlier communication, although nothing, surely, is prior to the poet’s profound recognition of his isolation. In addition, Poulin is far too colloquial for the Elegies (“who’d listen to me” has totally the wrong tone), but Young is even worse (“who would hear me up there”). These are not the sounds we should hear if our voice were to echo from the edges of the distant gods and were thus to return to us as a primitive original the way a deeply dappled shadow might replace—might cast back—its tree.

  The Elegies are dominated by Angels of an icy sky above and the gravitating dactyls of a declining ground below, with the dactyls by far the more powerful presence. When, as in the opening question, that meter is easy to maintain, it should be as thankfully embraced as an accommodating woman. And when the word order, so often a twisting and rocky road, is also straightforward, why not be straightforward? The Elegies tell us to listen as hitherto only holy men have listened. The individuality, the quirkiness, the bone-headed nature of every translation is inevitable. I see no reason to strive for these qualities.

  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.

  Leishman. And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence.

  Behn. Still, should an Angel exalt and fold me into his heart I should vanish, lost in his greater being.

  MacIntyre. And supposing one of them took me suddenly to his heart, I would perish before his stronger existence.

  Garmey/Wilson. And even if one suddenly held me to his heart: I would dissolve there from his stronger presence.

  Boney. Yet granted, one of them suddenly embraced me, I would only perish from his stronger being.

  Poulin. Even if one of them suddenly held me to his heart, I’d vanish in his overwhelming presence.

  Young. And suppose one suddenly

  took me to his heart

  I would shrivel

  I couldn’t survivenext to his

  greater existence.

  Miranda. And even if one of them impulsively embraced me, I’d be crushed by its strength.

  Mitchell. and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.

  Flemming. and even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I would perish in the embrace of his stronger existence.

  Hunter. And should my plea ascend,

  were I gathered to the glory

  of some incandescent heart,

  my own faint flame of being

  would fail for the glare.

  Cohn. Even if One suddenly clasped me to his heart I would die of the force of his being.

  Hammer/Jaeger. and suppose one of them suddenly pulled me to his heart: I’d dissolve beside his stronger existence.

  Oswald. and even supposing one suddenly took me close to the heart, I would perish from that stronger existence.

  Gass. And even if one of them suddenly held me against his heart, I would fade in the grip of that completer existence.

  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.

  Wh
y 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.

  Leishman/Spender. For Beauty’s nothing but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible.

  Leishman. For Beauty’s nothing but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.

  Behn. For beauty is only a seed of dread to be endured yet adored since it disdains to destroy us. An Angel alone, is misted in dread …

  MacIntyre. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.