Reading Rilke

by William H. Gass

  Garmey/Wilson. For Beauty is only the beginning of a terror we can just barely endure, and what we so admire is its calm disdaining to destroy us. Every Angel brings terror.

  Boney. For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of awesomeness which we can barely endure and we marvel at it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Each and every angel is awesome.

  Poulin. Because beauty’s nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear, and we adore it because of the serene scorn it could kill us with. Every angel’s terrifying.

  Young. Beauty is only the first touch of terror we can still bear and it awes us so much because it so coolly disdains to destroy us. Every single angel is terrible!

  Miranda. For Beauty is just the beginning of a terror we can barely stand: we admire it because it calmly refuses to crush us. Every angel terrifies.

  Mitchell. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

  Flemming. 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. Each single angel is terrifying.

  Hunter. For Beauty is only the infant of scarcely endurable Terror, and we are amazed when it casually spares us. Every Angel is terrible.

  Cohn. Beauty is as close to terror as we can well endure. Angels would not condescend to damn our meagre souls. That is why they awe and why they terrify us so. Every angel is terrible!

  Hammer/Jaeger. But beauty’s nothing but the start of that terror we can just manage to bear, and we’re fascinated by it because it serenely scorns to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.

  Oswald. For what strikes us as beauty is nothing but all we can bear of a terror’s beginning, and we admire it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every angel strikes terror.

  Gass. For Beauty is nothing but the approach of a Terror we’re only just able to bear, and we worship it so because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every Angel is awesome.

  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.

  Translators are on a par with poets when it comes to being mean-spirited. Walter Arndt, in his arrogant collection called The Best of Rilke (there are no Elegies), complains bitterly about the efforts of others, and one can enjoy his diatribes, if not the poems themselves. Considering line 4 of the “Panther” poem, Arndt says of one esteemed translator,

  the drugged languor of the stanza is spoiled, from mere ineptitude, by the indecent hop-and-skip of an anapaest. Its rhymes, moreover, are replaced by assonances. Close assonances may be unavoidable second-bests occasionally, but to this pains-faking paraphrast they are neither close nor occasional but part of a cheery what-the-hellitude that Rilke, of all delicate spirits, has not deserved.2

  Arndt is sc
ornful of those who try to translate from a language to which they are not native, and there is no doubt that such a practice frequently leads to errors, some of which he properly points out, though we could use a little less gloat and glee, since he deals with every mistake as if he has caught a criminal. In my opinion, it is more important that the translator have native-like possession of the language into which he is trying to put his chosen poem. Arndt is also, I think, idolatrous about genre and meter and rhyme, and insists on twisting normal English orders inside out simply to satisfy a scheme.

  I’ve already complained of how political it all is anyway. The poet, while composing, struggles to rule a nation of greedy self-serving malcontents; every idea, however tangential to the main theme it may have been initially, wants to submerge the central subject beneath its fructifying self as though each drizzle were scheming a forty-days rain; every jig and trot desires to be the whole dance; every la-di-da and line length, image, order, rhyme, variation, and refrain, every well-mouthed vowel, dental click, silent design, represents a corporation, cartel, union, well-heeled lobby, a Pentagon or NRA, eager to turn the law toward its interests; every word wants to enjoy a potency so supreme it will emasculate the others (I have known the little letter “a” to act just that outrageously); and then there is the poet too, who is supposed to be in charge, a fraud like Oz’s Wizard, teetering on a paper throne and trying to keep a dozen personal insecurities from finding out about each other; trying to overcome the temptation to give in to one poetic demand at the expense of another—the Useful instead of the Alluring, the Alluring rather than what’s Essential—trying to avoid habits which prefer first thoughts, indulge weak ones, encourage the facile, and ruin the work.

  Thus the completed poem is a series of delicate adjudications, a peace created from contention, and there are occasionally those beautiful moments when every element runs together freely toward the same end and every citizen cries out, “Aye!” Must the translator mimic this mess, and take the measure of such miracles? He must. The translator, remaining in command of his best self while working in another unaccommodating language, must somehow register these decisions and adjustments, the many permissions and denials issued by the poet in the first place. The result, of course, is the record of a reading, and almost never a poem—not the economical setting down of a critical interpretation, although the interpretation must take place, but one step beyond that toward the compound, multi-spliced and engineered, performance which emerges from a recording studio. Still, to sing Rilke in English, even when machines have gloriously falsified your voice: Ein Gott vermags.

  A god can do it. But tell me,

  how can a man follow him through the lyre’s strings?

  His soul is split. And at the intersection

  of two heart-riven roads, there is no temple to Apollo.

  Song, as you have taught, is not mere longing,

  the wooing of whatever lovely can be attained;

  singing is being. Easy for a god.

  But when are we? And when does he fill us

  with earth and stars?

  Young man, this isn’t it, your yearning,

  even if your voice bursts out of your mouth.

  Learn to forget such impulsive song. It won’t last.

  Real singing takes another breath.

  A breath made of nothing. Inhalation in a god. A wind.3

  So find an English song for these words, these phrases, from “Die Spanische Trilogie,” for instance: … der den Schein zerrissner Himmels-Lichtung fängt …, … das grosse dunkle Nichtmehrsein der Welt ausatmend hinnimmt …, … aus schlaftrunknen Kindern an so fremder Brust …, or, my favorite,… wie ein Meteor in seiner Schwere nur die Summe Flugs zusammennimmt.… You don’t have to know German. Just look at it: zusammennimmt. A god can’t do it.

  Nor are poems approached in innocence, and with the absence of lubricating forethought. Have we not had to suffer those who direct The Tempest as if it took place in Central Park? Many of our translators have programs—organized preconceptions—which drive and direct their labors. Hölderlin must sound as if written now. Why? The cry of the current is continuous like a noisy creek; let’s have a Hegel for our time, a Kant for the country club. Shall we throw Racine into a hearty street vernacular, update Dido and Aeneas? Or if nostalgia overtakes us, we can run as well in reverse. Does not MacIntyre translate Weltraum as “welkin,” down-dating Rilke in the direction of Chaucer?

  Welcome to the pole vault. The second section of this “First Elegy” puts the bar at twenty feet. Und so verhalt ich mich denn und verschlucke den Lockruf dunkelen Schluchzens. Several words from the opening line find re-employment. A harsh and overwhelming music surrounds these bird-sung meanings, and a deforming pattern, like a bound foot, unreasonably demands to be danced.

  Leishman/Spender. And so I keep down my heart, and swallow the call-note of depth-dark sobbing.

  Leishman. And so I repress myself, and swallow the call-note of depth-dark sobbing.

  MacIntyre. And so I restrain myself and swallow the luring call of dark sobbing.

  Garmey/Wilson. So I withhold myself and keep back the lure of my dark sobbing.

  Boney. And so I restrain myself and suppress the luring call with somber sobs.

  Poulin. So I control myself and choke back the lure of my dark cry.

  Young. And since that’s the case I choke back my own dark birdcall, my sobbing.

  Mitchell. So I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.

  Flemming. And so I force myself, swallow and hold back the surging call of my dark sobbing.

  Gass 1. And so I contain myself; choke back the appealing child’s cry of my innermost part.

  Gass 2. And so I master myself and hold back the appealing outcry of my childhood heart.

  If we try to stay close to the immediate English sense of the German words, a nearly vomitous calamity results (consider Leishman’s unfortunate initial effort, for instance), and we must avoid these luring calls, these dark sobs, at all costs. The controlling image, which “The Third Elegy” confirms, is that of the frightened child calling for Mother to remove the darkness with its terror, which, like the absent light, is so alive in it. Thus the cry is an appealing one on two counts, and one which issues from the poet’s deepest nature. The cry is held back because the fear itself is a fear we worship out of frightened gratitude; because the cry comes from the child in us; and because it is anyhow pointless, as the famous lines which follow mournfully but selfishly reiterate: alas, who is there we can make use of?

  However, what does Rilke say the “call” is like? Although Young’s casual prosiness is again inexplicable (“And since that’s the case …”), he is the only translator to put Rilke’s bird on its perch. The idea that the cry is effective the way a child’s sobbing might be, and the notion that the cry is alluring as the mating calls of the bird are meant to be, collide like two trains. I see only smoke and steam. But Rilke likes to pass through all the ranks: not God, not Angels, not men, not birds either. Perhaps a tree or a walk or a habit, as we’ll see, reading on, but our friends are few.

  Gass 3. So I master myself to stifle an appealing outcry—instinctive as a mating song. Alas, who is there we can call on? Not Angels, not men, and even the observant animals are aware that we’re not very happily home here, in this—our interpreted world.

  “So I master myself to stifle” is awkward; “… instinctive as a mating song” is an interpretation, but at the moment I want to keep it because I think the bird has to be there. Birds coo sometimes, or moan, but they never sob.

  Gass 4. So I master myself to muffle an appealing heart’s cry—instinctive as a mating song. Alas, who is there we can call on?

  Not another “heart,” I can hear my inner critic saying, and too many m&m’s. The pattern of alliteration could be shifted:

  Gass 5. So I control myself to cut short an appealing outcry—instinctive as a mating song. Alas, who is there we can call on?


  But “cut short” is a bit too colloquial, and too temporal to boot. We’re not talking about a vacation. “So I control myself to muffle an appealing outcry—”

  As we advance into the elegy as into some movie Africa, the weaknesses of our company become increasingly manifest: the heat is getting to them, the rotten gin, the drums, the flies. Who but fish swallow lures? Garmey/Wilson suggest that the poet withholds himself, and Boney that the poet actually employs his somber sobs to suppress his luring call. It is hard to imagine a version much worse than my first try. Shall we permit readers to believe that this great poem contains lines of such pretentious silliness? Poulin’s translation is cleaner than the others, as is customary with him, and that is not a minor merit when among the unwashed; yet for any poem, song is essential to its being, and all we hear here are the squeaks of unoiled doors. Für den Gott ein Leichtes. There is that wonderful moment, for instance, when the poem asks lovers (who characteristically believe their arms encircle an exciting and excited body) to add the actual emptiness they are grasping to the totality of space (Wirf aus den Armen die Leere zu den Räumen hinzu, die wir atmen; vielleicht dass die Vögel die erweiterte Luft fühlen mit innigerm Flug), and Leishman gives us a triumphant rendering:

  Leishman. Fling the emptiness out of your arms to broaden the spaces we breathe—maybe that [sic] the birds will feel the extended air in more fervent flight.

  Alongside this, Poulin’s attempt is awkward and prosy, except that (like Garmey/Wilson) he emphasizes the interior meanings that apply to innigerm, always appropriate with Rilke.

  Poulin. Throw the emptiness in your arms out into that space we breathe; maybe birds will feel the air thinning as they fly deeper into themselves.

  Poulin has no knack for the right word here. If we are hurling away from us what we’ve once hugged, isn’t “fling” the only correct name for the gesture which empties our arms?