Reading Rilke

by William H. Gass

  “Be dead forever in Eurydice—” the following quatrain begins. What can that mean? Possibly: since you looked back and cost her her chance at resurrection, then you ought to “Remain with Eurydice in the realm of death.” Mitchell interprets the lines plausibly: “Be forever dead in Eurydice—more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song,” although that’s not exactly Rilke’s wording. What to do?

  Anticipate all farewells, as if they were behind you

  like the winter that’s just past, for among winters

  there will be one so relentlessly winter

  that in overwintering it your heart will be readied to last.

  Remain with Eurydice in the realm of death—rise there

  singing, praising, to realize the harmony in your strings.

  Here—among pale shades in a fading world—

  be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

  Be—but nonetheless know why nothingness

  is the unending source of your most fervent vibration,

  so that this once you may give it your full affirmation.

  To the store of copious Nature’s used-up, cast-off,

  speechless creatures—an unsayable amount—

  jubilantly join yourself and cancel the count.6

  I hate “vibration/affirmation” but, so far, I haven’t been able to improve on it. This triplet is tough to render in reasonably uninflated English.

  For every poet we attempt to translate, certain adjustments will have to be made, equivalences found, sacrifices accepted; and we shall have to decide in each instance (whether the poet is Valéry or Hölderlin, Vallejo or Montale—whether the issue is rhythm, verse form, figures, sound, or wordplay—ambiguity, syntax, idea, or tone—diction, subject, weight, ambition—secret grief, overmastering obsession) just what element is so essential that a literal transcription must be aimed at; what we dare to seek certain equivalences for instead; when we can afford to settle for similar general impressions and effect; how to unpack the overly compacted; and what must be let go, unless luck is with us, in order to achieve the rest—that rest which must add up to greatness; and in the case of Rilke, I think, the poetry of idea must come first, the metaphors he makes out of the very edge and absence of meaning, the intense metaphysical quality of his vision (as unphilosophically developed as it yet is); while tone and overall effect would be next—in the Elegies that prophetic grandeur some of his translators are not convinced of—Rilke’s hubristic ambition, the vanity of “the seer”—and in the Sonnets the quick hot Heraclitean quality of a flame in which others have been unwilling to hold their hands without wincing (11, 12):

  Will transformation. Be inspired by the flame

  where a thing made of change conceals itself.

  then the figures, so essential, and some sense of Rilke’s rich verbal music, complex wordplay, and intricate complicities of suggestion; so that reaching the last factor, I think I’d be ready, in most cases, to give up his verse forms first.

  Most of the translators of the Elegies and the Sonnets do their homework and offer useful notes. There are certainly many clues to the meaning of Rilke’s poems to be found in his letters. Above all, nearly every poem is a version of many poems that have been written before it, and of many more to follow. This is one reason why Rilke is given to poetic outbursts. These sudden outpourings are summations: the regathering, reclenching, and releasing of a fresh fistful of former themes, images, motifs, emotions, ideas.

  Yet in several significant instances, scholarship has failed to warn translators away from errors. The most outrageous of these occurs in the first quatrain of a very famous sonnet from New Poems, “Torso of an Archaic Apollo.” In a footnote in his Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Works,7 Leishman explains that in Germany and Austria the word Kandelaber “was the usual word for a streetlamp: not for the comparatively short post with a single square lantern, but for the much taller and more elegant sort with two globes, each suspended from either end of a wide semicircular crosspiece. Gas lamps, in which the main supply was turned on by means of a long pole and ignited from a small, perpetually burning bypass, had not yet been replaced by electric. Rilke had already used the word in the poem ‘Night Drive.’ ”

  This news comes too late to help C. F. MacIntyre, who is forced into contortions:

  Never will we know his fabulous head

  where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened. Yet

  his torso glows: a candelabrum set

  before his gaze which is pushed back and hid …

  Even Leishman concentrates on the second part of his information (how the gas is turned down), instead of on the shape of the lamps, with their semicircular, hence skull-like, crosspiece and their eye-shaped globes. He writes, omitting mention of the Augenäpfel:

  Though we’ve not known his unimagined head

  and what divinity his eyes were showing,

  his torso like a branching street-lamp’s glowing,

  wherein his gaze, only turned down, can shed

  light still.

  My own effort tries, perhaps too hard, to justify itself:

  Never will we know his legendary head

  where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened. Yet

  his torso glows as if his look were set

  above it in suspended globes that shed

  a street’s light down.

  The temptation to push past Rilke’s German into the Platonic poem itself, the poem no one can write without resorting to some inevitably distorting language, is sometimes irresistible. One should never go, I think, quite all the way, yet a little flirting, some heavy petting, may sometimes be more than a pleasant indulgence. Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, or the gods may succeed. To do so, the translator has to say to the reader: forget the fact that the poem belongs in its body as utterly as you do in yours; listen to what’s going on behind my tongue, in my mind where the Muse was, in your mind where the Muse is. Try to realize the presence of Apollo’s decapitated head, its absent eyelight shining down upon the fragment that is its torso. See how complete this desecrated stone is, although it has no face, no smile, once upon a time tight curls of hair maybe, now armless, no longer wearing its inoffensive little phallus like a bit of fatter pubic hair, its well-muscled legs once extending into a firmly footed stance. They are the same bodily implements you have, reader (excepting, sometimes, the sex), without the necessity to imagine them, and none of them stone. Yet, lo and behold, that absent look, that vanished smile, is bright, and burns your eyes as you perceive its shine, flashing from this broken body to confront your inner incompleteness and condemn it. Are you as real as this ancient, battered remnant of statue? Change, then. Change your life.

  Never will we know his legendary head

  where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened. Yet

  his torso glows as if his look were set

  above it in suspended globes that shed

  a street’s light down. Otherwise the surging breast

  would not thus blind you, nor through the soft turn

  of the loins could you feel his smile pass easily

  into the bright groins where the genitals yearned.

  Otherwise this stone would not be so complete,

  from its shoulder showering body into absent feet,

  or seem as sleek and ripe as the pelt of a beast;

  nor would that gaze be gathered up by every surface

  to burst out blazing like a star, for there’s no place

  that does not see you. You must change your life.8

  As the Elegies argue: the beauty of perfection, when we are granted the doubtful good fortune to grasp it, announces the reappearance of our fearful conviction that we are, in both the soul and body of our being, so much less.

  INHALATION IN A GOD

  The Duino Elegies were not written; they were awaited. They were intended to be oracular and inspired. Their Being was to be beyond the poem. They are addressed first to the poet and then, as if over his shoulder, to
the rest of us. Their language, like the radiance of the Angels so frequently invoked, streams forth from an ego, an “I,” only to return again as a “you.” They are, in that sense, enclosed, and if the reader resists the enclosure, he will never realize their nature. The Elegies are like the Angels in another way, then: they have only an inside. Which is the same as saying, “Their form is imaginary.”

  They came to him as if they already existed—all ten—the way a mural might exist; but he sees, at first, only bits and pieces, obtains a brief glimpse, only to have them covered again. They come numbered. They arrive in shards with little tags as if they had been taken out of a dig and carefully brushed off by dutiful students.

  Their arrival was inevitable. The surprise was when.

  To my mind, the most persuasive explanation of the phenomenon we are pleased to call “inspiration” (pleased because we like mysteries, we like to think ourselves chosen) is the one offered us by the mathematician Henri Poincaré in a little essay, “Mathematical Creation,” frequently reprinted from his illuminating book Foundations of Science.

  The ground must be there. The ground is an individual’s genetic facility with the medium. But we must not be mistaken about what this facility is. Poincaré is at pains to point out that an inborn knack with numbers (a ready memory for such operations) has little to do with mathematical creativity. Nor does the ability many have to pick up languages as if the languages were thumbing a ride (again, a ready memory, a gift Rilke also had) give promise of poetry or playwriting or any other creative work. The ground Poincaré is speaking of is the ability to make fruitful connections between otherwise unlinked elements of the medium—mathematical connections in his case—resemblances, parallels, analogies—which constitute the synthesizing side of the science or the art; as well as the analytic aspect—the ability to discern deep differences among things as apparently similar as twins.

  If the ground is there, we can begin to till it. The elements of the medium must be internalized. The principles of their manipulation must be mastered. Again, we must not confuse learning a language with the training necessary for its poetic use, precisely because the poetic use is a radical reversal of its function in ordinary life. Paradoxically, our budding poet must be “trained” to “play.” If both rules and elements are few in number (as, relatively, they are in music, mathematics, and the formalized genres of poetry, and as they are definitely not in fiction, history, anthropology, or philosophy), then useful results may be possible, even expected, by youthful efforts in these fields.

  The training does not conclude with the internalization of elements and rules. The practice of other mathematicians, or poets, or composers, must be studied, heard, consumed. This listening, this reading, must be of the analytical kind I have called (in the case of language) transreading. For what is crucial to creativity is the repeated experience, by our young practitioner, of quality of the highest kind. Really gifted people know that values are as “out there” as cows in a field. And a sense for such significant combinations must be developed. Creativity concerns correct choice. I should say that the whole nature of a culture can be seen in its patterns of selection. The entire history of both art and science supports the view that some choices are better than others.

  What does one learn? To ask the right question. As I noted in the section on transreading, Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason in effect asks it: namely, why is a thing what it is, and not some other thing; or, why was this word chosen rather than some other? It may be that the nature of the universe does not provide answers of such completeness, so that we are left with half an explanation (what a thing is, not why it could not be otherwise), but works of art are supposed to bear more justification for their existence than you or I, a fox or flower or blade of grass, have to. There could be causes for the cosmos, but no reasons, or all of IT and the whole of WE could be accidents. The artist must do a better job than God has, although, having internalized the reasons for his choices, he may not be easily able to articulate them. Nevertheless, they’ll be there.

  What proper reading confers upon the right reader is not merely an expanded vocabulary or its subtle understanding, or the ready use of forms and strategies, but also a sympathetic awareness of traditional attitudes and opinions, feelings and desires. The young composer, the young poet, can, in this way, appear far wiser than his or her years. Alexander Pope says that he wrote the following poem at the age of twelve, and it scarcely matters to my point if he’s cheating by a few years.

  ODE ON SOLITUDE

  Happy the man, whose wish and care

  A few paternal acres bound,

  Content to breathe his native air,

  In his own ground.

  Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,

  Whose flocks supply him with attire,

  Whose trees in summer yield him shade,

  In winter fire.

  Blest! who can unconcern’dly find

  Hours, days, and years slide soft away,

  In health of body, peace of mind,

  Quiet by day,

  Sound sleep by night; study and ease

  Together mix’d; sweet recreation,

  And innocence, which most does please,

  With meditation.

  Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;

  Thus unlamented let me dye;

  Steal from the world, and not a stone

  Tell where I lye.1

  Does the kid really want to steal unsung, unpraised, and unheroic from the world? His attitudes are as borrowed as his forms and phrases. “Happy the man” indeed. But poems don’t have to be sincere. They only need to be good.

  After training (and Pope imitates the Earl of Rochester, Waller, Cowley, Spenser, Dorset; he translates Ovid and paraphrases Thomas à Kempis), after an education, comes practice. Intense. Extended. Mindful. Careful. While continuing to read, to imitate if necessary, to learn. Rilke’s easy way with words led him astray, and he was late in his mastery of Goethe, Hölderlin, and many others. Rilke’s salad days were followed by arid stretches, by doubts, difficulties of all kinds, and these were painful for him, but no doubt necessary. Meanwhile, he was trying to understand his own conflicted nature. It is important to remember that the body fuels the mind. And that character controls both. The creative life of the mathematician is usually over by age forty. Perhaps the emotional problems the scholar is fleeing, by working in a world of total abstraction, no longer exert the same fearful pressures. Rilke needed his neuroses, he thought, and he refused, for that reason, to undergo psychoanalysis, although it was suggested to him.

  Once one has become a mathematician, a physicist, a poet, then what one knows, what one feels and thinks, can be focused upon a particular problem. “For fifteen days,” Poincaré tells us, “I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions.” Despite his own denials, a sleepless night full of colliding ideas allowed him to establish the existence of such a class. Next, he wished to represent these new functions through the quotient of two series. This was a conscious choice. And the choice was made by an analogy with solutions achieved in other areas. Meanwhile, Poincaré had agreed to go by bus on a geologic excursion. Mathematical issues were far from his thoughts. “At the moment when I put my foot on the step [of the bus] the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.”

  As in Rilke’s case, the ultimate solution to this complex problem was achieved in stages. Work. Blockage. Insight. Verification. Followed by the orderly development of the new idea.

  Poincaré then turned his attention to what appeared to be quite a different set of problems in arithmetic, but he had a signal lack of success. Giving up in disgust, he took a few days off to visit the seaside. Then, for him, the Rilke-like moment arrived: “One morning, walking on the bluff, the i
dea came to me, with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty, that the arithmetic transformations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.” Further verifications follow. That is to say: proofs. “Naturally I set myself to form all these functions. I made a systematic attack upon them and carried all the outworks, one after another. There was one however that still held out, whose fall would involve that of the whole place.” One more blockage. Now he has to leave his work to go through military service (Poincaré is no exception to the rule of youth). While he was walking down the street one seemingly ordinary day, “the solution of the difficulty which had stopped me suddenly appeared to me.” He had to delay writing down this solution for some time, but time was no longer a factor. Eventually, he did it with dispatch.

  In each stage of Poincaré’s amazing discovery, there are the same factors: initial talent, life preparation, focus, failure, distraction, revelation. In Rilke’s case, we can be considerably more detailed in our description. And the delays are sometimes years rather than weeks or days. Not only is the inspirational moment preceded by a lifetime of practice, but its environmental conditions must be fully met—in effect, the gun must be loaded and cocked before the trigger is pulled. However, since one is never sure what all these conditions are, they are realized by luck as much as plan.