The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Darwin8u

Rating: really liked it
“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke



Rainer Maria Rilke seems to stretch his words from the dirt to the stars with his poems. His verse is my favorite kind of poetry. He is wrestling with angels, looking for the THING, peeling back the skin on tangerines while counting the seeds. This is both the poetry of my youth (I first read Rilke in HS) and my maturity. Rilke dances in that void between love, sex and death and makes the gravity of it ALL work.

I should also mention that I love Stephen Mitchell as a translator. I'm not sure exactly how many languages he reads, but his ability to turn German poetry into English poetry; his ability to turn Latin poetry into English poetry -- hell, it amazes me. Like Pinsky's translation of The Inferno of Dante, Rilke's 'Selectee Poetry' is one of those poet translations I believe is a must in a literate library.

Matt

Rating: really liked it
This is a book you might need years to prepare for.

Rilke is complex, his images interweave and play off each other. I believe it has something to do with the penchant for puns and hyphenated, conjuncted words that German is prone to.

"Archaic Torso Of Apollo" is one of the most powerful, moving pieces in all of 20th Century poetry.

Rilke is light years beyond you, dear reader, as he is for 90% of all his readers.

But he is accessible in small glimpses if you come correct with an open mind and reverence and inquisitiveness...

"Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me among the angels' heirarchies?"

Splendid. Elegant, aesthetic, cosmopoltian, skeptical, dense, rewarding, compelling.

This would change your life, if only you had enough of one to change.

Kim

Rating: really liked it
Many poets can distill their thoughts, observations, and feelings into poetry in a way that I could never accomplish, but I don't necessarily view them as wise human beings. They might have all sorts of other strengths, but deep interior wisdom is not what they give me. There are some poets, however, who take me to places that resonate so deeply and do it in language that I would never discover in myself. What they say is suffused with wisdom. Rilke is such a poet for me. Wisława Szymborska is another.

Rilke's poems are so dense with imagery, feeling, and insight they require an on-going relationship and an evolving understanding. So for me this is not a book to read and set aside, but one to savor and turn to repeatedly over the years. Rilke created poems that span a space between the beauty and wonder of life and the recognition of death as an inevitable conclusion. Awareness of that conclusion makes everything more wondrous right now and Rilke is incredible at conveying observed details as well as evoking imagery that make you contemplate the world immediately around you. But the poems remind you that these things -- and ourselves -- are all more precious because they are fleeting. Another reviewer called his writing "vaporous." I think that's an adequate description. It's like they trigger awareness of that sense of transience in life, temporarily sustain the moment for you, and then disappear. But isn't that how insight is? There then gone? Then there again?

Geoff

Rating: really liked it
I have read many of the poems in this collection dozens of times, by a handful of different translators, and I never, ever tire of Rilke. No modern poet goes as far into himself, into "the invisible, unheard center", and returns with such gems, really revelations. Revelatory image succeeds revelatory image. Am I being a bit too grandiose? That's fine, I think Rilke is the greatest poet of the 20th century, and high praise is not praise enough. A pure writer. Mitchell's translations are gorgeous and this should be the edition that introduces the new reader to Rilke. Then read all his letters and the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Then reread ad infinitum.

Yuval

Rating: really liked it
I'm not the world's biggest poetry buff, but Rilke's work is more like lyric philosophy, and the depth of ideas and richness of imagery is overwhelming. It's been way too long since reading these, and I've thoroughly loved the re-read over the last few weeks.

Last time I read this, I did not speak German, so this is the first time I was able to assess Stephen Mitchell's translations of the poems from German. They are truly amazing; accurate, graceful, and lovely. I can't imagine any better.

David

Rating: really liked it
There are times in life when I feel as if I live in a parallel universe. You know the way it goes. The usual precipitating event - everyone else on the planet holds an opinion or belief that seems so outrageous and outlandish to me, we cannot be having the same experience. I've had this feeling all day today.

My current sense of profound alienation was triggered by looking down the list of other people's ratings for this book, the Robert Bly "translation" of selected poems by Rilke. Four-star and five-star ratings abound. OK. Maybe people are responding to the beauty of Rilke's poetry, filtered through the laughable effort at "translation" by Robert Bly. But no - several people single out the translation for particular praise!

Did these people read the same book I did? This is the most abysmal "translation" of Rilke's work, indeed of anyone's work, I have ever had the misfortune to come across. It reads as if it were written by an imbecile, tone-deaf to the natural cadences of both German and English, whose grasp of German matches what one might expect of someone who had seen "The Sound of Music" as a youth. And possibly "Heidi".

To give two concrete examples, compare Bly's butchering of two of Rilke's most famous poems with some other translations:

http://gaelstat.com/translation.aspx

(click on links to "Autumn Day" and "The Panther", respectively; a direct link to "Autumn Day" is below, but for some reason goodreads doesn't accept my efforts to provide a direct link to "The Panther")

Autumn Day

I've given specific examples in the first document of where I think Bly makes inexcusable choices - changing the poem's title, duplicating text in a way that ruins the metre, making avoidable changes in the meaning.


I think just reading the various translations of "The Panther" should make it clear just how clunky Bly's effort is. A specific example is his translation of the line -

"Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte"
as
"The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride"

- it's awkward, and the metre of the original is completely mucked up.

The book is filled with other examples of hopelessly clumsy language, brutalization of the metre, and - this seems most unforgivable - the imposition of unnecessary changes. For instance, in the section "The Voices", "Das Lied des Bettlers" is rendered as "The Song the Beggar Sings", and that superfluous "sings" makes its appearance in each title in this section.

But Bly apparently feels no compunction about adding his own superfluous "improvements" to Rilke's original text. That this sometimes changes the meaning considerably doesn't seem to bother him. Combine this with what appears to be a tin ear for the normal rhythms of English, and you end up with the ghastly results in this sorry apology for a translation.

Seriously. There are many fine translations of Rilke out there. Give this one a miss.

Connie G

Rating: really liked it
This volume includes seventy-nine original German poems of Rainer Maria Rilke with the English versions translated by Robert Bly. Bly also wrote helpful commentary introducing five parts of the book. Some of Rilke's earlier poems seem mystical or introspective. His "New Poems" are influenced by deep observation. Listening and praise are themes in his beautiful "Sonnets to Orpheus". I don't speak German so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the translations.

One of my favorites was his poem about a panther. Rilke was working as a secretary for the sculptor Rodin, and had not been writing lately. Rodin encouraged Rilke to go to the zoo, and look at an animal over several weeks until he could really see it.

The Panther
In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted
that it no longer holds anything anymore.
To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand
bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride
which circles down to the tiniest hub
is like a dance of energy around a point
in which a great will stands stunned and numb.

Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise
without a sound . . . then a shape enters,
slips through the tightened silence of the shoulders,
reaches the heart, and dies.

Edita

Rating: really liked it
And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

Katherine Cowley

Rating: really liked it
I first discovered Rilke earlier this month when one of my friends posted a snippet of his poetry for National Poetry Month. The lines entranced me, and I decided I wanted to read more. So I found this selection of his poetry and read it from start to finish.

I loved the critical introduction by Robert Haas--it was a fascinating look at Rilke's life and poems, and helped me get a lot more out of my reading, by understanding the context.

My impression of Rilke is that his poems describe the beauty of loneliness, the meaning in emptiness, and the self-discovery in loss. In one of his requiems, Rilke writes:

I have my dead, and I have let them go,
and was amazed to see them so contented,
so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,
so unlike their reputation. Only you
return....

The brilliantly crafted ten elegies that make up Duino Elegies were incredibly sorrowful, bringing death close, but in some ways transcending death itself. In one of his sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke writes:

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.

One of my favorite poems is Rilke's first sonnet to Orpheus:


A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;
and it was not from any dullness, not
from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,

but from simply listening. Bellow, roar, shriek
seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been
just a makeshift hut to receive the music,

a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind--
you built a temple deep inside their hearing.


Reading Rilke makes me want to look, to see, to experience the world more deeply. It makes me want to stop running from my sorrows, and instead let myself experience them.

Since I've never read Rilke before, I can't comment on this particular translation or edition in comparison to the others. This one does have the original German on the opposite page, for those who happen to read German (I do not).

I need more poetry in my life. Reading Rilke has made that clear to me.

Jimmy

Rating: really liked it
There are not enough stars on Goodreads for Rilke. I loved this book, which included a little sampler from each of his books, chronologically, except the Duino Elegies, which was here in its entirety. I read the Duino Elegies first and was hooked, but the others are almost as good. The Sonnets to Orpheus especially are great, and some of his stand alone poems. Also because this was roughly chronological, you can see his progression as a poet, and how he developed his ideas, themes, and writing. He's not one of those writers who repeats the same poem throughout his career. Every book here has a different flavor and feel to it, he seemed to be perpetually striving. Stephen Mitchell's translations are very satisfying. I've read a few other translations on the web, but none approached the ones in this book. If you read Rilke before in another translation, I urge you to give this one a try. In a bad translation, Rilke can seem overly dramatic, overly romantic, or just plain "icky". But rest assured, he is not.

Here was my original review of Duino Elegies (on 9/16/2008):

I just finished this. It's incredible. I can't believe I hadn't read this before. Poets don't write like this anymore. Who dares to tackle the enormity of these themes, the meaning of life, death, god, love, pain? All conveyed in sometimes concrete sometimes abstract language but always avoiding the easy conclusions. There are so many beautiful passages here where he just tips things slightly so that you see them askew & anew.

Then in elegy 9 he almost sounds like Stevens, talking about thing-ness and language.

Just a little taste, here's the opening of Eighth Elegy:

With all its eyes the natural world looks out
into the Open. Only our eyes are turned
backward, and surround plant, animal, child
like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.
We know what is really out there only from
the animal's gaze; for we take the very young
child and force it around, so that it sees
objects--not the Open, which is so
deep in animals' faces. Free from death,
We, only, can see death; the free animal
has its decline in back of it, forever,
and God in front, and when it moves, it moves
already in eternity, like a fountain.

Noel

Rating: really liked it
Transcendent. Rilke must have had angels whispering in his ears. Perhaps he was one, in an earlier life…



* * *

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? 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 are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note
of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us
some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
into our vision; there remains for us yesterday’s street
and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.

Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space
gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for—that longed-after,
mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart
so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.

Don’t you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Jessica

Rating: really liked it
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? 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,
and we are so awed because it serenely distains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note
of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us
some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street
and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space
gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for -- that longed-after
mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart
so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionte flying.

Anima

Rating: really liked it
The fourth elegy

‘O trees of life, O when are you wintering?
We are not unified. We have no instincts
like those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,
we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,
and fall down to an indifferent lake.
We realise flowering and fading together.
And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,
as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.’

We Must Die Because We Have Known Them

'We must die because we have known them.' Die
of their smile's unsayable flower. Die
of their delicate hands. Die
of women.

Let the young man sing of them, praise
these death-bringers, when they move through his heart-space,
high overhead. From his blossoming breast
let him sing to them:
unattainable! Ah, how distant they are.
Over the peaks
of his feeling, they float and pour down
sweetly transfigured night into the abandoned
valley of his arms. The wind
of their rising rustles in the leaves of his body. His brooks run
sparkling into the distance.

But the grown man
shudders and is silent. The man who
has wandered pathless at night
in the mountain-range of his feelings:
is silent.

As the old sailor is silent,
and the terrors that he has endured
play inside him as though in quivering cages.’

Miroku Nemeth

Rating: really liked it
Rilke's words spring from a compassion and nobility that plunges into the depths and rises to the heights of human experience. Spend time with this book. You will increase your humanity.

Everywhere transience is plunging into the depth of Being....It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, 'invisibly,' inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the visible." (Rilke in a letter Witold Hulewicz, 1925).

"For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation....Love does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person...Rather, it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for another's sake...." Rilke

"The bird is a creature that has a very special feeling of trust in the external world, as if she knew that she is one with its deepest mystery. That is why she sings in it as if she were singing within her own depths; that is why we so easily receive a birdcall into our own depths; we seem to be translating it without residue into our emotion; indeed, it can for a moment turn the whole world into inner space, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between her heart and the world's" Rilke "Letter to Lou Andreas-Salome" 1914)

Angel!: If there were a place that we didn't know of, and there,
on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed
what they never could bring to mastery here--the bold
exploits of their high-flying hearts,
their towers of pleasure, their ladders
that have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaning
just on each other, trembling,--and could master all this,
before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless dead;
Would these, then, throw down their final, forever saved-up,
forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid
coins of happiness before the at last
geniunely smiling pair on the gratified
carpet?

Rilke, Duino Elegies, the Fifth Elegy

Andy

Rating: really liked it
Anybody who tells you that Germans are a gruff, unromantic bunch never read Rilke. This is the most delicate, romantic poetry I've ever read.
"If you are the dreamer, then I am the dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish."