Poems to Night
Page 4
Feel: at a divine double pace
blessedly they transform themselves.
(Muzot, 1922)
From the Periphery: Night
Stars of the night, I have awoken,
do they only overleap today, my face,
or at in the same moment the whole face of my years,
these bridges, resting on columns of light?
Who cares to walk there? For whom am I abyss and stream bed,
that he leads me in the widest circle –,
bounds over me and takes me like a bishop on a chessboard
and contends his victory?
(Muzot, September 1924)
Strong star, without need of support,
the night might concede to the others
which must first darken so that they brighten.
Star, which, already perfected, submerges,
when stars begin their passage
through the tentatively opening night.
Great star of the priestesses of love,
which, inflamed by a feeling,
transfigured to the last and burning up,
sinks down, where the sun sank:
a thousand times outdistancing
with its pure downfall.
(Muzot, January 1924)
What reaches us with the starlight,
what reaches us,
take the world in your countenance,
but do not take it lightly.
Show the night that you silently received
what she brought.
It is only when you merge into her
that the night knows you.
(Muzot, August 1924)
Earlier, how often, we stayed, star in star
when from the freest constellation
that speech-star detached from the rest and called.
Star in star we marvelled,
He, speaker of the constellation,
I, mouth of my life,
ancillary star to my eye.
And the night, how she granted us
the wakeful rapprochement.
(Val-Mont, February 1926)
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was born in December 1875 in Prague. In 1886 his parents had the child enrolled in the St Pölten military academy, which caused the shy, introspective only child great anxiety. In 1890 he graduated from St Pölten and entered the military secondary school of Mährisch Weisskirchen. In 1894 he published his first collection of poems, Leben und Lieder (Life and Songs). In the autumn of 1895 Rilke enrolled to study art history, literature and philosophy at the Charles University in Prague. From this point on he was determined to pursue a literary career. At the turn of 1895–96, the twenty-year-old published his second collection, Larenopfer (Offerings to the Lares), while a third collection, Traumgekrönt (Dream-Crowned), followed in 1896. Rilke left Prague for the University of Munich, switching his studies to political science, law and Darwinian theory. From 1897 Rilke resided in Berlin Wilmersdorf, but began to succumb to a lifelong compulsion for travel. In 1898, after a springtime of Italian journeys and the seminal reading of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Rilke encountered Bremen, Hamburg and, crucially, the artists’ colony of Worpswede in northern Germany for the first time. He wrote the Florenzer Tagebuch (Florence Diaries), Schmargendorfer Tagebuch (Schmargendorf Diaries) and Notizen zur Melodie der Dinge (Notes on the Melody of Things). In the spring of 1899, Rilke made an artistically and spiritually ground-breaking journey to Russia with Lou Andreas Salomé, and in 1900 returned for a longer sojourn from May until August. That autumn Rilke revisited Worpswede, where he renewed his friendship with the painter Paula Becker, amongst others, and her friend Clara Westhoff, a former pupil of Rodin, whom he married the following year. In 1902 Rilke set his sights on Paris, with the idea of writing a monograph on Rodin. That same year The Book of Images was published. The next twelve years saw Rilke travelling not only widely within Germany and Austria but also making protracted visits to Italy, France, Spain and Egypt. The experiences drawn from these destinations fed into his evolving poetry. In 1905 The Book of Hours was published, followed in 1907 by New Poems, and finally, after six years of labour, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in 1910, the great prose work which gave full expression to the poet’s spiritual struggle to maintain a solitary existence within Baudelaire’s “fourmillante cité”. Rilke would continue to travel throughout his lifetime; most extensively to Italy, Spain and Egypt, but Paris was always the endlessly giving refuge of his life, the engine house and hub from which all else radiated and the required place where the trials enacted with his inner self served to engender a new style of lyrical poetry. But when war broke out in 1914, Rilke was obliged to abandon the French capital for Munich. His possessions were later confiscated from his apartment on the rue Campagne Première by the French authorities; valuable manuscripts and books were never recovered. Moving between Berlin, Vienna and Munich, Rilke suffered the dismal upheaval of war, and the severance of his concentration. But in 1915 he managed to write the fourth Duino elegy and published Die Fünf Gesänge (Five Songs). In 1916 Rilke worked as a clerk in the war archive and performed military service in Vienna. In this year midway through the war, he presented Rudolf Kassner with the notebook containing the twenty-two poems of the Poems to Night. At the midpoint of 1919 Rilke was living in Munich and left the city for a tour of Swiss cities and the alpine region of the Engadine. The next two years saw the poet exploring Bern, Geneva, Locarno, Basel and finally Sion and Sierre. The still-undiscovered canton of Valais captured his heart; it recalled Provence. Seeking a safe harbour, from July 1921 he took up residence in his final refuge, the medieval tower of Château de Muzot above Sierre. 1922 proved an industrious year. Rilke finished the long-running Duino Elegies and created in a matter of weeks the Sonnets to Orpheus. He completed his translations of Valéry’s poems and also wrote Brief des jungen Arbeiters (Letter to a Young Labourer), whose “Monsieur V” clearly refers to the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916). At the end of 1923 Rilke, suffering an unnamed malady, visited the sanatorium of Val-Mont sur Territet for the first of several residences. In 1924 he produced a wealth of poems in French, including the sequences Vergers (Orchards), Les Quatrains Valaisans (The Valais Quatrains) and Les Roses (The Roses). In 1925 Rilke was back for a long residence in Paris, but by the end of the year he was ominously reinstalled in Val-Mont. Diagnosed with incurable leukaemia, Rilke, refusing all palliative care, died “his own death” at the sanatorium on 29th December 1926. On 2nd January 1927, Rilke was buried at his own request in the nearby churchyard of Raron. His chosen epitaph reads: “Rose, oh pure contradiction, to be no one’s sleep under so many lids.”
Will Stone
Will Stone is a writer, poet and literary translator of Franco-Belgian, French and German literature. His first poetry collection, Glaciation (Salt, 2007), won the International Glen Dimplex Award for poetry in 2008. Shearsman Books published his most recent collection, The Sleepwalkers, in 2016 and will publish his fourth collection in 2020. Will’s translations include Les Chimères by Gérard de Nerval (Menard, 1999), To the Silenced: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl (Arc, 2005), Emile Verhaeren: Poems (Arc, 2013), Georges Rodenbach: Poems (Arc, 2017) and Friedrich Hölderlin’s Life, Poetry and Madness by Wilhelm Waiblinger (Hesperus, 2018). His translations of Stefan Zweig with Pushkin Press include Montaigne (2015) and Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink (2016). Pushkin also published his translation of The Art of the City: Rome, Florence, Venice by Georg Simmel (2018) and Surrender to Night: Collected Poems of Georg Trakl (2019),
as well as producing new editions of Journeys by Stefan Zweig (2019), Rilke in Paris, including Rilke’s “Notes on the Melody of Things”, by Maurice Betz/Rainer Maria Rilke (2019) and On the End of the World by Joseph Roth (2019). Autumn 2020 saw the publication of Encounters and Destinies: A Farewell to Europe by Stefan Zweig and a new edition of Zweig’s Nietzsche.
Will has contributed poems, translations, essays and reviews to a range of publications including the London Magazine, the TLS, the Spectator, Apollo magazine, RA Magazine, The White Review, Poetry Review, Agenda and Modern Poetry in Translation. His essay on the Belgian painter Léon Spilliaert as illustrator appeared in the catalogue to the exhibition “Léon Spilliaert”, at the Royal Academy, London in February 2020. A French translation was included in the catalogue for the same exhibition held at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris from October 2020.
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COPYRIGHT
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English translation © Will Stone, 2020
First published by Pushkin Press in 2020
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ISBN 13: 978–1–78227–553–4
eISBN 978–1–78227–554–1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
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These translations were realised with the assistance of the Fondation Rilke, Sierre Switzerland
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