Reading Rilke (8 page)

Walls stand speechless

and cold, in the wind

weathercocks clatter.

Middleton has “weathervane,” but I must follow Hamburger here, not only for a better sound, but because I want to call quietly for the cock who discomfited Peter. The German con
cludes
Klirren die Fahnen
, and could be interpreted as “flags flap,” but nationalism has not had any presence in the preceding lines.

What we get when we’re done is a reading, a reading enriched by the process of arriving at it, and therefore, really, only the farewells to a long conversation.

What must not be given up, of course, is quality—quality and tone. If the translation does not allow us a glimpse of the greatness of the original, it is surely a failure, and most of us fail that way, first and foremost, last and out of luck. Tone, too, is a very tricky thing. Recently Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy translated Rilke’s
Book of Hours
for Riverhead Books. Here is a sample. The poet is presumably addressing his god, but we know the divinity in question is actually Rilke’s quondam lover, Lou Salomé.

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:

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 addressed 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.