A gust inside the god. A wind.
—-Rainer Maria Rilke, “Gesang ist Dasein”
They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.
—-Czeslaw Milosz, “Artificer”
1 How it began
Rilke began the first Duino Elegy in 1912 while walking along the cliffs near Duino Castle in Trieste (the castle would be largely destroyed during WWI). Two years later, the poet would be separated from his family and from his home to which he would never return. He would be conscripted into military service, and would suffer from illness and depression; it took him ten more years to complete the cycle of ten poems.
Bianca Stone narrates a rich, evocative description of this moment.
We know it took Rilke ten years to complete the cycle of ten poems. A chronos in elegies. A cycle of selves and selvings. I am intrigued by the temporal rupture within his elegies—a rupture forced by circumstance, by life, by lived experience. The Rilke who wrote the first elegy is not the same body or mind that wrote the 7th. In between these elegies, Orpheus intervened. I think the role played by time is worth considering here. For time had changed. This creates interesting questions about how we consider the poet-self, and how we read the world in relation to language.
2 “First Elegy
The poem in its entirety: “First Elegy” as translated by Stephen Mitchell (PDF).
Here is Rilke’s first stanza as translated by Stephen Mitchell:
And now, for the sake of hearing and tasting the poem across its possibilities, I want to add more translation next to this one.
Here is Rilke’s “First Elegy” as translated by Edward Snow— and the first stanza replicated below:
A few immediate observations:
1. Mitchell and Snow occupy the field differently: where Mitchell’s translation stretches horizontally across the page, in relation to the horizon, Snow’s translation tumbles down the page and leaves an empty white margin. Absence and space is felt and perceived differently as a result.
2. Mitchell tears the first line away from the stanza and uses it as a frame above the poem’s threshold. The question is set apart from the poem visually. This set-apartness is emphasized and expanded by Mitchell.
3. Translations of the first line also reveal other differences in emphasis. Mitchell leaves the noun as abstract as possible. But something wants a proper noun, or an identified subject, in Snow’s translation.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? (Mitchell)
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’ Orders? (Edward Snow)
Notice the difference between "hierarchies" and "Orders.” Notice the shift in the specificity of the subject: angels v. Angels.
The opening question is immense. This immenseness made Mitchell feel that it demanded spacing outside the rest of the poem. But the answer to this question (as Robert Hass noticed elsewhere) can only be :"No one."
3 “No One” in Correspondence
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
Rilke doesn’t answer this question directly in the elegy, but he also works tirelessly to convince the reader that ‘No one’ matters.
‘No one ‘is another way of figuring the statement: there is no single thing known as one. There are many Ones. (As there are many interlocutors.)
Perhaps there is something else as well, a None.
I believe that "No one" was central to Rilke's poetics as well as the relationship between eros, imagination, and writing for him. Just as Muzot became central to this poetic imaginary, he was buried there. He picked the churchyard site at Raron. He requested a small, plain gravestone like his father's.
And he composed the poem intended to rest above him forever:
Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep under so many
lids.
When Rilke died on December 26, 1926, he was buried in this location. Beneath the words. He exists for eternity in relation to them.
For several years, I have (albeit carelessly) read the first elegy in relation to a poem by Paul Celan. There is, to me, a correspondence with Paul Celan's "Psalm”? Here is John Felstiner's translation:
No one kneads us again… —- this wrecks me still. I cannot read this first line without already having lost the rug that ties the artifice of my selfhood together.
No one. The echo of that hollow O. And the way the echo gestures towards “none” in English. The strange sonic energy between no one and none.
And here is how Hamburger and Joris translate the first three stanzas of the elegy:
No one molds us again. NoOne kneads us again. No one conjures our dust. Praised be your name, no one. Praised be thou, NoOne.
Where Hamburger leaves the abstract ‘no one’ open, Joris closes it somehow: a proper noun must be divine. It must be the “NoOne” God has become when he does not answer. And Joris’ use of “thou” plays further into this holy name. This pattern continues:
A nothing we were… A Nothing we were…. the nothing, the Nothing…the no one’s rose, the NoOnesRose. And this NoOnesRose is central to Joris’ Celan. I just wanted to note these differences, while acknowledging that I am less inclined to adjudicate between them and more inclined to learn from them as a dialogue. Since (again) there are many Ones. (As there are many interlocutors.)
4 Rilke as poet of desire
Bianca gave me a beautiful introduction on Rilke authored by Robert Hass. Reading it allowed me to reexamine my feeling that Rilke is a poet of desire, or a poet of desire in relation to the way desire exists to me. Hass makes a brief reference to Marina Tsvetaeva. Again—-to me—Tsvetaeva is Rilke’s kindred spirit. I think his intensity was hers, and vice versa. They understood desire similarly. Irrespective of other relationships in their lives, both poets felt most alive on the page, most lit in correspondence fueled by the velocity of mutually imagining each other. This particular correspondence between their personalities is erotic, as their epistolary correspondence is also erotic. Their letters are mutually uncommitted to the material facticity of the moment. The material is almost a profanation of the erotic energy in the letter.
Rilke loved the absent more devotedly than he loved the present. Whether his wife, Clara, or Lou Andreas, the child Vera, or Paula—Rilke's women are cherished and tended on the page.
Hass quotes one of Rilke’s lovers as saying of him:
And so the question opens about how careless Rilke was—-and whether this carelessness was a form of “narcissism”. Given that this word is often defined differently, and given my own uncertainty as to whether I can sustain such a claim, I’d rather consider what can be said with what is given.
Rilke wasn't a womanizer. He couldn't really be Rodin. Much as he tried, he couldn’t objectify women in the flesh—-couldn’t impose that aura of mastery over them. Even if Rilke wanted to imitate Rodin, he was too cerebral, too haunted by his own fear of death, too touched by the pain and suffering of others as with the screams from the hospital in Paris.
And those who are beautiful, oh who can retain them? (Second Elegy)
5. Translations and interlocutory frisson
John Felstiner wrote about the relationship between Celan’s translation practice and his poetics in an essay for World Literature Today:
A gift to spend time with Bianca’s brilliant mind and spirit thinking through poetry. An absolute gift. Always.
For our own heart always exceeds us, as theirs did.
And we can no longer follow it,
gazing into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies where,
measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.
—- Rainer Maria Rilke, “Second Elegy” (t. by Mitchell)