Holding back and grim endurance become centers of emanation, and move toward exaltation and grace. This is true of the archaictorso’s radiant bursting-forth, the self-abandoned blind man’s “marriage,” the “contagiousness” of the leper king’s “new dignity,” and the winged exfoliations of the coat of arms’s “indrawnness.” “Persian Heliotrope” provides a gentle paradigm: as “sweet words” there “at night in sentences/pull close together, refusing separation,” they “perfume forth” to fill the silent four-poster that contains them. The last two poems in the volume consummate this theme beautifully, first with the cradled sleep of the ancient beetle-stones, then with the unattached Buddha installed in glory, welcomed as “center of all centers, core of cores.” But its most powerful expression is “The Solitary,” where the destructive element—here conceived of as distances—drives aloneness further and further into bliss:

No: a tower shall rise out of my heart,

and I myself will be placed at its edge;

where nothing else exists, once again pain

and unsayableness, once again world.

Still one thing alone in immensity

growing dark and then light again,

still one last face full of longing

thrust out into the unappeasable,

still one uttermost face made of stone

heeding only its own inner gravity,

while the distances that silently destroy it

force it on to an ever deeper bliss.

*   *   *

The gains of New Poems: The Other Part, however, are not without their costs. If it is more “intense” than New Poems, it is also less varied and relaxed. In its drive toward objectivity it loses the youthful quality of the first volume, and this registers as real loss. The gentle wistfulness of “Portrait of My Father as a Young Man” or “The Carousel”—itself supremely assured—scarcely survives into the second volume. Nor does the first volume’s extraordinary openness to the realm of women. In spite of isolated examples like “Woman in Love,” there is nothing in The Other Part to compare with the series of voicings of female desire that launches the erotic theme in New Poems. Nor, in spite of poems like “Lady at a Mirror” and “The Rose-Interior,” is there anything like the feeling for feminine withinness and apartness that produces the original volume’s magnificent concluding poems.

If New Poems sometimes flirts with sentimentality and false ingenuousness, The Other Part can seem near-pathological in its pursuit of “hardness.” Under the guise of maker (“not feelings but things I had felt”) Rilke sometimes seems to be cultivating distance for its own sake, and trying to expunge feeling itself. “Corrida” is a good example. It is a brilliant poem, technically and thematically, and it works out the relationship between its two antagonists with impeccable balance. But a coldness infuses its very making. The indifference that it cultivates even acquires a kind of sadistic edge, as in the queasy sexuality of its ending:

before he serenely, unspitefully,

leaning on himself, calmly, carelessly

into that great wave, turned round and once more

rolling toward him, above its lost thrust

almost gently sinks his sword.

Finally, it must be said that too often the poems in The Other Part seem merely willed, as if the desire to repeat the first volume were without any deep impulse or intuition. This is especially true of the early poems that stretch from “Dolphins” through “Magnificat.” Here important poems are almost ruined by a piling up of alliteration and assonance for their own sake, as in “Dolphins,” “The Last Judgment,” and “The Temptation.” Other times elaborate wordplay and rhyme schemes attempt to compensate for impoverished content, as in “The King of Münster” and the wretched “Absalom’s Rebellion,” surely one of the worst poems Rilke ever wrote. And few of the seemingly endless biblical poems ever acquire a life of their own. It is not until “Adam” and “Eve” that Rilke truly finds his voice and his themes, and after that the poetry rises to a level of sustained accomplishment comparable to that of the original New Poems. It would be a shame if the reader were deterred by those mediocre first poems. For what follows—especially “Adam” through “The Lute”—though not the greatest, is probably the most consistently fascinating run of poems in all of Rilke. If there is such a thing as an “unknown Rilke,” it is probably in New Poems: The Other Part that it waits to be discovered.

*   *   *

I would like again to express my gratitude to other translators of Rilke: the selections of Stephen Mitchell, M.D. Herter Norton, C. F. MacIntyre, Robert Bly, and Franz Wright have all aided me at one time or another—as, of course, has J. B. Leishman’s translation of the complete New Poems. I would also like to thank the friends who have been so generous with their comments: Albert Cook, Alan Grob, Ed Hirsch, Philip Lopate, Scott McLean, Stephen Mitchell, Michael Winkler, and Bill Zavatsky have all provided helpful suggestions. And I owe a special debt of thanks to Winnie Hamilton. She has been a constant critic, sounding board, and arbiter during the latter stages of these translations. Whatever success I may have achieved would have been impossible without her patience and generosity.

New Poems [1908]

THE OTHER PART

A mon grand Ami Auguste Rodin

Archaïscher Torso Apollos

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,

darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber

sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,

in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug

der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen

der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen

zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz

unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz

und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern

aus wie ein Stern: denn da is keine Stelle,

die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We never knew his head and all the light

that ripened in his fabled eyes. But

his torso still glows like a candelabra,

in which his gazing, turned down low,

holds fast and shines. Otherwise the surge

of the breast could not blind you, nor a smile

run through the slight twist of the loins

toward that center where procreation thrived.

Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt

under the shoulders’ invisible plunge

and not glisten just like wild beasts’ fur;

and not burst forth from all its contours

like a star: for there is no place

that does not see you.