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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Preface
Die Erste Elegie / The First Elegy
Die Zweite Elegie / The Second Elegy
Die Dritte Elegie / The Third Elegy
Die Vierte Elegie / The Fourth Elegy
Die Fünfte Elegie / The Fifth Elegy
Die Sechste Elegie / The Sixth Elegy
Die Siebente Elegie / The Seventh Elegy
Die Achte Elegie / The Eighth Elegy
Die Neunte Elegie / The Ninth Elegy
Die Zehnte Elegie / The Tenth Elegy
Also by Edward Snow
About the Authors
Copyright
PREFACE
The Duino Elegies take their name from Castle Duino, an ancient fortress-like structure set high atop cliffs overlooking the Adriatic near Trieste. It was once a Roman watchtower, and Dante supposedly wrote parts of The Divine Comedy there. During the winter of 1911–12, Rainer Maria Rilke, feeling empty and despondent since completing The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in 1910, was residing there alone when the inspiration for the elegies came to him. Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe (1855–1934), the friend and patron who made the castle available to him, relates in her memoir the story of their genesis:
Rilke later told me how these elegies arose. He suspected nothing of what was taking hold inside him; though he may have hinted of it in a letter he wrote: “The nightingale is approaching—” Had he perhaps felt what was on its way? But things seemed again to fall silent. A great sadness came over him; he began to think that this winter too would be fruitless.
Then, one morning, he received a troublesome business letter. He wanted to be done with it quickly, and had to concern himself with sums and other such tedious matters. Outside, a violent north wind was blowing, but the sun shone and the blue water had a silvery gleam. Rilke climbed down to the bastions which, jutting to the east and west, were connected to the foot of the castle by a narrow path along the cliffs. These cliffs fall steeply, for about two hundred feet, into the sea. Rilke paced back and forth, deep in thought, since the reply to the letter so concerned him. Then, all at once, in the midst of his brooding, he halted suddenly, for it seemed to him that in the raging of the storm a voice had called to him: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” He stood still, listening. “What is that?” he half whispered. “What is it, what is coming?”
He took out his notebook, which he always carried with him, and wrote down these words, together with a few lines that formed themselves without his intervention. Who had come? And then he knew the answer: the god …
Very calmly he climbed back up to his room, set his notebook aside, and replied to the difficult letter.
By that evening the entire elegy had been written down.1
Rilke was elated; he copied the poem into a green leather-bound notebook that he and the princess had bought together in Weimar and sent it to her in Vienna on January 21 as “the first Duino work (and the first for a long time!).” Within days he had composed the effortless-seeming “Second Elegy” as well, along with fragments of the third, sixth, and ninth, and the opening fifteen lines of the tenth. His task as a poet had been announced to him.
But nothing further would materialize at Duino. Rilke left the castle in May with no more written, and recommenced the wanderings that had preceded his stay there. Though he continued to write brilliant poems in his notebooks—150 in 1913 and 1914, several of them masterpieces—the Elegies and his failure to sustain them were what obsessed him now.2 (“Yes, the two elegies exist,” he wrote to his ex-lover and lifelong confidant Lou Andreas-Salomé from Spain in January 1913, “but I can tell you when we meet how small and sharply riven a fragment they form of what was then delivered into my power.”) During the next few years he would make sporadic progress: he forced the uneven “Third Elegy” to completion in October 1913 in Paris, and composed more lines of the sixth; in November 1915 he wrote the terse, elliptical “Fourth Elegy” in just two days in Munich. But that would be all for more than six years, until, in February 1922, in another castle-solitude in Switzerland, the floodgates broke.
Rilke had been living alone since July 1921 in the Château de Muzot, a small medieval tower in the Rhône valley near the village of Sierre, Switzerland, where he had deliberately isolated himself in hope of recapturing the inspiration of the elegies. (“I am now taking root and spinning a web around myself inside a primeval tower … in the midst of this incomparably grand, magnificent landscape,” he wrote to Francisca Stoecklin on November 16.) There, during three weeks in February, he experienced a creative storm so extraordinary that his later mythologizing of the resulting work as “given” to him, a “dictation” for which he served as medium or scribe, is understandable. It began on February 2, when he unexpectedly began writing sonnets. After three days of uninterrupted work, he had produced twenty-five of the twenty-six poems that would form the first part of the Sonnets to Orpheus. On the morning of February 7, “The Seventh Elegy” came (all but the final lines, which he would add on February 26). That same day he began “The Eighth Elegy,” the masterwork of the sequence, and finished it the following afternoon. On February 9, after completing “The Sixth Elegy,” he composed the difficult ninth and all but the first four lines of “Antistrophes,” a poem that would temporarily serve as the fifth. That evening he wrote excitedly to his publisher, Anton Kippenberg, that the Elegies were done (“My dear friend, I am over the mountain! The Elegies are here!… I went outside into the cold moonlight and stroked little Muzot like a big animal, its old walls which granted this to me … And my dear friend: this: that you have made this possible for me, have been so patient with me: ten years! Thanks!… And that you always believed in me—thanks!”).
The next day was uneventful. Then, on February 11, Rilke returned to his draft of “The Tenth Elegy.” He kept the first fifteen lines, which had existed since Duino, and composed a completely new version of the rest that same day (later, when asked, he would name the tenth as his favorite). He wrote at once to Princess Marie, who had remained for him, in an almost courtly sense, the patron of the Elegies:
At last,
Princess,
At last, the blessed, so blessed day, when in this letter the conclusion—so far as I see—of the
Elegies
I can announce to you:
TEN!
From the last, great one (with the opening begun back in Duino: “Someday, at the end of the nightmare of knowing, may I emerge singing praise and jubilation to assenting angels…”), from this last one, which even then was intended to come last,—from this—my hand is still trembling! Just now, Saturday the eleventh, at six in the evening, it is finished!—
Everything in only a few days, it was an indescribable storm, a hurricane in my spirit (like that time in Duino), all the sinews and tissues in me groaned,—there was no thinking about food, God knows who fed me.
But now it is. Is. Is.
Amen.
So this is what I’ve survived for, through everything, on and on. Through Everything. All for this. Only this.
One of them I have dedicated to Kassner. But the whole is yours, Princess, how could it not be! Will be called:
The Duino Elegies
In the book there will be no dedication (for I can’t give you what has been yours from the beginning) but instead:
That same evening Rilke wrote similar letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé and two other close friends—as if the accomplishing of the elegies, which required total solitude, was nonetheless a drama in which a whole circle of acquaintances had to be absorbed. Then, on February 14, in what Rilke described to Lou as a “radiant afterstorm,” a final elegy came, the fifth, or “Saltimbanques,” which he placed at the center of the cycle, discarding “Antistrophes,” a poem that now felt to him inappropriate there.3 With the Elegies complete (save for a handful of lines), there was a last surprise: the sonnets returned almost at once, and Rilke found himself writing nonstop again. Between February 15 and 23 he composed another cycle of twenty-nine fantastically experimental poems that would form the second part of the Sonnets to Orpheus.
After the second group of sonnets, the tempest at Muzot subsided, and Rilke’s elation reached again toward friends. He copied out the last six elegies and sent them to Kippenberg on February 23, “for publication when he saw fit”; on the same day he sent the sonnets to Kippenberg’s wife, Katharina (with whom he enjoyed a years-long friendship and correspondence), along with a separate letter asking her to judge if they were suitable for publication. (Both volumes were published sumptuously in 1923.) There was of course to be a copy for the Princess, but Rilke waited until she could visit him at Muzot, so that he could present the poems to her in person and read them to her aloud. That “great day” occurred on June 7. Princess Marie would remember it vividly:
Secretive, tiny, low rooms with old furniture—flowers, many flowers everywhere, among them the five-petaled, flame-colored rose … We went up to the study—a room filled with books, filled with devotion. Adjacent to it the narrow bedroom and the little chapel … Everything seems as if created for the poet. And finally, standing at his desk as he always does, he began to read … As he read—wonderfully, as only he can read—I felt my heart beating more and more strongly, felt the tears running down my cheeks. There are no words for this experience. The next day—in the charming hotel room in Sierre—it was the sonnets’ turn. Fifty-seven, and not one too many. Every word a jewel. Some of them make one’s heart stand still.4
In July the Kippenbergs visited and again Rilke read—the Elegies one evening for the two of them, the sonnets the next morning for Katharina alone. Plans were discussed for the publication not only of the Elegies and the sonnets but of a five-volume edition of his complete works—so convinced was Rilke that all he had been given to say had been said.
In truth he would continue to write poems prolifically at Muzot—there are some thirty pieces in the notebooks from the latter months of 1923, and over a hundred poems in the notebooks of 1924, many of them among his finest. But Rilke never allowed any of this unpublished work to infiltrate his life’s story as poet, which had to climax with the Elegies. (Even the sonnets he would think of as a “bonus” or “reward” that came with the Elegies’ completion.) So many ethical evasions, disappointments, and things undone he had rationalized in terms of the “waiting” required of him by the task of the Elegies, that it was only by rehearsing the drama of their composition that he could feel himself justified and redeemed—even, albeit in a wishful sense, exemplary:
That a man who had felt himself … cloven to his foundations [Rilke is looking back from December 1925, scarcely a year away from death, on how he was “saved” that February in Muzot] into a Formerly and an incompatible, dying Now: that such a man should experience the grace of being able to perceive how, in still more secret depths, beneath this torn-open cleft, the continuity of his work and of his mind was being restored…, seems to me more than a merely private occurrence; for by that token a measure is provided for the inexhaustible layering of our nature; and how many who, for one reason or another, believe they have been torn asunder, might not draw from this example of “continuability” their own particular consolation.
(I would like to think that this consolation has also somehow become an aspect of the accomplishment of the great Elegies, so that they express themselves more completely than, without endangerment and rescue, could have been possible.)5
* * *
Despite Rilke’s personal, sometimes almost hermetic investment in the elegies, he believed that his poetry spoke for itself. He distrusted commentaries as dilutions and foreclosures of the individual’s reading experience. When a friend wrote to him that she felt the key to one of the Sonnets to Orpheus lay in the idea of the transmigration of souls, he responded: “You are thinking too far out beyond the poem itself … I believe that no poem in the Sonnets to Orpheus means anything that is not fully written out there, often, it is true, with its most secret name. All ‘allusion’ I am convinced would be contradictory to the indescribable ‘being-there’ of the poem.”6 In another context he wrote that his most recalcitrant obscurities may require not elucidation (Aufklärung) so much as “submitting-to” (Unterwerfung).7 In this spirit I have held explanatory notes to a minimum: a few passages to give the flavor of Rilke’s thinking, an occasional gloss on something perhaps now lost to us, and one attempt to address what may be a major misconception about “The Fifth Elegy.” Since a guiding principle of this translation has been that it would be folly to ignore all the work that has already been done, I would like to express my debt to the following translators of all or parts of the elegies: J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender, A. Poulin, Jr., Stephen Mitchell, Gary Miranda, David Young, C. F. MacIntyre, Stephen Cohn, David Oswald, Elaine E. Boney, Peter and Sheila Stern, Roger Paulin, William Gass, and Galway Kinnell. My thanks also to Michael Winkler, Jonathan Galassi, Paul Elie, Winifred Hamilton, and Ethan Nosowsky for their many helpful comments.
DUINESER ELEGIEN
AUS DEM BESITZ DER FÜRSTIN
MARIE VON THURN UND TAXIS-HOHENLOHE
DUINO ELEGIES
FROM THE PROPERTY OF PRINCESS
MARIE VON THURN UND TAXIS-HOHENLOHE
DIE ERSTE ELEGIE
Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme
einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem
stärkeren Dasein. 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.
Und so verhalt ich mich denn und verschlucke den Lockruf
dunkelen Schluchzens. Ach, wen vermögen
wir denn zu brauchen? Engel nicht, Menschen nicht,
und die findigen Tiere merken es schon,
daß wir nicht sehr verläßlich zu Haus sind
in der gedeuteten Welt. Es bleibt uns vielleicht
irgend ein Baum an dem Abhang, daß wir ihn täglich
wiedersähen; es bleibt uns die Straße von gestern
und das verzogene Treusein einer Gewohnheit,
der es bei uns gefiel, und so blieb sie und ging nicht.
O und die Nacht, die Nacht, wenn der Wind voller Weltraum
uns am Angesicht zehrt—, wem bliebe sie nicht, die ersehnte,
sanft enttäuschende, welche dem einzelnen Herzen
mühsam bevorsteht. Ist sie den Liebenden leichter?
Ach, sie verdecken sich nur mit einander ihr Los.
Weißt du’s noch nicht? Wirf aus den Armen die Leere
zu den Räumen hinzu, die wir atmen; vielleicht daß die Vögel
die erweiterte Luft fühlen mit innigerm Flug.
Ja, die Frühlinge brauchten dich wohl. Es muteten manche
Sterne dir zu, daß du sie spürtest. Es hob
sich eine Woge heran im Vergangenen, oder
da du vorüberkamst am geöffneten Fenster,
gab eine Geige sich hin. Das alles war Auftrag.
Aber bewältigtest du’s? Warst du nicht immer
noch von Erwartung zerstreut, als kündigte alles
eine Geliebte dir an? (Wo wil
lst du sie bergen,
da doch die großen fremden Gedanken bei dir
aus und ein gehn und öfters bleiben bei Nacht.)
Sehnt es dich aber, so singe die Liebenden; lange
noch nicht unsterblich genug ist ihr berühmtes Gefühl.
Jene, du neidest sie fast, Verlassenen, die du
so viel liebender fandst als die Gestillten. Beginn
immer von neuem die nie zu erreichende Preisung;
denk: es erhält sich der Held, selbst der Untergang war ihm
nur ein Vorwand, zu sein: seine letzte Geburt.
Aber die Liebenden nimmt die erschöpfte Natur
in sich zurück, als wären nicht zweimal die Kräfte,
dieses zu leisten. Hast du der Gaspara Stampa
denn genügend gedacht, daß irgend ein Mädchen,
dem der Geliebte entging, am gesteigerten Beispiel
dieser Liebenden fühlt: daß ich würde wie sie?
Sollen nicht endlich uns diese ältesten Schmerzen
fruchtbarer werden? Ist es nicht Zeit, daß wir liebend
uns vom Geliebten befrein und es bebend bestehn:
wie der Pfeil die Sehne besteht, um gesammelt im Absprung
mehr zu sein als er selbst. Denn Bleiben ist nirgends.
Stimmen, Stimmen. Höre, mein Herz, wie sonst nur
Heilige hörten: daß sie der riesige Ruf
aufhob vom Boden; sie aber knieten,
Unmögliche, weiter und achtetens nicht:
So waren sie hörend. Nicht, daß du Gottes ertrügest
die Stimme, bei weitem. Aber das Wehende höre,
die ununterbrochene Nachricht, die aus Stille sich bildet.
Es rauscht jetzt von jenen jungen Toten zu dir.
Wo immer du eintratst, redete nicht in Kirchen
zu Rom und Neapel ruhig ihr Schicksal dich an?
Oder es trug eine Inschrift sich erhaben dir auf,
wie neulich die Tafel in Santa Maria Formosa.
Was sie mir wollen? leise soll ich des Unrechts
Anschein abtun, der ihrer Geister
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