Duino Elegies (A Bilingual Edition)
RAINER MARIA RILKE
DUINO ELEGIES
Translated by David Young
With an Introduction
and Commentary
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
THE ELEGIES
First Elegy
Second Elegy
Third Elegy
Fourth Elegy
Fifth Elegy
Sixth Elegy
Seventh Elegy
Eighth Elegy
Ninth Elegy
Tenth Elegy
NOTES AND COMMENTS
ALSO BY RAINER MARIA RILKE
INTRODUCTION
We have a marvelous, almost legendary, image of the circumstances in which the composition of this great poem began. Rilke was staying at a castle (Duino) on the sea near Trieste. One morning he walked out on the battlements and climbed down to where the rocks dropped sharply to the sea. If such a scene makes us think of Hamlet, about to encounter a ghost or begin a soliloquy, what follows may remind us even more of Lear, whose mind was brought to an extraordinary clarity at the brink of derangement, posing questions about human existence (“Is man no more than this? Consider him well.”) while exposed to the elements. From out of the wind, which was blowing with great force, Rilke seemed to hear a voice: Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? (If I cried out, who would hear me up there, among the angelic orders?) He wrote these words, the opening of the first Duino Elegy, in his notebook, then went inside to continue what was to be his major work and one of the literary masterpieces of this century.
The story has much to tell us about poetic composition: a heightened awareness in which a voice that is and is not the poet’s begins to speak, almost as if a dramatic character were reciting a “part,” speaking both for himself and for all of us, as Hamlet and Lear seem to. No wonder the voice of the Elegies varies its pronouns so often, sometimes speaking for Rilke, sometimes to him, and, more often than not, speaking with mysterious force and urgency for and to each of us, we who are human, intrigued yet bewildered by our existence. We cannot read this great poem until we realize that it speaks in a voice at once deeply personal and piercingly impersonal: Rilke’s voice, Lear’s voice, the voice of the wind, my voice, your voice too. To have taken the individual self, communing with itself in profound and frightening isolation, and to have made its solitary voice the every-voice that seems to respond from within us as we read the poem, was a remarkable achievement. In a sense, it reflects the aim of every lyric poem, but the peculiar tension between one self, isolated, and all selves, made one by isolation, that vibrates in the voice of this poem makes it especially dramatic. And even so, Rilke’s achievement in the Elegies is still not fully grasped. Like the cathedrals that intrigued him, this poem has stood completed in our midst for some time now, but its clarity of outline and abundance of detail, its intimacy and majesty, are still coming into focus.
For Rilke, after that moment in the wind, it was not simply a matter of writing it down. The poem he began that day in 1912 he was to work on for ten years, an act of great artistic patience and restraint. And if the completion was troublesome, coming near the end of Rilke’s life, we must also consider the effort that led up to that first outburst. Rilke had not mastered his life or his art with anything like ease. Born in Prague in 1875, he found his poetic vocation after a difficult childhood and then devoted himself to it with a dedication that cut him off from other people. Despite marriage and many friendships, he was essentially solitary, needing isolation in order to journey deeply into himself, where terror, exhilaration, and further solitude lay in wait. He forged his style slowly and with difficulty, out of nineteenth-century Romanticism and the more contemporary movements of Expressionism and Symbolism. He pressed language and imagination for a precision and an intensity that other poets still marvel at.
It was a career marked by restless travel, study, and continued uncertainty about his writing. By the time Rilke had written the New Poems (1907, 1908) and, more especially, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), an experimental prose work that resolutely explored the worst fears that memory, imagination, and existence can produce, he began to think he was artistically blocked and used up. But after two frustrating years, he found he could say, at Duino, “Solitude is a true elixir.” Something was beginning to happen. He spoke of himself in letters as creeping around in the thickets of his life, “shouting like mad and clapping my hands … I howl at the moon with all my heart and put the blame on the dogs” (Lear again). But he was also poised and listening, and when the voice came on the wind he was ready: Stimmen, Stimmen. Höre, mein Herz … (Voices, voices. Listen, my heart …). Ten years in all it would last, that listening. A work that would combine the intensity of the lyric with the scope of the long poem, that would allow the poet to stand on the borders of life and death and sing both in anguish and jubilation, was underway at last.
A student once asked me what the Duino Elegies were about, and before I had time to begin explaining how impossible the question was, I had already replied: “They are about what it really means to be human.” I still like my thoughtless answer. The poem (or poems; it is both one and ten) resists paraphrase or identification, but that it addresses itself to what we call the human condition, with considerable force and honesty, there can be no doubt. It speaks to the distinctive and often crippling effects of our self-awareness, to the alienation from others and from ourselves that we suffer in varying degrees. It touches on children and parents, on love and lovers, on heroes and heroism, art and artists. Through its concern with this last group it deals with our attempts to use our self-consciousness to some advantage: to transcend, through art and the imagination, our self-deception and our fear.
In the process of defining and facing the terms of our existence, the poem is perhaps most famous for speaking trenchantly and courageously of death, the single overwhelming fact of mortality, the most feared and least faced aspect of our lives.
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