Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation - Hardcover

Gass, William H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375403124 ISBN 13: 9780375403125

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

The greatly admired essayist, novelist, and philosopher, author of Cartesian Sonata, Finding a Form, and The Tunnel, reflects on the art of translation and on Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies -- and gives us his own translation of Rilke's masterwork.

After nearly a lifetime of reading Rilke in English, William Gass undertook the task of translating Rilke's writing in order to see if he could, in that way, get closer to the work he so deeply admired. With Gass's own background in philosophy, it seemed natural to begin with the Duino Elegies, the poems in which Rilke's ideas are most fully expressed and which as a group are important not only as one of the supreme poetic achievements of the West but also because of the way in which they came to be written -- in a storm of inspiration.

Gass examines the genesis of the ideas that inform the Elegies and discusses previous translations. He writes, as well, about Rilke the man: his character, his relationships, his life.
Finally, his extraordinary translation of the Duino Elegies offers us the experience of reading Rilke with a new and fuller understanding.

About this title

About the Author

William H. Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1924. He has been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, as well as the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Medal of Merit for Fiction, the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (1985 and 1996). He has also won the Pushcart Prize (1976, 1983, 1987, 1992), and his work has appeared four times in Best American Short Stories. He lives in St. Louis, where he is the director of the International Writers' Center.

From the Inside Flap

admired essayist, novelist, and philosopher, author of <b>Cartesian Sonata</b>, <b>Finding a Form</b>, and <b>The Tunnel</b>, reflects on the art of translation and on Rainer Maria Rilke's <b>Duino Elegies</b> -- and gives us his own translation of Rilke's masterwork.<br><br>After nearly a lifetime of reading Rilke in English, William Gass undertook the task of translating Rilke's writing in order to see if he could, in that way, get closer to the work he so deeply admired. With Gass's own background in philosophy, it seemed natural to begin with the <b>Duino Elegies</b>, the poems in which Rilke's ideas are most fully expressed and which as a group are important not only as one of the supreme poetic achievements of the West but also because of the way in which they came to be written -- in a storm of inspiration. <br><br>Gass examines the genesis of the ideas that inform the <b>Elegies</b> and discusses previous translations. He writes, as well, about R

Reviews

In 1922, four years before he died of leukemia at age 51, Rilke finally completed the Duino Elegies, named for the castle where they poured out over an intensive four day (and night) period; within days of their completion, the Sonnets to Orpheus emerged as a reality-affirming coda. Rilke's dense and intricate verbal texture has made translation all the more irresistible over the years, and Gass, an intellectual eminence (Cartesian Sonata; Finding a Form; The Tunnel; etc.) is the first to meet the challenge discursively: this genre-bending book is a series of personal essaysAat times veering between melodramatic and ellipticalAthat explore Rilke's biography as much as they address Gass's own difficult choices in the translations scattered throughout. Gass vividly evokes a poet "getting used to strange dark halls, guest beds, always cadging and scrounging, eating poorly," finding Rilke's lyrics "obdurate, complex, and compacted... displaying an orator's theatrical power, while remaining as suited to a chamber and its music as a harpsichord." In the translations themselves, however, Gass tends to replace complexity with unwarranted truism, as in the Fourth elegyA"but the contours of our feelings stay unknown/ when public pressure shapes the face we know"Aas if to shield readers from the difficult and the strange. (Translations of all 10 elegies appear in an appendix at the book's end.) That said, Gass has an impressive ear for dramatic prosody, and a sensitivity to Rilke's playfulness and formal elegance (especially in the Tenth Elegy). Its willingness to be bold in a climate of scholarly restraint makes this translation one of the best availableAsuperior, in particular, to the once-standard versions by Leishman and Spender, and to the recent versions of Stephen Mitchell. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The American novelist probes the Austrian's metaphysical poetry with exceptional clarity of mind, verbal grace, and shrewd skepticism. Apart from his five works of fiction, Gass has published five books of literary and philosophical essays (Finding a Form, 1996, etc.). By now there can be no doubt that hes one of our foremost public critics of literature. This new bookdedicated entirely to Rilke and focusing special, superbly concentrated attention on the Duino Elegieshas the effect of a declaration of love. It comes as no surprise: readers of Gass know him to be in love with language; and Rilke, as Gass presents him, is the century's supreme master of verbal dance. But Gass is also a professor of philosophy at Washington University and not much inclined to the kind of gushy imprecision that Rilke's poetry has sometimes evoked in admirers. Gass may love Rilke's poetry, but he also presses it with hard-nosed questions and demands. The result is as impressive as it is engrossing. He explores problems of translation in a workmanlike way. His German is evidently flawless, and his commentaries on the many translations of the Elegies are acerbic, generous, and revealing. In addition, he concludes the book with his own translations of these very difficult poems. Gass's are certainly among the best renditions of Rilke into English. His gift for metaphor and his uncanny ability to mimic Rilke's cadences (very different from his own) are striking. But perhaps most satisfying of all is Gass's thought about poetry itself as an autonomous way of knowing the world. Rilke's poetry ``sets the mind free of the world. Free to see and feel afresh the very world it's been freed from.'' A book not only for people interested in Rilke or Gass, but for anyone who takes poetry seriously. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gass offers so much more than the subtitle to this gem might imply. The pages are filled with seamlessly intertwined biographical insights, textual analysis, commentary on the elusive art of translation, and fresh and vibrant new renderings of many of Rainer Maria Rilke's key works. A fitting tribute to one of the 20th century's greatest poets and everything literary criticism should be. (LJ 8/99)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Translation into English, especially within such an idiomatic genre as poetry, always poses a difficulty to the reader. Gass--a writer, poet, and translator--shows in painstaking detail what a translator goes through in order to produce a work that not only makes sense in English but remains faithful to the structure and meaning of the original language in which it was written. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in a German so expressionistic, so often untranslatable, and so utterly beautiful in its original format, that he proves to be a good guinea pig for this experiment. Gass translates Rilke's poems himself and then takes critically regarded Rilke translations and compares them, line by line, often word by word. Gass dismisses many of the translations and gives his reasoning for it. Brutally honest, he sometimes dismisses his own translations; brutally catty, his dismissals are often delightfully acerbic. Gass is a beautiful writer, and he includes much on the life and influences of Rilke, for the history and background of a writer is as important as language when it comes to translation. Gass offers excellent interpretations of Rilke and an entertaining and provocative look at a subject that could be fearfully dreary. Michael Spinella

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From "Lifeleading"

Open-eyed, Rainer Maria Rilke died in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926. The leukemia which killed him had been almost reluctantly diagnosed, and had struck like a storm, after a period of gathering clouds. Ulcerous sores appeared in his mouth, pain troubled his stomach and intestines, he slept a lot when his body let him, his spirit was weighed down by depression, while physically he became as thin and fluttery as a leaf. Since, according to the gloom that naturally descended on him, Rilke's creative life was over, he undertook translations during his last months: of Valery in particular -- "Eupalinos," "The Cemetery by the Sea " -- and composed his epitaph, too, invoking the flower he so devotedly tended.

rose, o pure contradiction, desire
to be no one's sleep beneath so many lids.

The myth concerning the onset of his illness was, even among his myths, the most remarkable. To honor a visitor, the Egyptian beauty Nimet Eloui, Rilke gathered some roses from his garden. While doing so, he pricked his hand on a thorn. This small wound failed to heal, grew rapidly worse, soon his entire arm was swollen, and his other arm became affected as well. According to the preferred story, this was the way Rilke's disease announced itself, although Ralph Freedman, his judicious and most recent biographer, puts that melancholy event more than a year earlier.

Roses climb his life as if he were their trellis. Turn the clock back twenty-four years to 1900. Rilke is a guest at Worpswede, an artists' colony near Bremen, and it is there he has made the acquaintance of the painter Paula Becker and his future wife, Clara Westhoff. One bright Sunday morning, in a romantic mood, Rilke brings his new friends a few flowers, and writes about the gesture in his diary:

I invented a new form of caress: placing a rose gently on a closed eye until its coolness can no longer be felt; only the gentle petal will continue to rest on the eyelid like sleep just before dawn.

The poet never forgets a metaphor. Nor do his friends forget the poet's passions. Move on to 1907 now, when, in Capri, Rilke composes "The Bowl of Roses," beginning this poem with an abrupt jumble of violent images:

You've seen their anger flare, seen two boys
bunch themselves into a ball of animosity
and roll across the ground
like some dumb animal set upon by bees;
you've seen those carny barkers, mile-high liars,
the careening tangle of bolting horses,
their upturned eyes and flashing teeth,
as if the skull were peeled back from the mouth.

Bullyboys, actors, tellers of tall tales, runaway horses -- fright, force, and falsification -- losing composure, pretending, revealing pain and terror: these are compared to the bowl of roses. Rilke has come from Berlin, where his new publisher, Insel Verlag, has been distressed to discover that Rilke's former publisher plans to bring out The Book of Hours as well as a revised Cornet. This does not get the new alliance off to a smooth and trusting start. Moreover, Rilke is broke again. During 1906, the poet had been bankrolled by his friend Karl von der Heydt, who twice generously deposited funds in Rilke's Paris bank, but Rilke's habit of staying in deluxe hotels and eating (modestly) in expensive restaurants, his dependence upon porters and maids and trains, had left him holding nothing more than his ticket to Alice Faehndrich's Villa Discopoli on Capri. Von der Heydt sent him some supplementary funds eventually, but not before making a face. Perhaps these unpleasantries account for the poem's oddly violent and discordant opening.

But now you know how to forget such things,
for now before you stands the bowl of roses,
unforgettable and wholly filled
with unattainable being and promise,
a gift beyond anyone's giving, a presence
that might be ours and our perfection.

More than a bowl was set before him. Though the New Year was approaching, the island was abloom with winter roses, and Rilke's cottage, on the grounds of the villa, was covered with them.

Living in silence, endlessly unfolding,
using space without space being taken
from a space even trinkets diminish;
scarcely the hint there of outline or ground
they are so utterly in, so strangely delicate
and self-lit--to the very edge:
is it possible we know anything like this?
And then like this: that a feeling arises
because now and then the petals kiss?
And this: that one should open like an eye,
to show more lids beneath, each closed
in a sleep as deep as ten, to quench
an inner fire of visionary power.
And this above all: that through these petals
light must make its way. Out of one thousand skies
they slowly drain each drop of darkness
so that this concentrated glow
will bestir the stamens till they stand.

The rose is a distilling eye. It gathers light and filters it until the concentration is powerful and pure, until its stamens become erect. If the rose is not a poem, the poem is surely a rose.

And the movement in the roses, look:
gestures which make such minute vibrations
they'd remain invisible if their rays
did not resolutely ripple out into the wide world.
Look at that white one which has blissfully unfolded
to stand amidst its splay of petals
like Venus boldly balanced on her shell;
look too at the bloom that blushes, bends
toward the one with more composure,
and see how the pale one aloofly withdraws;
and how the cold one stands, closed upon itself,
among those open roses, shedding all.
And what they shed: how it can be light or heavy,
a cloak, a burden, a wing, a mask -- it just depends --
and how they let it fall: as if disrobing for a lover.



E. M. Butler, whose Rilke of 1941 was the first biography of the poet to appear in English, writes:

"There is no doubt that roses cast a spell upon Rilke. Monique Saint-Helier recounts how he once sent her some fading flowers to die with her [sic -- Butler means "to die in her company"], because he was going away. His description of a vase of falling roses in Late Poems represents him as keeping them in his room until they were really dead, when he embalmed their petals in books and used them for pot-pourri. Rilke's roses were always explicitly in enclosed spaces: in death-bed chambers, in his study at night, in rose-bowls, bringing summer into a room, bestrewing the chimney-piece as they shed their petals. And even in his garden at Muzot, they seemed to be clad in pink silk boudoir-gowns and red summer dresses, like carefully tended and cherished, fragrant and fragile hothouse blooms."

The poet collects the world inside himself as the rose gathers the light of the skies, and there he intensifies it until the phallic element of the flower dominates the symbol. Eventually the rose bestrews itself. Petals, like poems, leave their tree. The beautiful unity the rose once was now becomes a fall of discoloring shards; yet these petals can help us see to another part of the world as through a stained-glass window.

What can't they be? Was that yellow one,
lying there hollow and open, not the rind
of a fruit in which the very same yellow
was its more intense and darkening juice?
And was this other undone by its opening,
since, so exposed, its ineffable pink
has picked up lilac's bitter aftertaste?
And the cambric, is it not a dress
to which a chemise, light and warm as breath,
still clings, though both were abandoned
amid morning shadows near the old woodland pool?
And this of opalescent porcelain
is a shallow fragile china cup
full of tiny shining butterflies --
and there -- that one's holding nothing but itself.

Later, in the August of an emptied Paris, Rilke will compose a poem about the interior of the rose: it is first an Inside awaiting its Outside, then a bandaged wound, at last a lake full of the sky's reflection. When the rose is blown and the petals part, they fill, as if fueling for the journey, with inner space, finally overflowing into the August days, until summer becomes ein Zimmer in einem Traum -- a room in a dream. But it is "The Bowl of Roses" which remains Rilke's great rose-poem.

And aren't they all that way? just self-containing,
if self-containing means: to transform the world
with its wind and rain and springtime's patience
and guilt and restlessness and obscure fate
and the darkness of evening earth and even
the changing clouds, coming and going,
even the vague intercession of distant stars,
into a handful of inner life.
It now lies free of care in these open roses.

It would be tempting to organize Rilke's biography around such themes, because the themes are there: the significance of the rose, the mirror, the unicorn, the puppet, the fountain, or the pathos (as for Poe) of the death of a young woman; his increasing "belief" in animism (that all things, as well as the parts of all things, are filled with life); the notion that we grow our death inside us like a talent or a tumor; that we are here to realize the world, to raise it, like Lazarus, from its sullen numbness into consciousness; that differences are never absolute, but that everything (life and death, for instance) lies on a continuum, as colors do; that we are strangers in a world of strangers; that simple people have a deeper understanding of their existence than most, and an insight into the secret rhythms of nature. These themes are like tides that rise and fall inside him, as if he were just their bay and receptive shoreline.

Rilke's parents had lost a daughter the year before they begot Rene (as he was christened); hoping for another daughter to replace her, and until he was ready to enter school, his mother, Phia, got him up girlishly, combed his curls, encouraged him to call his good self Sophie, and handled him like a china doll, cooing and cuddling him until such time as he was abruptly put away in a drawer. Lat...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375403124
• ISBN 13: 9780375403125
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256