Uplifting Songs
Even readers not much acquainted with Rilke’s work often know the story of how his two masterworks – Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus – came about. He’d begun the Elegies in 1912 at Castle Duino, on the Adriatic coast. But ten years had to pass before he could complete that original 10 poem sequence and, in the same few weeks of February 1922, the Sonnets also broke upon him ‘completely unexpectedly’. He was by this time living in the Château de Muzot in the Swiss Valais region. Reflecting on that moment, he later said that he ‘could do nothing but submit, purely and obediently, to the dictation of this inner impulse’. What Rilke wrote in that storm of inspiration often has a similar impact on his thunder-struck readers.
So it did for me too – though from inauspicious beginnings. In the mid-1990s a group of friends planned to present an evening celebrating Rilke’s work. This had been provoked by a Poetry Review survey of contemporary UK poets, several of whom declared his work to have been influential. But I had not got very far through my Penguin Modern European Poets Selected Rilke, translated by J.B. Leishman in 1960. As much to my own surprise as anybody else’s (I’d hardly attempted to translate poetry before then), within a month I had produced a new ‘version’ of the ninth Elegy. By version, I mean a close-ish translation, but I’d had to take considerable liberties with particularly obscure passages and I’d occasionally inserted what I thought Rilke might have meant, or perhaps what I wanted him to mean. Delighted with the audience’s response and by now firmly hooked on the Rilkean vision, I tried the first Elegy too and, over the course of 10 years, I completed and published my translation of Duino Elegies. But I’d not had enough of Rilke: my translation of the Sonnets to Orpheus also appeared 6 years later in 2012.
Why do these life-changing enthusiasms strike us? In part because the writer expresses ideas and feelings we already know. They clarify and extend our own still inchoate thoughts. In an important letter of November 1915, Rilke describes the way we create deities from the ‘unwieldy and ungraspable forces’ of our own inner life. He argues that we ‘agreed to place them outside us’ but, as their origins come to be forgotten, these false gods begin to exert an influence on us. This same sleight of perception has also been performed in our relationship with death so that, once externalised and alienated in this same way, we come to see it as the contradiction, the adversary of all we love, all that we then too narrowly define as ‘life’. Rilke wrote to his Polish translator explaining that ‘Affirmation of life AND death appears as one in the “Elegies” . . . we must try to achieve the fullest consciousness of our existence, which is at home in the “two unseparated realms, inexhaustibly nourished by both”‘. It was this sort of insight into the fabrication of deities and the true wholeness of (human) being that chimed with and so excited me about Rilke’s work.
Now, on revisiting the Sonnets to Orpheus, besides these powerful and profound ideas, I am also struck by the wide cast of supporting objects, creatures and individuals that Rilke draws into the magic circle of the sonnets. There are the ancient sarcophagi he once noticed, probably at Alyscamp, near Arles – having once contained death and now re-purposed as irrigation channels, they become a perfect metaphor for the comprehensive openness to experience that Rilke is advocating. There is a white horse he first saw in May 1900, in the village of Nisovka, Russia: ‘Round its front leg, the fetter from a stake’. He made of the horse ‘an ex voto for Orpheus’ and it comes to represent the unquenchable life spirit of a creature harmed by its earlier tethered imprisonment.
An important figure in the poems is Rilke’s own Eurydice. In Munich before the Great War, Vera Ouckama Knoop had briefly been friends with his daughter, Ruth. She was beautiful, a dancer, attracting attention through the ‘art of movement and transformation which was innate in her body and spirit’. She abandoned dance when found to be suffering from leukaemia. Her body shape changed, growing heavy, her artistic aspirations switching from dance to music and then, ‘finally she only drew – as if the denied dance came forth from her ever more quietly, ever more discreetly’. Rilke received an account of her death on New Year’s Day 1922 and, in the completed sequence, alongside Orpheus and the narrator of the poems, Vera becomes a third image of the inspired, driven artist.
It’s true that the overriding impression one gets in reading the Sonnets to Orpheus is of celebration and joy. The Duino Elegies fight their way towards this condition, but the quick-coming sonnets took the godless world as a given, as well as the perception of life and death as one whole and the consequent relish of our being in the world. Hence, we aspire to the kind of ecstatic, almost erotic, experience of blooming flowers, or the ecstatic joyfulness through the sense of taste.
To return from death singing: all those years ago, I took this to be Rilke’s key message. I heard him urging a willingness to undergo transformation in our encounters with the Other. I still read his most valid sonnet (II, 13) as an urgent call to continual renewal. We are to collude in our own demise in order to move forward:
‘Be forever dead in Eurydice – by singing ascend
and give praise, rise into the pure relation.
Here among fading things in a realm of decline,
be a ringing glass shattered by its own sound.’
Martyn Crucefix is a poet and translator. His poetry collections include The Lovely Disciplines (Seren, Bridgend 2017). A poem from it is reprinted on page 8. His translations include Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke (Enitharmon, London 2012). His translation of one sonnet is on page 3.