Since he avoided every noise, even his own fame—that “sum of all misunderstandings, that collects itself about a name,” as he once expressed it—the approaching wave of idle curiosity moistened only his name and never his person. It was difficult to reach Rilke. He had no house, no address where one could find him, no home, no steady lodging, no office. He was always on his way through the world, and no one, not even he himself, knew in advance which direction it would take.

The silence which Zweig says grew around Rilke was necessary to that extraordinary and attentive listening of the heart out of which the Duino Elegies began. Rilke’s way through the world took him to Duino, where the poem began in 1912, and eventually to Muzot, in Switzerland, where it was completed, in a burst that included the Sonnets to Orpheus, in 1922. We should be grateful for that silence, that listening, that way through the world: we are their beneficiaries.

NOTES

The first letter quoted (“Solitude … put the blame on the dogs”) is to Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, owner of Duino, who had given him its use, and is dated December 30, 1911.

The phrase about keeping life open to death is from a letter to Nanny von Escher, December 22, 1923. Rilke’s Polish translator was Witold von Hulewicz; the letter in question is dated November 13, 1925. The part of it which concerns the Sonnets and the Elegies is translated and quoted in full in M. D. Herter Norton’s translation of the Sonnets, (Norton, 1942; reissue 2006) pp. 131–136.

Richard Exner’s lecture, “Alas, poor Rilke; His Readers, His Reception, the Boldness of Fear, and the Language of Fish,” was delivered at a symposium in honor of Rilke’s hundredth birthday held at Oberlin, December 4–6, 1975. It later appeared, considerably expanded, as “Ach, armer Rilke! Leser und Narziss—Kühnheit der Furcht—Zeitgenossenschaft—Sprache der Fische” in Rilke heute: Beziehungen und Wirkungen (2. Band) Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1976, pp. 59–94.

The translation of Mandelstam’s “Talking About Dante,” by Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes, was published in Delos, 6. The quotation is from page 81.

Stefan Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday, was published in 1943 by Viking Press. The quotation is from page 141.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

A number of translations of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien already exist in English. None is definitive. Probably no single translation ever will be. What made me undertake the present version was a feeling that existing renderings were unsatisfactory in two ways: from the point of view of clarity, and from that of modernity. It seems to me crucial that the reader of a translation understand what is being said; that involves, over and over, an urgent search for the exact meaning of a passage, and, equally vital, its clear expression in the language of the translator. True “accuracy” in translation needs to be distinguished from literal sense on the one hand and loose paraphrase on the other. Literal sense fails the translator when he gives a word that has vivid associations in one language a dictionary translation into an inert, uninteresting word in the other language; the process is not at all accurate given the kind of interest that poetry brings to language. Paraphrase, if it is expressive, can be remarkably impressive when we are not in a position to question accuracy. But it invites the translator to introduce subtle (or unsubtle!) changes that withhold the unique sense of the poetic original.

When I say that a reader must understand a translation, I mean to imply as well that his interest must be aroused and held. In this respect, it seems essential to have the Elegies move with energy and sweep, carrying us forward in the current of their excitement. Too often, I felt, one could keep one’s attention focused on the existing translations only with effort; like muddy rivers, they were both sluggish and unclear.

The issue of clarity is in this case intertwined with the question of modernity. Rilke began his great poem in 1912, and did not finish it until ten years later. Thus, while it belongs to a tradition and partakes of the 19th century in which the poet came to greatness, it is most definitely a poem of the modern age, a classic of this century like The Waste Land, The Heights of Macchu Picchu, The Man With the Blue Guitar and any of Yeats’ volumes from Responsibilities on. Other translations seemed to me, in matters of diction, imagery, syntax and movement, too willing to face Rilke toward the past, making him sound in English like Tennyson, or Milton, or the Wordsworth of The Prelude. If my version seems excessively contemporary to some, it will be because I have tried to bring the poet’s voice, in all its life and urgency, to the surface of the poem, free of the mufflings and wrappings of the traditional long poem in English.

The urge to achieve clarity, and the desire to let Rilke’s poem speak in the voice of this century’s poetry, both depended heavily, I came to feel, on a successful choice of form.