RILKE FOR SEEKERS

Speaking broadly, the many to whom Rainer Maria Rilke is a powerful presence fall into two categories: those fortunate ones whose engagement with him is positive and nonproblematic, and those for whom it is at best ambivalent, a struggle between what in him is magnificent and what is appalling. On the one hand, perhaps, Robert Bly, Jane Hirshfield, Li-Young Lee. On the other, certainly, John Berryman, who in the final stanza of “Dream Song III” puts it this way:

So ends the poem. Also on the other, Robert Hass, who in “Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer,” writes parenthetically, “. . . one of my minor occupations was raging against Rilke.” Mine too. I envy the effortless admirers, but I am one of the ragers and resisters. It goes without saying that one would not work so hard at resisting any but a great poet; the rest one would simply ignore.

I have engaged Rilke in writing over more than fifty years, through translations of his work and poems of my own, through a novella called The Man Who Loved Rilke, through a number of essays and even a full-length biographical and critical study that took eight years of research and writing, but not even the last has managed to lay him to rest. Recently, after hearing (with some eagerness and some dread) the call of Rilke again, and trying to make out what it was telling me, I stumbled on Stephanie Dowrick’s In the Company of Rilke, a book about the poet as religious or spiritual visionary. The list of Dowrick’s books on the back cover—Intimacy and Solitude, Forgiveness & Other Acts of Love, Seeking the Sacred, and Creative Journal Writing—led me to expect to find everything I disliked about those who market Rilke to the New Age and self-help trades. With these expectations, I bought In the Company of Rilke to serve as a kind of useful antagonist, and it has served this purpose well. What I did not expect was to find it done so carefully, anticipating so many of my own objections to Rilke the human being, and to the kinds of use Dowrick and others put him to. This meant that I would have to go about my own work just as carefully, not settling for easy dismissals. I do have basic reservations about Dowrick’s undertaking, but in many ways her execution of it is strong.

Dowrick is careful, I was pleased to discover, not to paper over Rilke’s numerous character flaws and personal failures—especially in his behavior toward Clara Rilke-Westhoff and their daughter, Ruth Rilke. I would argue that Dowrick should be more skeptical of the writings on Rilke of Lou Andreas-Salomé, whose memoirs of her times with him are famously revised and idealized in retrospect, but on the whole Dowrick gives a reasonably fair account of Rilke the man. In a wide-ranging series of chapters, she places Rilke in a series of spiritual and philosophical contexts (both those of which she approves and those of which she does not), considers translation issues thoughtfully, and makes a continual effort—not always successful, I think—to avoid inflated claims. The wide range of references testifies to years of research and writing.

One way of putting my fundamental doubt about Dowrick’s project is that Rilke himself would have been appalled by it. It constitutes a putting to use of his work that was alien to him. As it happens, a test case presents itself in Rilke’s life story: his friend and supporter, the Swedish feminist Ellen Key, composed a lecture, partly synthesized from Rilke’s written answers to questions she had posed to him, which she called “Rainer Maria Rilke and the Concept of God”—precisely the subject of Dowrick’s work. When this lecture was given to Rilke to read, as possible preface to his Stories of God, he reacted, in Ralph Freedman’s words, this way:

He felt his subtleties had been flattened, the dark riddles . . . exposed to a glaring light. Rilke was referring to Key’s discussion of the Stories of God, but I think these phrases describe equally well parts of Dowrick’s enterprise. Rilke was essentially a poet, dealing in subtleties and dark riddles; he gave to the term poet a broad, profound, and elevated meaning, certainly encompassing the spiritual, but he did not see himself as a potential spiritual master or guide, nor his poems as in the same category as sacred texts. He would have done nothing to encourage undertakings like Dowrick’s; he felt no obligation to be clear, easily understood, or consistent. He was an elitist and snob, as Dowrick admits; he would not have favored popularization of anything, least of all his own work. Though he spent his share of hours at the Louvre, he deplored the fact that paintings once owned by families of the old nobility were being removed from the castles and palaces where they belonged and placed on public view in those newfangled institutions, art museums.

But what leapt out at me most of all in reading Dowrick’s book was her choice of translations, especially those that she made herself, those by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, and those by Mark S. Burrows. I was often astonished: that’s supposed to be Rilke? Often I had to read halfway through a translated poem before I could recognize it as one that I knew virtually by heart in German. Seeking out Barrows and Macy’s two volumes of Rilke translations, Rilke’s Book of Hours (1996, revised and expanded version, 2005) and In Praise of Mortality: Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus (2005), and then googling all the principals, I discovered a world of Rilke translation and exegesis that I had not known existed, in which Dowrick, Barrows and Macy, and Burrows were leading figures. Translations done in this context, it appears, needn’t sound like Rilke at all, and the translators are free to coax out of the poems spiritual insights that in some instances I can see, often dimly, in the originals, but in others I can’t. I am trying here to understand this practice, and why it seems so alien to me.

In the writing of Barrows and Macy I find the reasons why so many of the translations are at first unrecognizable as Rilke; the flattening that he objected to in the work of Ellen Key can be seen quite directly. It is his language that is flattened. One reason for the flatness of these translations may be that their work is a collaboration, the work of a two-member committee, and so no single consciousness is present to meld or weld each poem into a unified entity. Flatness is particularly out of place in translations of the Duino Elegies, in which there is no shortage of subtleties and dark riddles. In their notes, Barrows and Macy describe and defend their procedures: “To the modern ear, some German poetry of the post-Romantic period seems sentimental and overblown. Such passages in Rilke risk diluting the effect of the whole and distracting today’s readers, accustomed as they may be to a more concise diction.” This concern suggests that they do not have much faith in the judgment of their readers, who might be distracted by encountering Rilke unmediated. (Today’s readers of German, however, will have to struggle along through the sentimental and overblown parts, fending off distraction as best they can.) It is in the Elegies that they take the largest liberties with form; the originals are written in free verse, they tell us, fairly enough (though they have not noticed that the eighth is written in blank verse). The technicalities of what they view as the dated procedures of rhyme and meter are not one of their strengths; in their introduction to the Book of Hours volume they tell us that many of the poems are written in “iambic quatrameter.” They point out that they have often incorporated alliteration, and sometimes even actual rhyme, into their versions, as if these traits alone made them poems. What I miss in their free verse is any consistent sense of measure, of the line as a meaningful unit in fruitful tension with the sentence, and both of these with the poem’s often astonishing trains of thought. These versions don’t emerge in any active way, as the originals brilliantly do. They just sit there.

In the Elegies Barrows and Macy decide to do away with Rilke’s long lines and long stanzas. The modern reader, apparently, has a short attention span. Short lines, short stanzas, short sentences, and simple syntax prevail. Here, to illustrate the form of the original, is the well-known opening of the First Elegy, part of a single stanza of sixty-eight lines:

Here is the translation:

In this case the ideas are essentially Rilke’s, but seven lines become eleven, a small fraction of one stanza becomes two stanzas and the beginning of a third, and two sentences (in one of which, characteristically, Rilke has his way with conventional grammar) become five. The result is a kind of simplified English. The sweep of Rilke’s writing, the bold and unconventional syntax that carries the reader along at a brisk pace through one astonishing thought after another, is sacrificed as the poem is reduced to a series of static nuggets that the translators believe their readers can profit from spiritually. At the end, after breaking one of Rilke’s longer sentences in two, they add to the powerful short sentence, “Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich,” the weak and gratuitous “in this way” at a point when the flow from one sentence to the next is perfectly clear, as if this continuity might otherwise elude the readers they write for.

But the single text that first caught my eye in Dowrick’s book was Barrows and Macy’s translation of a passage in the fifty-ninth poem in “The Book of the Monastic Life,” the first book of the Book of Hours (“Gott spricht zu jedem nur . . .”). In the translation, the second stanza reads, “You sent out beyond your recall, / go to the limits of your longing. / Embody me.” This poem, and this passage in particular, are important to Dowrick; she opens her chapter entitled “The Languages of Longing” with the entire poem. Then, in the chapter called “Ways of Knowing,” she quotes the opening passage again, up to “Embody me,” and rather goes on about it: “As familiar as those lines have become over countless readings, as I type that ardent call, Embody me, it catches me by the throat. For a moment I have no more need to breathe. Yes, I feel myself responding. But to whom? And to what?” A bit further on she writes, “A passionate divinity is imploring us to live passionately. The bodiless One pleads: / . . . Embody me.” The problem, which Dowrick chooses not to mention to her readers, is that Rilke did not write “Embody me.” He wrote (with his slightly affected, archaic spelling), “Gieb mir Gewand”—“Give me clothing.” This, alas, is not nearly so ardent, so throat-catching, and if it were used in Dowrick’s second passage, that would have to read, “The naked One pleads: / . . . Give me clothing.” This would not do.

Here too, to their credit, Barrows and Macy acknowledge and defend their emendation (and the many others they make throughout):

But “give me clothing” is neither more nor less clumsy, more nor less absurd in English than is “Gieb mir Gewand” in German; it is a straightforward sentence in both languages. “Give me clothing” may be unexpected, but this is not, in itself, a bad thing, and it is a common thing in Rilke. Of course, we can follow the logic by which Barrows and Macy arrived at their version, but body and clothing are typically taken as antithetical—the essential as opposed to the superficial. In the world of translation in which I live, this version would seem indefensible. The translators are apparently determined to find in the poem a statement of “the task we are to perform for God in the world”—it is for answers to such questions that they read Rilke. He should have known better than to have God plead for clothing—we are repeatedly told in the notes that the poems of the Book of Hours are often flawed because they were written hurriedly, en masse—and so, with striking self-confidence, they have corrected his error of judgment.

I am reminded, in the case of “Embody me” and similar cases, of a discredited approach to communication with the autistic called “facilitated communication,” in which a “facilitator,” typically a parent, grasps the hand of an autistic subject, by which action the subject is allegedly enabled to type out on a keyboard his or her responses, which reveal far more knowledge and understanding than the subject had previously been able to convey. It is easy to see how the parents of an autistic child would wish to believe that the “facilitated” communication was genuine, but studies have demonstrated the results are attributable solely to the facilitator, not through fraud but through an all too strong will to believe. Translators, too, are would-be facilitators of communication, and their work, too, can be influenced by their will to believe, and by what they hope to find in the works they translate. In the case of “Embody me,” the translators acknowledge that their desire is to show “the task that we are to perform for God in the world,” and that, since in this instance the task was not proclaimed in satisfactory form by Rilke, they had taken hold of his writing hand and proclaimed it, in his name, themselves.

It is significant that while Barrows and Macy’s readers are told what they have done in this passage, Dowrick’s readers are not. No translation of verse is perfectly faithful in all its dimensions of sound, rhythm, statement, image, metaphor, but most translators hope to be as faithful as they can. When they translate rhymed and metered verse into free verse, the biggest obstacle to faithful translation—the need to find equivalent rhymes—is removed, which is the reason why such translation is the common practice. One good reason for hewing as best one can to the literal is that there is a kind of slippage that occurs when translations that take large or willful liberties are read by those who don’t have or can’t read the original, and this is compounded when these readers make judgments and even written comments on the assumption that they know what the original poem actually says. Misreadings born of mistranslation are sometimes passed on, as in the proverbial game of Telephone. I have seen instances in which even our best poets and critics have mistaken, whether through lack of knowledge of the original or failure to pay attention to it, the inventions of a translator for Rilke’s own inventions.

Many of the liberties taken by Barrows and Macy seem to occur when they simply differ with Rilke about what the poem ought to say in order to give rise to the spiritual insight or inspiration which is the task they have chosen to assign to him. In their version of the first poem in The Book of Hours I find a less extreme but perhaps more instructive example than “Embody me.” The setting is a monastery, the persona a Russian monk and icon painter; in the first two lines, the bell striking the hour sets the poem in motion. The next two lines say, literally (and using an English cognate that would make a finished translation laughable), “. . . my senses tremble. I feel: I can— / and I seize the plastic day.” Plastic here, plastisch in the German, means malleable, shapeable—in German the noun Plastik often means a sculpture. This plastic day, then, is a day that offers possibility, a day of which something can be made. This becomes in the Barrows and Macy translation “I feel it now: there’s a power in me / to grasp and give shape to my world.” This version is certainly defensible, but it displays an all too common movement in the work of these translators toward the grander (from day to world), the more inspirational (“there’s a power in me”) and, in phrasing, the more conventional (“my world”). The German contains no ready-made life lesson; Barrows and Macy insert here a thoroughly marketable banality.

A sampling of the notes that Barrows and Macy append to their work on The Book of Hours indicates how readily they modify and even correct Rilke’s words to suit their own purposes:

The confident, even self-satisfied tone is significant; these translators, unlike typical literary translators who often speak of being in the business of failure, radiate satisfaction with their work. If some literary translators—and I am one—are of the glass-is-half-empty school, these seem convinced that their glass runneth over.

Nor are they modest in taking the measure of their own accomplishments. This is the beginning of their note on the sixty-first poem of The Book of the Monk’s Life (“Du dunkler Grund . . .”): “This poem has become an anthem of the deep ecology moment, thanks to Joanna Macy in her workshops and Anita Barrows in her talks on ecopsychology.” But there is more; the poem, addressed like so many to God, ends, in their translation, this way:

The note continues, “To find the book mentioned in the last lines, look in your hands.” The book being theirs as much as (or, unfortunately, more than) it is Rilke’s, they confer upon themselves a good deal more credit, even, than they have in their previous sentence.

Such self-esteem may be the blessing but also the curse of those whose spiritual quest is shaped by Jung, whose influence is acknowledged by both Dowrick and Barrows and Macy. As it happens, Jung has a name for this phenomenon: spiritual inflation. The paradox may be that the system of Jungian thought that includes this term has a particularly powerful capacity to engender such inflation among its devotees, while rendering them unable to see it in themselves. Rilke himself, moreover, has an extraordinary power to produce it as well—to go the heads of his readers, even more in his letters than in the poems, perhaps because the letters are so full of flattery. Those collected as Letters to a Young Poet have this effect in large measure, which may be why I have met so many writing teachers who, like me, decline to recommend the book to any student at all, or to any but the strongest and most clear-headed.

I should acknowledge here that one source of the observations I have just made is my own experience, decades ago, with Jung. There was a time when I read him intensely and eagerly, filling many pages in my journal, bringing his ideas to bear on my own life. The culmination was an exploration of the fact that I have been, since earliest childhood, without a practicing father, a fact seemingly tailor-made for Jungian exploration. Once I recognized that this was my subject, I pored over books on fatherlessness, some from an explicitly Jungian perspective and others not, and filled journal pages at an even faster rate. At this time I was also reading, approvingly at first because I had not yet checked them against the originals, Robert Bly’s Rilke translations, of which later I would be highly critical in print. Seeing and hearing Bly read both his Rilke and his own work, donning the masks that for a time he put on as he read certain poems, was a powerful part of the mix, producing, that night, what I was sure was a Big Dream, in which I saw my mother in a wedding gown. In the end I put together from the journal, sampling many books as well as my own writing, a long poem called “Excerpts from the Lost Father Journal,” which was published in the Jungian publication Dreamworks. The turning point was my dream after the Bly reading, and the last lines were a sampling of the last lines of Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

For a time, in this Jungian mode, I was productive and happy. I wrote a lot of poems that stemmed from Jungian epiphanies. But then something turned. The epiphanies kept coming, but they came to seem too easy, too self-satisfied. The constant self-examination felt more than a little narcissistic. There was a fair amount of silliness (Bly’s Mother conferences?) out there in Jung Country then, and I felt I was hearing, said in Jung’s name, an awful lot of talk that struck me as fatuous. I worried about the possible fatuity quotient in my own writing. Finally I put an end to my Jungian period by writing an essay called “Inflation and Poetry,” which may have gone too far in rejecting the work of others because I was also rejecting my own.

I find a shocking bit of fatuity from Barrows and Macy in their note to Sonnet I, 17 of their Sonnets to Orpheus. The poem describes, in my reading, a noble family tree like the one Rilke invented for himself, rooted in some unknown forefather, followed by generations of men of action, warrior-knights and fair ladies (Frauen wie Lauten, which means, straightforwardly, women like lutes, though Barrows and Macy prefer a feminist message, “women played upon”) and finally, at the top like a crowning but also final achievement, Orpheus, or an Orpheus figure (like, well, Rainer Maria Rilke) who biegt sich zur Leier, which I prefer to translate, honoring the tenor of the metaphor, as “bends to [or over] the lyre” to play it, rather than, honoring as some do the vehicle, the tree, as a branch that bends itself into a lyre, or the shape of a lyre. The fact that Rilke uses the definite article, the lyre not a lyre, supports this reading. The conception itself was common in the Europe fin de siècle: the thought that after centuries of decline the descendants of the old nobility may be poets and other artists (often of a deliciously decadent sort) was everywhere. Beyond all questions of interpretation, though, lies the note added by Barrows and Macy, and especially its final assertion: “The song seems to come from the tree itself, which is now like an axis mundi, connecting all eras and epochs. As we give ourselves to the climb and follow it upward, we find a lyre. Any one of us can be Orpheus [my emphasis].” This last is the sheerest inspirational blather; nothing could be further from the spirit of Rilke. I imagine workshops offered under the heading “Becoming Orpheus,” with seekers of a certain stripe flocking to them. The thought would have horrified Rilke, and horrifies me.

Given the nature of Dowrick’s book and those of Barrows and Macy, I cannot help looking, in their portrayals of Rilke the man and his life in the world, for signs of what it seems fair to call, in its more general sense, hagiography: for idealized portrayals made by uncritical admirers. Dowrick, as I’ve said, is conscientious about acknowledging Rilke’s human failings. In the work of Barrows and Macy the tendency to idealize is more evident. One passage from the biographical account in their introduction to the Book of Hours, about Rilke’s going off to Paris to write his Rodin monograph, leaps out: “He and Clara had decided to change their life and—leaving Ruth predominantly in the care of her maternal grandparents in their comfortable country home—freed each other to pursue their art.” This is a far too wide-eyed recitation of Rilke’s version of the events; that it was a mutual decision is one of the things which simply must be true in order for Rilke to justify his chosen way of life. One need only read Rilke’s letters to his young wife from this time to see that it was a decision made by Rilke and imposed on a reluctant Clara, the force of whose objections can be inferred from the vehemence of Rilke’s arguments. I do not know which specific letters from Clara to Rilke have survived, but it is my understanding that many have. Yet, despite the proliferation of volumes of Rilke’s correspondence, we are unlikely ever to see what would be a fascinating document, a Briefwechsel Rainer Maria Rilke—Clara Rilke-Westhoff. There may be several reasons for this, but one is clearly that it would be bad for the franchise. It is a safe bet that their correspondence on this decision and other matters would show Rilke at his manipulative, overbearing worst.

Enough, perhaps. I may be accused of choosing easy targets, but there are reasons for taking aim. The most important, from my point of view, is that those without German whose interest in Rilke grows from an interest in poetry rather than, or in addition to, a spiritual quest may find or be given these versions, which convey virtually nothing of the presence of the originals, which seems to me the proper starting point for any study of them. I think these versions foster illusions about Rilke, and I do not like to imagine any student in search of Rilke the great poet finding Dowrick’s book or the two volumes by Barrows and Macy without knowing their limitations. Beyond this is the need to defend literary translation itself, which aspires to honor both the difficulty and complexity of Rilke’s thought and the force of his writing, rather than merely distilling spiritual Essence of Rilke. Poets, Rilke included, derive their authority not only from the value of what they say, but more importantly, from the power of the writing: badly written poetry discredits itself. In his best work, Rilke writes magnificently; Barrows and Macy too often write indifferently at best.

There remains, of course, one frame of reference within which Rilke can be admired without reservation: the fact that, despite a weak constitution and a childhood which distorted his view of the world as well as his sense of himself, he survived and found his own way, distinctive if in some ways distasteful, of living in a world he found alien, and to get his great work done. This required enormous discipline and, in the one specific area, even courage. Removed from any context other than the work itself, it is a heroic undertaking, and for many readers who focus solely on the work, this is more than enough. When we look outside this frame, however, as inevitably we do when we read the biographies and the letters, there are still some things to be admired, and many others by which one can only be appalled. Though he has bold and provocative things to say about spiritual matters, it remains surprising to see him put forward as someone to whom we can look for wisdom, or who can teach us how to live in the world. His own accommodations were desperately necessary to him; they were at the same time brilliantly conceived and utterly self-serving. He must be descended from an old noble family, once consisting of brave knights and fair ladies, producing, in a final efflorescence, poets, because then it becomes the obligation of other members of this aristocracy to support him, while expecting nothing in return but flattery and song, at both of which he was a master—and it would be out of the question for him simply to get a job. Marriage must be about standing guard over the solitude of one’s partner, because he needed solitude for his work and so, in the early days of their marriage, Clara, loved among her friends in Worpswede as a spirited, even headstrong young woman, a prodigious dancer and cyclist, must be willing to stay at home, avoiding contact with them. It must be true that Rodin, Cézanne, and others had let their lives dry up like unused riverbeds and poured all their energy into the great work, because he could not bear a married life in the usual sense, in which one’s wife and daughter would actually be present, and the demands of others in his life—especially the women who were later his lovers and his patrons—must be managed very carefully, often through lovely, didactic, inspirational letters which are at the same time manipulative snow jobs. The following claim by Rilke about his daughter Ruth, made in a letter to Carl Sieber, the son-in-law whom Rilke never met, and cited as follows by Dowrick, must, however dubious it sounds, be true as well:

There must exist such a thing as an exclusive call to the inner realizations of one’s life that reduces human beings—a wife, a daughter—to forsaken occasions for external realization, and the daughter whose needs one is thus exempt from meeting must understand, and so be unharmed.

When it comes to human love—the area in which Rilke’s raging and resisting readers most often dig in their heels—he cannot be labeled as anything more than an interesting and occasionally telling theorist. We may acknowledge ruefully the truth that between even the closest human beings who love there remain great distances, while rejecting the corollary that preserving that distance, “standing guard over the solitude of another,” is love’s function or purpose, because the crudely self-serving motive is so apparent. In his life, and in the great mythic constructs by which, with utter determination, he lived it, Rilke had no operative sense of the love that involves sacrifice of one’s own needs and desires for the sake of another’s. He was prepared to accept such sacrifice from others, starting with his wife and daughter, but not prepared to have it expected of him. He had in place an elaborate and fascinating construct whose vital function was to justify his chosen life by excusing him from such obligations. The world which Rilke’s highly individual set of tenets implies is a brilliant creation, utterly necessary because it is the only world in which Rilke himself is possible and defensible. Taken as a whole, it can be read as his own strange, fascinating, appalling apologia pro vita sua. It seems to me a great mistake, however, to invite young twenty-first century American students aspiring to poetry to imagine that they too might live by it. It is similarly mad to say in Rilke’s name that anyone aspiring to spiritual growth can become Orpheus; in his world, there is one human being who, by an extraordinary array of disciplines and evasions, was able to do so, and his name was Rilke.