The Poet's Guide to Life Read Online

The revolution was not about to occur from within, argued these reformers of Germany’s university system, and by the time the radicals had been granted tenure Rilke had been all but dropped from seminar reading lists. Not surprisingly, though, the poetry survived outside of the university’s walls. When the new generation of scholars came to realize that revolutions—to which Rilke was not opposed on principle—are matters not only of the intellect but also of the body and the heart, they discovered that Rilke had continued to be read all along by the students whom they had been lecturing. But recent defenses of Rilke as a political thinker, such as an albeit well-intentioned six-hundred-page volume of his “letters on politics” published in Germany, similarly miss the mark. They try to politicize a poet who was highly doubtful about the strict distinction of the personal and the political. Rilke endures his contradictions, and even those remarks less suitable to our tastes and our time neither diminish nor augment what he writes elsewhere.

Through celebration and through censure, urgent attempts have been made to assign Rilke to a fixed state of poetic development and to delimit his reach by means of critical acclaim and public renown. The letters burst out of these classifications; they even shatter “the sum of misunderstandings that gather around a name,” which Rilke defined as the nature of fame.

Translating Rilke

Among the most powerful letters are those in which Rilke expresses condolence. The idea for this book, indeed, was born when I was at a loss for words and couldn’t find an appropriate poem to read at my father’s funeral in Germany. I was unsure whether I could speak but also felt that this was a responsibility no one else could assume for me. The following passage from one of Rilke’s letters seemed to put these feelings into words:

It has seemed to me for a long time that the influence of a loved one’s death on those he has left behind ought to be none other than that of a higher responsibility. Does the one who is passing away not leave a hundredfold of everything he had begun to be continued by those who survive him—if they had shared any kind of inner bond at all? Over the past few years I have been forced to gain intimate knowledge of so many close experiences of death. But with each individual who was taken from me, the tasks around me have only increased. The heaviness of this unexplained and possibly mightiest occurrence, which has assumed the reputation of being arbitrary and cruel only due to a misunderstanding, presses us more deeply into life and demands the most extreme duties of our gradually increasing strengths.

I read these words in German at that occasion and then translated them and additional passages from German, and occasionally French, into English. I felt a distinct need to render available this side of Rilke to my English-speaking adult self as well. The movement from German into English also afforded me a way to relive and re-experience, now more consciously through the task of translation, my own first, joyous encounters with Rilke’s words. Of equal importance was my gradual sense, put in its proper terms only by Rilke in a comment on his French poems written in a period he experienced as a second youth, that one always lives a “younger” existence than one’s chronological age when one lives in a language that has been acquired later in life. Sometimes a second language may afford you the opportunity to reclaim through the act of translation parts of your development that had passed you by in your own native language owing to that idiom’s seeming transparency. My translations are guided by this sense of discovery and renewed appreciation for words and phrases that I was now able to claim for myself a second time, this time in English. The effort to render Rilke in English, rather than turn English into what Rilke might have sounded like in the language he did not master or enjoy, grows out of the experience of hearing Rilke open up German in ways that leave that language sounding less, well, German. My point was, above all, to re-create for English readers the experience of rhythm that is afforded to native German readers by Rilke’s prose. This meant, however, finding a new rhythm that is properly suited to English rather than forcing English, in the name of literalism, into a teutonic frame and thus losing the grace of Rilke’s words. In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke advises that to write poetry one must wait for one’s memories and experiences “to have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture.” The same applies for translation: the original must course for long periods through the translator’s ears and mind and body, only to be cast often quite suddenly into the target language, at which point it adapts to and occasionally stretches the gestalt and rhythms of that idiom. And that idiom must be full of breath and life, which means that it might strain a bit against the syntax and sounds in which these sentences are now reborn. I don’t share the belief held by some of Rilke’s translators that German is more capable than English of expressing sustained thought. If such differences exist, they surely belong with individual speakers and not whole languages, and if there are differences between the ways one may structure an argument or describe an emotional state in a given tongue, these differences can be acknowledged but do not suggest the inherent superiority of any one language over another. In my case, translating Rilke quite unexpectedly gave language, for me now living in my “younger” English-speaking self, to one of life’s pivotal and difficult experiences of passing into true adulthood.

On December 4, 1926, his fifty-first birthday, Rilke asked from his hospital bed for cards to be printed that were then to be mailed to far over a hundred active correspondents, all of them waiting for his word. The card read, in both German and French:

Monsieur Rainer Maria Rilke, seriously ill, asks to be excused; he finds himself incapable of taking care of his correspondence. December 1926.

On December 29, 1926, Rilke is dead. The task of his correspondence had assumed absolute moral importance for the poet; his failure to live up to his correspondents’ desire for his letters pained him deeply. But to ask his correspondents to forgive him for not writing means, in this poignant card, effectively to be excused for being “seriously ill” and thus, ultimately, to be excused for dying.