RILKE

Selected POe111S

RAINER MARIA

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

. . the translation does not give back thefull meaning, and he wants to showto young people the beautiful and realfragments o{ this massive and gloriouslanguage which has been fused andmade pliable in such intense flame. . . hewarms himself again to his work. Nowcome evenings, fine, almost youthfulevenings, like those of autumn, {ör in-stance, which bring with them such longca/m nights.ln his study the lamp burnslate. He does not always bend over thepages; he ofien leans back, closing with-in his eyes a line he has read over ando ver, until its meaning flows into hisvery blood.

CONTENTS

From NEUE GEDICHTE: ERSTER TEIL

Früher Apollo 58 Blaue Hortensie 74Early Apollo 59 Blue Hydrangeas 75

Opfer 60 V or dem Sommerregen 76Oblation 61 Before the Summer Rain 77Buddha 62 Letzter Abend 7 8The Buddha 63 The Last Evening 79Der Panther 64 Die Kurtisane 80The Panther 65 The Courtesan 81

Die Gazelle 66 Die Treppe derThe Gazelle 67 Orangerie 82

Römische Sarkophage 68 The Steps of theRoman Sarcophagi 69 Orangery 83Der Schwan 7 0 Das Karussell 84The Swan 7 1 The Merry-Go-Round 85Ein Frauenschicksal 7 2 Spanische Tänzerin 88A Woman's Fate 73 Spanish Dancer 89

Eine Welke 102 Ubung am Klavier 116Faded 10 3 Piano Practice 117Römische Campagna 10 4 Die Flamingos 118Roman Campagna lOS The Flamingos 119Die Parke [I und VII] 106 Der Einsame 120

The Parks [I and VII] 10 7 The Solitary 121

Die Laute 110 Das Kind 122

The Lute 111 The Child 12 3Don Juans Kindheit 112 Der Käferstein 12 4Don Juan's Childhood 113 The Searab 12 5Dame auf einem Buddha in der Glorie 126

Balkon 114 The Buddha in theLady on a Balcony 115 Glory 12 7

NOTES 12 9

INTRODUCTION

between "the leaves of the dark book" of German criti-cism which has been written despite the OlympianLessing.

I want now to isolate my own Rilke, with a docu-mented brief for his existence, as a man who during a

certain period of his life rode the twin fillies of the wing'dhorse, sculpture and painting, keeping a firm foot on

each, and singing, as he went, his beauti£ully £ormed andcolored sonnets, or polishing and painting small concert

and salon pieces, sonatas in miniature. When he gallopsout of the tent into the night of the soul in the DuineserElegien and into the foggy obfuscations of Die Sonettean Orpheus� my blessing but not my interest goes withhim, and I am, as yet, unconcerned with his a£ter-fate.The illusion of his performance has been consummate,and it is the well-nigh perfect artist o£ three books whomI would present to my reader.

The poet of the period 19°°-19°8 seems to me, ratherarbitrarily perhaps, to be the center of a circle drawnthrough three points: the painting of the W orpswedersand the French Impressionists, the sculpture of Rodin,and the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme, andother Symbolists. The poems of Das Buch der Bilder andof the two parts of the Neue Gedichte represent an in-

creasingly richer alloy o£ these various elements, untilfinally what the poet observes of form and color is ex-

pressed in a thin, clear music which is certainly not theGerman of the philologists. After he finished the last ofthese books, a great artist began to grow dim; the power-ful filament from which light with the minimum of heat

2

had emanated began to quiver forebodingly toward ex-

tinction.In 1900 he went to W orpswede and lived for a time in

the colony of painters. The following year he brought hiswife Clara (nee Westhoff), one of Rodin's pupils, a sculp-tress whose masterpiece, their daughter Ruth, was pro-duced here, while Rilke wrote his mono graph on theW orpswede painters. There are many letters coveringthis period, from which the following excerpt must serve:

"Dank thun will ich euch allen und eurem Lande undeurer Kunst" (letter to Otto Modersohn, one of the most

distinguished painters of the group).In 1902 he met Rodin, whose secretary he later became,

and about whom he wrote a book. Hours of watching thesculptor at his work impressed on the poet a strong sense

of the unity of a thing in bronze or stone. A painting can

never possess the same vital existence as a plastic formstanding alone in space; this viable reality is a quality ofRilke's best lyrics. That his association with Rodin in£lu-enced hirn gready is shown by his many poems on statues

and architecture: two on Apollo, three on the Buddha,the group on the cathedral at Chartres, other pieces on

the Roman sarcophagi and fountain, and on the variousbuildings and squares of several cities. The last book endswith a poem on the stone scarabs and another done understimulation of astatue of the Buddha,-although it istrue that these, as finale, have transcended in the vastness

of their conception any attempt to shut them in a half-ounce of carved pebble or even in a ton of bronze or blackmarble.

The works conceived from paintings or based on theart would make a no less impressive list: the Pieta, SaintSebastian, the angels, Leda, a doge, a portrait of a lady,those of himself and his father, and in one poem, "DerBerg" (Sechsunddreissigmal und hundertmal/hat derMaler jenen Berg geschrieben), he seems to give a fillipat the art itself. In his many poems on flowers and ani-mals there is profound evidence that he observed nature

with eyes that took note of form, color, and texture untilat last he does not so much describe the object as makethe reader see it for himself, projecting it from his own

mind, as on a screen. This power to make a headlock on

the reader and force his gaze in one direction only, Rilkegot from wrestling with the technique of the sculptorsand painters.

Let me now indicate the third point through wh ichthe circle limiting his art during this period was drawn.In the pages of Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte LauridsBrigge will be found several references to various modernFrench poets; he made translations from Maurice deGuerin, Andre Gide, Paul Valery, and Stephane Mal-larme, and often the tone, approach, and feeling of hispoems are reminiscent of the best o£ French poetry of thetime.

Let the poet himself speak of his work:Alas, those verses one writes in youth aren't much. One shouldwait and gather sweetness and light all his li£e, a long one i£ pos-sible, and then maybe at the end he might write ten good lines.For poetry isn't, as people imagine, merely feelings (these come

4

soon enough); it is experiences. T 0 write one line, a man oughtto see many eities, people, and things; he must Iearn to knowanimals and the wa y o£ birds in the air, and how little flowersopen in the morning. One must be able to think baek the wayto unknown plaees . . . and to partings lang £oreseen, to days o£ehildhood. . . and to parents . . . to days on the sea . . . to nightso£ traveI . . . and one must have memories o£ many nights o£love, no two alike . . . and the screams o£ women in ehildbed . . .

one must have sat by the dying, one must have sat by the deadin a room with open windows. . . . But it is not enough to havememories. One must be able to forget them and have vast pa-tience until they eome again. . . and when they become bloodwithin us, and glanees and gestures . . . then first it ean happenthat in a rare haur the first word o£ averse may arise and eome

£orth . . .

place to none,-and he understood the mysteries of child-hood and the delicate nuances in the feelings of wornen.

And now he sits in an armchair, covered with rustygreen, with gray greasy hollows pressed by dozens ofheads, breathing the fumes of a tetc de moineau whichrequires a quarter-hour's stoking: this man who dines at

creameries, sickened by the smell of urine and the graynasty reek of potatoes in stale grease: here he sits anddreams of Apollo, cathedrals with beautiful rose win-dows, charming !ittle gazelIes, angels, elderly spinstersbrooding futilely in libraries, aristocratic ladies playingthe piano, and of the Buddha sitting calmly on the lotusof contemplation.

Much has been and must yet be written of Rilke'stechnique and form, but he has packed the best analysisof creative power in one sentence:

Y our blooo drove you not to form nor to speak, but to reveal.(Malte, p. 100)

I believe it was Zeuxis who painted grapes so realisti-cally that the £inches £lew down and pecked at the can-

vase Here was the proof of a splendid technique! Butthere was a Chinese Taoist (his name eludes me) whopainted a crane (Grus chinensis) on an ion wall whichhad been plastered with cow dung-the picture was

done in payment of his wine bill-and then suddenlymounted on the bird's back and ßew off into the bIue,leaving the wall as blank and bare as the inkeeper' s face!This was the creation of form to the nth power. AndRilke's method of working is almost the same; he creates

6

the image of the object, stroke by meticulous stroke, andinfuses life into the resul t by sudden revelation, the exact

essence of which is not to be pronged by any criticalscal pel.

This faculty he possesses in common with a11 poets,but to a greater degree than most of them. Perhaps I can

best demonstrate his peculiar application of it and at thesame time insert an opening wedge for my pet thesis bydissecting four of his animal poems and pointing out hisseveral methods of approach.

In "Die Gazelle" (p. 66), at the first word, "verzau-berte," one is immediately rapt into a magic world insuch sharp contrast to that suggested by the Latin name

which subtitles the poem that the very shock whets theattention. If the rapidly succeeding images seem at firstto be entirely unrelated to gazelle, once you have notedand accepted the premise that the poet-after the firstdirect address to the animal-is really talking over withhimself the artistic problem of the impossibility of catch-ing the live beauty of the creature in two rhymed words,the rest of it will go off quite naturally, and each figureof speech will lead the next on to the stage by the hand,as children do at a Sunday School cantata. T 0 proceed:these rhymes come and go, like a signal winking off andon (not bad, that, for the alternate movements of the ani-mal's legs). Not only are the metaphors of the Iyre andthe branches rising from the gazelle' s forehead just evoca-

tive comparisons, when the musical curves of the hornsare considered, but a similar pair may very weIl haveserved as the frame for the first I yre. And since the

7

branches suggest the laurel, another essential of the songgod's equipment, Apollo might logically have been therecipient of this !ittle monologue on the theory of poetry.This reference continues through the love songs withwords as soft as rose petals. No one can complain aboutthat; for the animal Inay have been standing conven-

iently before a rosebush-possibly the astute curators ofthe Botanical Gardens of Paris had provided an occasionalfloral nibble for the occupants. But mark how the petalsfall on the tired eyelids of the reader: the poet himsel£with his eternal books, who suddenly conjures up (ver-zau berte) before the mind, which sees into the li£e o£things, this creature o£ the imagination-not at a11 likeBlake's symbolical tiger-through an odd and untrans-

latable pun. "Lauf" means both the leg of an animal anda gun barrel; this is merely a matter o£ language, and thepoet didn't have to make it. But the metaphor is easilycarried on by "charged but not fired," which makes thegazelle stand alerdy on slender legs, Hcocked" you mightadd, and ready for instant ßight. Nor is this delicate sus-

pension released by the final trope of the sonnet; for thepoem ends with the seemingly completely foreign pic-ture of a girl bathing in a forest pool. But then a girl,especially a German girl, might weIl have as much nat-

ural modest)' as any nicely brought-up little gazelle! Andthere is a splendid suggestion of coyness in the reßectionof the water on the half -averted face, with even a blush,maybe. Nevertheless, the reader is not to be diverted bythe poet's caprice, and his mind instantly returns to theanimal, posed against eternity, as real and beyond change

8

as the bison on the walls of the caves at Altamira. Anda11 this without any photographie description of the ob-jeet. There is none of the veterinary' sexposition of thestallion of Adonis. It is done calmly. No stars throwdown their spears. No God direets its solitary ßight. Butone has seen agazelle that never was on sea or land:Rilke's private little antelope, whieh now beeomes thereader' s forever . The next time you see one, you will no-

tice that you get the same effect as from a doubly exposednegative, and that the poet' s image is imposed on, andprobably completely invests, your own picture. If thisexplanation has grown slightly longer man the fourteenlines of the original, it shows, as by achart, the poet' s

power of eompression. His figures are not the result ofheliographie mirrors ßashing bright thoughts from dis-tant hills; they are the hitherto unapprehended facets ofthe erystal of his thought whieh are suddenly lighted bya ßuoroseope.

In "Der Panther" (p. 64) he is eoncerned with anothertype of study. From the first he is dealing with nothingbut the anima!. There is onIy one hgure of speech in the

poem. These sharp notes were written by one who hadwatehed the eompaet, softly moving beasts many times.There is the unusual observation of the nictitating mem-

brane, eommon to the cat family, as it moves aeross theeyeball. Other translators have rendered this "eyelid. " Ihave interviewed three panthers about this, but have gotno results. After the dance of strength around the eircleof the cage, no other action seems possible. Then it is thatRilke gets inside the panther (as Jupiter in the swan in

9

the Leda poem) and looks out through the bars. Sud-denly a picture-he does not say what, but one imaginesthe jungle forest and the pantheress-glides into the ani-mal's eyes, flows through the tense body, and ceases inthe heart. Mrs. M. D. Herter Norton calls this "one ofthe most dramatic moments in poetry." This animal is byno means Rilke's panther as the gazelle is his. This isRilke in a panther, not fierce, but resigned with the sor-

row of a dumb beast. Although it is not so hard to followas the other animal poems, it probably represents a more

compIete embodiment of the poet's self in the objectunder consideration.

When he purposes a symbolic use of an animal, as in"Der Schwan" (p. 70)' it is characteristic of the poet thathe does not overdo his symbolism. He does full justice to

the awkward movement of the bird on land, its cIumsydescent into the water (which I have rendered by a literaIcompound of three words), and finally to the majesticnatatory triumph with which the now very dignified birdmoves-almost as if he (like the Queen of Spain) had no

legst Only as one thinks back does the full signif1.canceof the poem take effect: one has seen a pageant of life anddeath. The piece is not so pleasing as "The Gazelle," nor

so moving as "The Panther," but it has its roots in a more

universal human significance.Still another treatment of a similar subject, this time

more in the style of the painters, is found in "Die Fla-mingos" (p. n8). The luminous colors of Fragonard, one

of the most delicate of the French painters, present thewhite, black, and fruit-red plumage above the rosy stilt-

10

legs standing in sedge and Hags: the whole thing like a

bright Bowerbed just outside the window-so irnme-diately does he bring the picture before the reader. More-over, here are two delicate glirnpses of the soft beauty ofwoman: "she lay there, flushed with sleep," and the evoca-

tive name of the loveliest of the Greek hetaerae, Phryne,who was the model for statues by Praxiteles and paint-ings by Ape11es-a whole gallery of fine young wornen,a11 appropriately white and rosy, and standing, perhaps,also in water, like the flamingos. By an extension of asso-

ciation the whole festival of the birth of Aphrodite iscalled forth, as the most glamorous girl in Hellas risesbeautifully from the white sea foam . . . and a11 the oldmen tremble. But the poet does not let one lose himselfin artistic and erotic contemplation. Swiftly he haies thereader into a passionate and sympathetic participation inthe futility of the caged birds wh ich waken, stretch them-selves, and soar through imaginary skies. The last threelines are master punches on a glass chin: a fine poeticshock. And there is nothing here about "only God can

make a flamingo.)) There is, I believe, in a11 Rilke no remi-niscence of the Landseer or the Rosa Bonheur school offaithful and sentimental animal painting. Only Whistler,or any one of the great Oriental artists a thousand yearsago, or Monet could have painted these birds. Here thesensitive artist, lost in the love of living beauty, enrichesit with images from the past, then, at the first note ofsuffering from his models, immediately becomes the seer

vividly presenting the inner, deeper pain which is theessence of a11 beauty.

Perhaps these brief studies of his several methods of

approaching a subject will suffice to indicate that one

may expect a constant variety of concept and treatment

in the poems. Y ou've got already a very unusual !ittlemenagerie, as sharply differentiated as an ebony elephantfrom Ceylon, a carnelian mandarin duck, a French bronzestag, a Chelsea pottery poodle, a Mayan obsidian plumedserpent, or a Lalique glass colt.

This striking power of making the reader see throughthe poet's eyes is characteristic of the Neue Gedichte; butDas Buch der Bilder� although it represents Rilke as a

mature artist, is too subjective, too full of ego-lyrics. Itwas written while he was still under the influence of thefolk song and the traditional pastoral poetry of Germany.His vocabulary is limited, the verse is loose and capri-ciously handled, with stanzas and lines of varying length,with often a thirteen-line poem where he obviously pur-posed three quatrains but ran over the edge; and thereare pieces which started to be sonnets but ended one lineshort or over. There is even a poem in terza rima whichhas a single isolated line and an interpolated quatrain.(I have not hesitated to reproduce this ragged effect insome of the translations from the first book.) His figuresof speech lack the impact he developed in the laterpoems. One might say that in the former the soul looksout of itself at the world, and the poems are built on itsreaction; in the more mature new poems a mind looksthrough an eye into the object, and the poems afterdescribing the external, universal attributes go into theDing an sich. My interest in Rilke's earlier work was

12

stimulated largely by adesire to get a running start at

the hnished artist. In the Neue Gedichte he achieves a

tightness of form, a progression to a climax, and a greaterability not to mold external hgures but to puH the in-ternal ngures out of the poem itself. Here is no gessowork, no protrusion o£ added foreign matter into spacebeyond the canvas, like the glass jewels on the pictures ofCarlo Crivelli; the poems have now the implicit depthand rotundity of Cezanne' s apples. He is no longer a

writer of subjective lyrics, but has become a painter anda seer.

Rilke's hgures are his forte. They are never draggedalong like trailers, nor fabricated to make his poetrypretty, as are those in Shelley' s "Skylark." After a11, thishidden poet-what is he hiding £rom?-this high-bornmaiden in a substantial thousand-ton tower-this goldenglowworm in a dell of dew, admittedly a11 wet-whathave these to do with the skylark? And i£ there is any-thing which a skylark is emphatically not like, it is a

rose, probably pink, an undersized and sentimenta11yflushed cabbage! This sort of stuff is an excrescence on

the legitimate body of English poetry and should beabated. Shelley has industriously lugged in four littlesimiles, rolled them thin as piecrust, and made his poemtwenty lines longer. These figures are the product offancy, as Coleridge has dehned it: the silver paper, thestrung cranberries, the glass gewgaws, the popcorn balls,the tinsei angels stuck on the Christmas tree. Rilke' s

tropes are the brown tight cones, the legitimate fmit ofa tree with roots in earth; they represent the power of

13

true imagination which unfolds and develops fromwithin. Resultants of the life force which is common to

trees and poems, they are organic and not fabricated.And, speaking of a tree, here is a fine chance to bring

in his first poem, "Initiation/' where the poet addressesyou-"whoever you are"-and instructs you to go out

and erect a tree before the evening sky. "And you havemade the world." Y our own world, your representa-tion . . . and so on, to the last poem, "The Buddha in theGlory," where the almond is the Buddha, full, sweetlyripening, with its very shell extending to infinity. Thereis a directness of impact in these metaphors which is farbeyond the circumlocutions of simile. Let me list otherexamples of comparisons which are likewise part andparcel of the work at hand: Apollo is the morning gazingthrough the leafless trees of spring; the Buddha (p. 63)'with a woman' s creative force, is in labor for a millionyears; and the thirsty king who picks up just any glass islikened to destiny "wh ich also has a thirst"; the eyebrowsof the Venetian courtesan resemble the bridges archedabove the canals intimate with the sea; the balustradescrumbling at Versailles remind the poet of the formercourtiers who bowed to the lonely king; and in anotherpoem the harlot waits to seize one's hand-as if to wrapit in a dirty picked-up piece of paper; but the happilyconceived simile likening the Spanish dancer to a flaringmatch is perhaps his most completely unified compari-son, for the poem is built of some half-dozen allusions to

hre. T ruly, his figures are designed to "startle and way-lay" the reader.

Regarding the present translations: the earlier bookfrom which I have worked is written often in the folk-song measures which have influenced every German poetfrom Herder to Heine, and the poems are slighter andeasier to reproduce. But the two parts of the NeueGedichte are mountain peaks, real and solid againstclear sky. Unfortunately, he seems to have used these as

aspringboard for a leap toward an uncertain stratosphere;for his later books are to be followed only by inquisitivetravelers in !ittle air-tight mystical balloons. My choiceof his rhree cenrral books implies no criticism of his otherwork; but he is nowhere else so finished an artist. Anyoneinterested in writing will profit from a elose study of theoriginals. The transmutation of German poetry into Eng-lish verse is not quite so simple a matter as the kinshipof the two languages might lead one to believe. Rilke'svocabulary includes archaie, neologie, and coined words.His punctuation is arbitary and often inconsistent. Hissyntax leaves even his compatriots gasping-I have oftenfoundered completely. The often purposed vagueness ofthe poems is exasperatingly creared by his overuse of in-definite pronouns, many verbs either colorless or used ina secondary meaning, and his blessed relative clauses,which have been my despair. I have not hesitated to availmyself of his various metrical resources: variations fromthe fixed forms of verse, the use of a short line in an

unexpected pI ace, ellipsis of connectives, assonance anddissonance when an effect is required. Gfren I have beenable to duplicate his devices; often again, I have used hisbolder technique for the rendition of perfectly orrhodox

15

passages. For this liberty I can plead only that Goethe' s

remark to Eckermann, in 1831, influenced me profoundly:"If I were young and reckless enough, I would violate a1lthe dicta of these critical gentlemen. I would use falserhyme, alliteration, and assonance, according to mycaprice-but I would take care to say so many goodthings that everyone would read and remember them."Rilke has supplied me with the latter.

The following versions of the poems are the results o£my anatomy lessons: erode drawings made while the eye,attentive over a microscope, gazed into something riehand strange. Rilke is an explosive experience. From "In-itiation n

to the final "The Buddha in the Glory" I haverepeatedly undergone a progressive se ries o£ emotionaleffeets whieh are climactic, like those of a symphony.And it is as music that Rilke is best approached; let thereader give himself to the rhythm, the melody, and theexaltation of the poems; the understanding will follow.His very oddities should be apprehended as the dis-sonances employed by all the great iconoclasts fromDebussy to Schönberg, from Cezanne to Picasso. Thesethree books rise to a mighry finale of surrender, likeBeethoven' s "Resignation! quel triste refuge! et pourtantc'est le seul qui me reste," to the awe o£ the last Hne, a

silent thunder-crash, a Bood of ealm and penetratinglight, worthy to stand beside

Das Ewig- WeiblicheZieht uns hinan.

takes to which my attention has been directed by BabetteDeutsch, Jenny Ballou, and W. H. Auden. Had E. L.Stahl of Oxford been equally explicit, I should haveatternpted to expunge other rnistranslations or additions.At least I hope to please hirn by adding that I have donethe Duineser Elegien three tirnes and am patiently wait-

ing until the holders o£ the American copyrights allowme to hunt for a publisher. This hope constitutes a

retraction of the unfortunate sentence on page 2.

c. F. MAcINTYRE

From DAS BUCH DER BILDER

EINGANG

INITIATION

RITTER

THE KNIGHT

DER WAHNSINN

MADNESS

DIE ENGEL

THE ANGELS

AUS EINER KINDHEIT

FROM A CHILDHOOD

DER NACHBAR

THE NEIGHBOR

DER EINSAME

THE SOLITARY

KLAGE

LAMENT

EINSAMKEIT

SOLITUDE

HERBSTTAG

AUTUMN DAY

ERINNERUNG

MEMORY

ENDE DES HERBSTES

END OF AUTUMN

HERBST

AUTUMN

ABEND

EVENING

ERNSTE STUNDE

SOLEMN HOUR

STROPHEN

STROPHES

DAS LIED DER WAISE

THE SONG OF THE W AIF

AUS EINER STURMNACHT

FROM A STORMY NIGHT

From NEUE GEDICHTE: ERSTER TEIL

FRÜHER APOLLO

EARLY APOLLO

OPFER

OBLA TION

BUDDHA

THEBUDDHA

DER PANTHER

THEPANTHER

DIE GAZELLE

THE GAZELLE

..

ROMISCHE SARKOPHAGE

ROMAN SARCOPHAGI

DER SCHWAN

THESWAN

EIN FRAUENSCHICKSAL

A WOMAN'S FATE

BLAUE HORTENSIE

BLUE HYDRANGEAS

VOR DEM SOMMERREGEN

BEFORE THE SUMMER RAIN

LETZTER ABEND

THE LAST EVENING

DIE KURTISANE

THE COURTESAN

DIE TREPPE DER ORANGERIE

THE STEPS OF THE ORANGERY

DAS KARUSSELL

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

Und das geht hin und eilt sich, daß es endet,und kreist und dreht sich nur und hat kein Ziel.Ein Rot, ein Grün, ein Grau vorbeigesendet,ein kleines kaum begonnenes Profil.Und manchesmal ein Lächeln, hergewendet,ein seliges, das blendet und verschwendetan dieses atemlose blinde Spiel.

And all this hurries toward the end, so fast,whirling futilely, evermore the same.

A flash of red, of green, of gray, goes past,and then a little scarce-begun profile.And oftentimes a blissful dazzling smilevanishes in this blind and breathless game.

SPANISCHE TANZERIN

SPANISH DANCER

From NEUE GEDICHTE: ANDERER TEIL

ARCHAISCHER TORSO APOLLOS

TORSO OF AN ARCHAIC APOLLO

LEDA

LEDA

DER ALCHIMIST

THE ALCHEMIST

DIE IRREN

THE INSANE

EINE VON DEN ALTEN

ONE OF THE OLD ONES

EINE WELKE

FADED

..

ROMISCHE CAMPAGNA

ROMAN CAMPAGNA

DIE PARKE

THE PARKS

Selbst der Frühling ist da nicht mehr gebend,diese Büsche glauben nicht an ihn;ungern duftet trübe, überlebendabgestandener Jasmin

Spring itself has nothing more to give;these bushes can no more believe in hirn;unwillingly the gloomy, half-survivingjasmine vine emits a fraH perfume,

DIE LAUTE

THE LUTE

DON JUANS KINDHEIT

DON JUAN'S CHILDHOOD

DAME AUF EINEM BALKON

LADY ON A BALCONY

..

UBUNG AM KLAVIER

PIANO PRACTICE

DIE FLAMINGOS

THE FLAMINGOS

DER EINSAME

THE SOLITARY

DAS KIND

THE CHILD

DER KÄFERSTEIN

THE SCARAB

BUDDHA IN DER GLORIE

THE BUDDHA IN THE GLORY

NOTES

Pages 26-27, Tbe Angels-These pathetic, anemic, epicene angels, with yellow water-

waved hair and long white robes, these angels all alike, as theyare to be found in the paintings of the Primitives, in Blake'sdrawings, or in the church windows designed by Burne-Jones,are not particularly impressive. One likes the seldom used ironyof the poet in recording their yearning for parenthetic sin. Thepoem seems to me important because Rilke is describing the"broad sculptor-hands" of Rodin. And it's a grand simile thatrelates the mighty rush of the angels' wings to God' s turningthrough the vast pages of the dark book of the Beginning. Butthese angels have merely the importance of rests in music.

Pages 28-29, From a Cbildbood-

Compare this memory of his mother with the Malte (p. 117):H. . . Maman kan herein in der großen Hofrobe, die sie garnicht in acht nahm, und lief beinah und ließ ihren weißen Pelzhinter sich fallen und nahm mich in die bloßen Arme. Und ichbefühlte, erstaunt und entzückt wie nie, ihr Haar und ihrkleines, gepflegtes Gesicht und die kalten Steine an ihren Ohrenund die Seide am Rand ihrer Schultern, die nach Blumendufteten." There is great love in this poem, intensified perhapsby the mother's casual and litotic "Are you here?"-as i£ shehadn't known all along that the shy boy would be there, wait-ing for what seems almost a secret love-tryst. And there ismuch wistfulness and suffering in the last stanza as the great-eyed boy watches the tired bejeweled hands on the white keys.See also the other poems on music, "The Last Evening" (p. 79)and "Piano Practice" (p. II7)'Pages ]0-]1, Tbe Neigbbor-

This is the outcry o£ an exile who feels himself pursued,almost "picked on," by the music of an equaIly lonely man.

Cf. "Ich sitze hier in meiner kleinen Stube. . . Ich sitze hier undbin nichts... fünf Treppen hoch, an einem grauen Pariser

130

Nachmittag. .." Malte (p. 29). "The heaviness o£ things[Dinge]" is one o£ his ma jor themes. This poem gains in theoriginal by the proximity o£ "Menschen bei Nacht" and theblind man in "Pont du Carrousel," two pro£oundly lonelypoems.

Pages 32-33, Tbe Solitary-This belongs to the same group. Rilke had made several

journeys to foreign lands: Italy, in 1897, 1903' 1904; Russia, in

1899. Later travels included Sweden, in 1905, and Egypt, in1910. My point is that the solitary traveler is just the man whowould be most exposed to the museums, galleries, cathedrals,city squares, and so forth, which Rilke describes in so manypoems. He has eaten his bread in tears and is not unaware o£the powers o£ heaven. One almost sees the "full days" likewooden mugs o£ beer on Swedish tabIes, contrasted with theinner life o£ the poet to whom only the £ar-away is filled withrealities, which I take to be implied by "Figur." The wholepoem is a fine example o£ the Zwiespalt, the dichotomy whichRilke, like other poets, feIt in his relation to ordinary life.

Pages 34-35, Lament-

In a similar mood of perplexity about the world, he turns tothe stars with the same assurance as did Ptolemy (in the GreekAnthology), Dante at the ends o£ the three parts o£ theC omed y, and the serene philosopher o£ Königsberg. This is one

o£ a group o£ poems (from which I have done six) which revealhis misfitness for life and his ingrained melancholy.Pages 36-37, Solitude-

After its topic sentence, this piece works principally with rainand its effect on peopIe in the gray ho ur of dawn; but theidentity of rain with solitude is finally established in thesplendidly isolated last line, itsel£ a mute symbol o£ loneliness.At the beginning o£ the nineteenth century, the Romantics ina11 countries wrote about their individual soIitude. Rilke makes

it universal: Everyman's loneliness, even, or especially, in thecity. For contrast, compare Shelley's "Euganean Hills" and themany rather futile and wishy-washy poems o£ Waldeinsamkeitfrom the Germans.

first stanza. Line 5 has three al rhymes; and four g' s are heardin the second stanza. Notice the gilbenden and gelben rhymes.In line 9 are four initial w's and six hard monosyllabies, threeending in a vowel and r. That's hard to beat.

Pages 44-45, Autumn-

A consoling assurance that the apparent destruction of thingsis but part of the etemal order. It all happens in the hands ofGod: those "broad sculptor-hands." One is reminded here o£ a

Buddhist story in which Hannuman, the monkey son of thewind god in the Hindu pantheon, wagers the Buddha that hecan leap out o£ sight. He takes a deep breath and makes a

mighty spring. Returning, he teIls the Buddha o£ five giganticred sands tone pillars which he has seen and marked at the veryouter rim of space. Quietly Sakyamuni shows the Haliburtonmonkey his hand, with little scratches on the fingers, and asks,"Did they look anything like these?" The story is better thanthe poem.

Pages 46-47, Evening-Evening is akin to autumn. In stanza 3 the reader again feels

himself in the situation presented in "Autumn Day" (p. 38),but here is a typical Rilkean chance to amalgamate onesel£ withthe symbols of stone for the earth and stars for the sky: a

cosmic unity in place o£ the con£usion and fear o£ humanexistence.

Pages 52-53, The Song of the Waif-I have skipped a section of long poems whieh are not partieu-

lady noteworthy, to an example from "Voiees," a group whiehineludes songs from earth' s disinherited: the beggar, the blindman, the drunkard, the suieide, the widow, the idiot, theorphan, the dwarf, and the leper. Who can beat this Homeriecatalogue of life's unfortunates? This is an erratic pieee o£rhyming, but the plangent note of desolation is eomparable to

that in Theodor Storm's "Waisenkind," whieh is quotablysuccinct:

Pages 58-59, Early Apollo-When one remembers the expressionless, not to say dumb,

faces of early Greek sculpture, he is surprised that such a

prophecy can be evoked from the unanimated features of thegode But here it is: a perfect little history of the development ofthe Greek lyric after Apollo awakens and becomes, in additionto being a solar deity, a culture god, the god of song. Onerecognizes again the poet's favorite rose petals. In the original,g's and k's give coherence to the octave; the sestet is tightenedby several b' s.

Pages 6�1, Oblation-This links the poet' s cult of childhood with a delicate trouba-

dour love and the symbols of Christian worship. The glisteningof water is a motif to be found repeatedly in his later verse.

P�ges 62-63, Tbe /Juddha-The first of three poems on this subject. I have used two. This

poem, much lower in key than the one he chose for the last ofhis book (p. 125)' was written in Paris in 1905, (Cf. Briefe, 1902-1906, pp. 262 ff., 274 f., 290, 3 21 .) According to a note given me

by Frau Ruth Sieber-Rilke, her mother remembers that thispoem is about a statue in Rodin' s garden at Meudon. (Cf.Gesammelte Werke, IV, 408.) I made a futile pilgrimage there;the garden had been stripped. In the Rodin Museum in Paristhe statue had lost its importance because of comparison withthe many others.

Pages 64-65, Tbe Panther-

Perhaps the best of his several poems on animals in captivity.Line 3 is typical of his capricious versification: "Stäbe gäbe,"which I have feebly reproduced. Line 9 refers to the nictitatingmembrane.

Pages 66-67, Tbe Gazelle-See the Introduction for a full discussion. This seems to me

to be one o£ the key poems for understanding his technique.

Pages 68-69, Roman Sarcophagi-This, another museum piece, shows his interest in carved

stone, his desire to connect even dead matter with life, and hisuse of water as a symbol of the enduring essence of the world.(Cf. pp. 61, 105, above, and Die Sonette an Orpheus, Pt. I, x.)Pages 7011, Tbe Swan-

A fine example of his symbolism. The swan represents bothlife and death. As he enters the water, we are put under thespeIl of a truly Rilkean moment: the entrance of an awkwardbeing into that mystery in which it not only becomes more

beautiful, but in which its forward movement seems to be themature fulfillment of the meaning o£ life. I have reproduced inline 6 his own purposely clumsy phrase to represent this transi-tion.

Pages 76-77, Before the Summer Rain-

An indication of his interest in parks and childhood. Noticethe darkness and melancholy with which he invests even theliving rain. And the bird's reminding him of the saint is price-less. In the sestet he uses the future, the present, and the pasttense in his verbs and somehow achieves an effect of time'shaving been reversed in its motion until it leads one back intomemories of childhood. In Malte (pp. 153 ff.) he does some fineinterpretations of the six tapestries of "La Dame a la Licorne" inthe Musee de Cluny. The poem will receive considerable emo-

tional glow if the faded red and cobalt blue of these tapes tri es

are remembered.

have served him. The color of the hair, the jeweled hands strok-

ing the dog, the slender brows, are there; but the women lookso stupid that it' s impossible to imagine eimer of them indulg-ing in a little dramatic monologue about hersei£. The compari-son of the eyebrows with the bridges, the "commerce" betweenher eyes and the sea which is the life-blood of the city, are otherorganic figures growing from the very stuff of the subject-asif a sculptor pinched a lump of clay from part of his modelingand applied it to another place: it's all of a piece. And "com-merce" has to me, at least, something of a play on words. Theoctave of this sonnet rhymes a bbb a ccc and runs over into thesestet in the original. Burckhardt in his Renaissance has an

interesting seetion on this part of Venetian life.

Pages 82-8], The Steps of the Orangery-The Orangery lies between two great stairways ca lIed the

Cent Marches (it somehow pleased me to find that they have103 and 105 steps, respectively). Tbe balustrades really seem

very insignificant and the broad stairs very lonely. The forceof line 8 can be feIt only by standing below and looking up, as

the poet of course did. Then one forgets the palace on theterrace, and the stairs lead to the sky. The play o£ thoughthere is admirably carried out: the lonely stairs and the agedking, the crumbling (bowing) balustrades and the noddingcourtiers, and the king and stairs both climbing "by the graceof God." There are thirteen long i's in the first six lines of theoriginal. Any other poet would have made a sonnet; Rilkeknows when he is through.Pages 84-87, The Merry-Go-Round-

Tbis merry-go-round is still in use. It is a primitive contrap-tion under a tent among the chestnut trees of the garden. Tbemotive power is supplied by a hulk of a man who grinds a largewheel. W orst of all, there is no organ and the animals do notrise and fall on cams. But the children seem not to mind suchminor defects. The names o£ the steeds are fascinating and de-

termine the popularity of the mounts. The horses are paintedwith cheerful names: Bijou, Felix, Charlot, PapilIon, Gamin,and Coco. Three, probably triplets, are ca lIed Loulou, Lolo, andLulu. I suspect recent tampering in the names of Mickey,Donald, and Epinard. But children refuse to be bamboozled; Ihave never seen anyone on this last poor creature, named afterthe Ioveless vegetable. There is a giraffe ca lIed Fatima. The two

stags, Rapide and Pied Leger, have dilapidated anders mauledby hundreds of hands. The lions, black Brutus and red Sultan,are splendidly carnivorous, with fine great teeth and droolingtongues. The grand white elephants which seem so large in thepoem and bob magically up and down are really two smalI,lovable, roly-poly calves called Rizi and T oby. Oh, yes, andthere are two old, red, moth-eaten camels, Simoun and Siroco,whom the children will not ride for love or money-the humpsrefuse to conform to childish anatomy; the animals have an

eternal hungry look, and seem to have perpetual snufHes. I havebeen past this place on dozens of autumn and winter after-noons, and there is always a crowd of children and a sprinklingof mothers grouped here. A brown ground-swirl of leaves serves

for a carpet. The man who takes the tickets is very genereus inhelping the younger children to spear the brass rings which givefree rides. An air of sweetness and naivete pervades the place;a ride costs 50 centimes; I once rode one of the poor, lonely, oldcamels myself. The movement of the verse as the girls "glancehere and there and near and far away" does something towardreproducing the easy bounding motion of the original. In at

least two of the poet's letters he says that this poem was almostthe only one which was sure of enthusiastic reception when heread it before an audience. I have been criticized for not rhym-ing the refrain. In German thc last syllable carries the accent,but there' s very litde to be done with a dactylic word inEnglish.Pages 8�, Spanish Dancer-

Rilke saw this dancer at the christening party o£ Zuloaga'sdaughter, Ruth Sieber-Rilke teIls me. One is reminded o£

139

Sargent's "Carmencita," the dancer in the yellow dress. I havegot the nine k sounds of the original in the second stanza.

These prepare the reader for the unmentioned castanets. Klap-pernd and Schlange really combine to Klapperschlange, which." I k "IS ratt esna e.

immortal cygnets, who sprawl among the Howers. Mother andthe father-bird stand in much the posture of those photographsof our grandparents. But the emphasis, after all, is on the resultsof the union. Correggio takes the affair at high tide in his soft-est, most voluptuous style; the whole thing is Huffy and fuzzy,all flesh and feathers. Of the statues, one can hardly es cape thatin Florence by Ammannati, which is indebted to the female fig-ures of the Medicean tombs-the Leda has a silly face and a

muscular, stringy thigh; it is an unpleasant piece of work. Thesmaller figure in the Archaeological Museum at Venice isfrankly bawdy and very amusing. But the presence of the storyin one o£ the details o£ the famous bronze Jubilee Doors of St.Peter's gives one an unholy shock, and the brisk treatment ofthe event makes one feel rather more kindly toward the frigidbaroque barn behind the doors. One wishes that Dante had putLeda in his seventh circle, where she richly belonged for havingviolated nature. Now consider how the story has fared in theliterature of our time. In Faust � Part 11, lines 6903-6920, Ho-munculus relates the dream he is reading in Faust' s mind. Thereis a deal of life flame in the noble body, of rustling, Huttering,and splashing, but the gentlemanly little manikin draws a thickcurtain of vapor over the finale as if the tableau were being pre-sented to a parlorful of Backfische in fluffy white gowns withpink sashes. After all, Goethe is pretty much eighteenth cen-

tury. But may I present a line-for-line translation from a poemon the subject from Divertissements by Remy de Gourmont?

The bird came nearer, beautiful, ardent, and dreaming.The bird neared, beautiful, ardent, with an airSo regal and vigorous that Leda was charmedAnd regretted in this illusion of her fleshNot being a swan herself that she might be loved

Under the shadows, among the pleasant soft grasses.In the shadows, among the soft grass and the lilies,Leda gives way to the weight of this arrogant bird,All dripping yet with the waters of Simois,And her startled body, shivering, resigns itself

Notice that both these poets-and Yeats, too-put the empha-sis on the woman and her reactions, whereas Rilke spends most

of his lines on the bird. Isn't there a fundamental differencehere, and is not Rilke' s sensuous handling-if such it be-moreakin to the manner of the Greeks, childlike and unashamed? Ihave gone into this perhaps at too great length because an un-

derstanding of his point of view seems worth the trouble.

Pages 96-<;7, Tbc Alcbemist-

(I have skipped a dozen Biblical poems here.) A few yearsago gold was actually produced from base metals-and in Ore-gon, of a11 places! The "glass pear" is, of course, the retorte

There is a bigness of the sweep of time in this, which is Rilkeat his best: after the aeons, an ironic tapering off to the tinycrumb of gold.Pages 9�9' Tbe lnsane-

A poetic interpretation of dissociation. The short fourth andfifth lines of the second stanza are typical iconoclasms. It wouldhave made a better twelve-liner. (Cf. "Madness," p. 25')Pages 100-101, One of tbe Old Ones-

Let me quote from Malte (p. 248): "Diese Stadt ist voll von

solche, die langsam zu ihnen hinabgleiten. Die meisten sträubensich erst; aber dann gibt es diese verbleichenden, alterendenMädchen, die sich fortwährend ohne Widerstand hinüber-lassen, starke, im Inneresten ungebrauchte, die nie geliebtworden sind." T ypical of his interest in the underprivileged.(Cf. the next poem.)Pageslo2- 10 3,Faded--

This is a tender and accurate study of an old maid who must

now resort to artificial perfumes to replace the loss of her youth-ful blooming fragrance: a loss which is symbolical of the fadingof her personality until she seems merely the old aunt of thegirl she once was. I have observed this tragedy many times.

Pages 1°4-1°5, Roman Campagna-In the second quatrain the sonnet form is violated; it con-

sists of two sets of couplets. Fermen is a word made by Rilkefrom the French ferme. The poem is almost humorous in its

conception of the personified road, fearful of the windows, yetdoomed to have them always at his neck. Compare M.D. Her-ter Norton) Letters to a Y oung Poet, page 42, where it reads:"Waters unendingly fuIl o£ life go over the old aqueducts . . .

and dance in the many squares over white stone basins."

Pages 106-109, Tbe Parks-The poet is definitely interested in parks, for he had wan-

dered in many and lived on the estates of various friends andpatrons. Much of the material in the seven poems of this setwas gathered from Versailles. He spe�ifically mentions theT apis vert, the smiling Dianas, the stairs and the Naiads, andhe seems to have looked at these studies through the eyes ofWatteau and Fragonard, for he uses their very tones: silver,rose, gray, white, and blue. The end of VII, where the swarm ofgnats blots out the world behind one's back, is one o£ his grand-est moments. It is as if Shiva the Destroyer were right behindone.

the series of plays and poems on the subject. It's sad to think ofthis splendid boy growing up only to be crushed under vindic-tive marble.

Pagcs 120-121, Tbc Solitary-Not to be con£used with an earlier poem o£ the same tide.

One has only to contrast the two poems to see how far on theVia Dolorosa the poet has come. Here he longs for somethingbeyond the usual ivory tower of romantic escape. All this is inharmony with the motif of the last part of his book: lonelil1ess,detachment, wistfulness for a place beyond mortal suffering,past the changes inherent in the universe, beyond even thewhite face of love. I have attempted to represent this in thepoems chosen from his finale. I t seems to end in a Buddhistannihilation or an absorption into something which might becalled God. This poem has to be grown into and requires orien-tation in the sacred books o£ the East i£ the vague symbols are

to be felt-they cannot be explained. It should be read in con-

nection with the last poem. The irydividual is striving to passout o£ space into something whicl1 is either nothingness or a

divine whole.

Pages 124-125, The Scarab-This penultimate poem of the Neue Gedichte is another piece

conceived in a museum; for as yet Rilke had not been in Egypt.But he has changed a casual experience into an important partof bis book by linking the motifs of time and space and leadingto his cIimax in the last poem. The little stone beetles becomethe symbol of a heavy and eternal vastness. Space, like an em-

bodied postulate, rests on their wing shards.

Pages 126-127, The Buddha in the Glory-Her mother' s recollection, Ruth Sieber-Rilke tells me, was

that "one o£ the Buddha poems was written about the greatstatue in the Völkerkunde Museum in Berlin. This must be thelast poem, 'Buddha in der Glorie.' " In an early preparation forthis poem (p. 63)' the Buddha is shown as unaware of the pres-ence of his worshipers. Here he is apotheosized; he becomes thecenter of all space and time. The figure of the self-enclosed,ever-ripening almond is daring but exact: the Buddha thus ismade the seed of all existence. The shell is in infinity, and timeis struck in a full final chord by "something more enduringthan the suns."

c. F. MACINTYRE onee suggested that he was an inde£ati-gable translator partly because of the international inter-ests of his family: his mother was a student of Latin andGreek, and his father was deeply interested in France andEgypt. Much of Maclntyre's life had been spent abroad,in various parts of Europe and in Mexico. German was hissecond language, and he took his Ph.D. at the Universityo£ Marburg. (There he began his translation of Faust,Part I, which first won him notiee as a translator.) Hespent his last years in Paris and devoted himself to trans-

lating, in support of which he received Guggenheim andFulbright grants.

Maclntyre was also known for his original poems, ofwhich several volumes have been published: Ca/es andCathedrals, The Rlack Rull, and Poems. The Universityof California Press volumes (bilingual editions) translatedby Maclntyre include:

DUINO ELEGIES by Rainer Maria Rilke $ I .00

FRENCH SYMBOLIST POETRY $ I .50THE LIFE OF THE VIRGIN MARY by Rainer Maria Rilke

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Charles Baudelaire $ 5.00SELECTED POEMS by Stephane Mallarme Cloth,

$3.50; Cal 9, paper $ I .50SELECTED POEMS by Rainer Maria Rilke $ I .50SELECTED POEMS by Paul Verlaine $1'50SELECTIONS FROM LES AMOURS }AUNES by Tristan

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