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. So I was only asked to contribute a reading aloud from the Elegies. The ninth poem was chosen, but as I practised my lines, I found myself stumbling, losing the thread and, frankly, I hardly knew what it was I was reading. I supposed this obscurity was part of the point and that it must signal unplumbed depths of profundity. Years later, I know that a proportion of this difficulty is Leishman’s obfuscating translation and that the resulting impression of slippery ‘mysticism’ has misleadingly been part of Rilke’s appeal for some readers.
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. Even so, delighted with the audience’s response to these first efforts 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. This is a sure indication Orpheus and Eurydice by Carl Andreas August Goos (1826) commons.wikimedia.org of the successfully syncretic nature of his vision. There are the ancient sarcophagi he once noticed, probably at Alyscamp, near Arles. Many of them had been emptied, lined up and re-purposed as irrigation channels. Their duality of use – having once contained death and now the source of life – permits them to 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’. In a letter written after the poems had been completed, he said he’d 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.
Sonnet II, 7 describes young women arranging cut flowers, while in another poem Rilke recalls and addresses childhood playmates from ‘the scattered gardens about the city’. Elsewhere, there are farmers working on the land: ‘Listen – the first ploughs are already at work. / Once again, hear the human rhythm / in the measured stillness of the strong earth / in early spring’. In pointed contrast, the brutal hunting of doves in the Karst caverns in the South Harz of Germany, is methodically described (yet with a sense of horror) in sonnet II, 11: ‘I know you better than a trap or a net, you strip of sailcloth they would hang down deep into the Karst cavern.
They lowered you softly as if you were a symbol, a mark of peace. A boy seized an edge, gave it a shake and night flung a handful of white doves from the cave.’ Of course, a more 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. He met Vera only a few times, but 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: ‘you tried out your beautiful steps / in hope of turning your friend, his face, perhaps / his course one day toward healing celebration’. In these lines, Rilke is the ‘friend’ and his ‘celebration’ is the poetry he eventually wrote for Vera.
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: ‘Flower-muscle that opens the anemone in its meadow-mornings, step by step, until the noisy polyphony of heaven pours its light into her lap, into the rapt, quiet star-flower’s shape…’ Sonnet I, 13 evokes the same kind of ecstatic joyfulness through the sense of taste, pushing at the limits of ordinary language: ‘Try to express what it is we call ‘apple’.
This sweet one with its gathering intensity rising so quietly – even as you taste it – becomes transparent, wakeful, ready, ambiguous, sunny, earthy, native.
O experience, touch, pleasure, prodigal!’ Such lines are also a fine example of the speed, intensity and flexibility of Rilke’s use of the sonnet form to convey the impression of vigour, excitement and song-like ecstasy. Such poems must echo the language of Orpheus, the singing god, who, even after suffering death at the hands of the maenads, continued to create: . . . ‘you – singing still to the last, divine one – even as the swarm of scorned maenads struck, you beauty, you drowned out their shriek with order, from ruin raised your uplifting song.’ 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 and – as C.S. Lewis has argued – the paradox that what must destroy us may remake us to even greater joys is an ancient one. I often return to sonnet II, 13 (the one identified by its author as ‘most valid of all’). This stunning poem reasserts the idea that we must welcome change.
Despite the passage of years, I still read it 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.
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.