64. Rilke, Duineser Elegien
Good choice with the St.-John Perse, Nemo. Here's another non-Anglophone nomination.
The Duino Elegies blew me away the first time I read it in Stephen Spender’s translation, and then it blew me away even more in Stephen Mitchell’s. The opening line is one of the most famous lines of 20th-century poetry:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies?
Rilke’s whole oeuvre attests to the authenticity of his search for an answer to that opening question—which of course is never answered. Instead he acknowledges that life is preparation for something we can’t even begin to comprehend:
and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure. (Stephen Mitchell’s trans.)
The Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus (which was almost my Rilke choice for this thread) were written for the most part in that month in 1922 (I think it was) when Rilke was the embodiment of the inspired poet in the ancient sense.
Rilke more than most poets lived that ideal of negative capability that Keats wrote about. He is one of the poets whose intuition breaks down mental categories and cages, the habitual barrier between the seen and the unseen.
Like a student of Zen, he suggests in the Elegies that the adequate symbol is what simply is. The Elegies end:
If the endlessly dead awakened a symbol in us,
perhaps they would point to the catkins hanging from the bare
branches of the hazel-trees, or
would evoke the raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in springtime.
And we, who have always thought
of happiness rising, would feel
the emotion that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happy thing falls.
Even in translation the quality of Rilke’s poetic thought comes through—he’s one of the main reasons I hope to learn German some day.
I know the Edward Snow translation as well, which has struck me as very well done. But I’d love to hear from others here, especially someone who knows what the original is like, what translation they like best.
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