Reading Rilke (11 page)

Poulin, our second, younger, far fresher horse, neatly reduces this to:

Meanwhile, Stephen Mitchell, presently our most popular translator of Rilke’s work, goes back to Leishman, because Leishman is struggling to capture qualities in Rilke’s lines that
are really there, while Poulin quietly erases them. Mitchell achieves this improvement:

Before pushing my pencil angrily through the paper, I stumble through the passage first this way, then that:

Poulin’s and Mitchell’s translations are frequently superior to Leishman’s in terms of what they do not attempt. In “The Ninth Elegy,” for instance, occurs the famous heart-and-hammer image:

Leishman lets the German twist his line. Poulin’s row has a better bite, like straightened teeth, but he finishes too quickly.

Images like this—of a space enlarged by the emptiness in a lover’s arms; of a bat ricocheting through the air like a crack through a cup; of a child’s death made from gray bread and stuffed in the child’s mouth like the core of an apple … no … like the ragged core of a sweet apple; or the ideas themselves: that the world exists nowhere but within and therefore the springtimes have need of us; that the youthfully dead have a special meaning and life and death run like hot and cold through the same tap; that we are here just to speak and proclaim the word; that love should give its beloved an unfastening and enabling freedom; that praise is the thing—they belong to no language, but to the realm of absolute image and pure idea, where a simple thought or bare proportion can retain its elementary power; and it is the ubiquitous presence of these type-tropes and generalizing “ideas” in Rilke that makes translating him possible at all, as their relative absence in someone like Mallarmé makes him as difficult to shape as smoke.

Poulin is uncomfortable, not with the rough free form of the
Elegies
, but with their metaphysical grandeur. The lighter translucency of the
Sonnets to Orpheus
is more to his liking, while Leishman’s tread there is too heavy, still too elegiac, even in his most successful moments, as if he had continued to slog long after the swamp had dried and its residual dusts had blown.

The trials of the translator can contain no better testimony that they are trials indeed than the abrupt and thrilling opening of the
Sonnets to Orpheus
, an opening which so beautifully describes the poems themselves:
Da stieg ein Baum
.

Merit is spread pretty evenly here. Except for Pitchford’s “Somewhere a tree ascended.” Actually, this tree shoots up in a special way—it does not simply rise. Instead of being climbed, it does the climbing—it scales the sky—and in that lies its transcendence. Both Leishman and Gass are after a kind of “going up.” Gass, who flails like someone drowning here, found the word which would reflect that rising music, but the word was “scaled,” and no one wants to keep company with flaking and disease. “There climbed a tree” or “There scaled a tree” are silly in English. Yet “scaled” is so nearly the right word. A bitter business, this. Poulin puts the suddenness in the verb, a good idea, while Gass expansively explains it. MacIntyre’s rocky rhythm prevents any real rising (arose/a tree). Gass, again, defeats his own sense with an overlong line. Both MacIntyre and Mitchell seem insensitive to the differences between “O” and “Oh” and
“Oh,”. To find a tree in your ear is odd enough, but Flemming almost sticks it in there. Pitchford postpones the problem. In English, one exclaims: “Oh rats!” or “Oh my God!” but never “Oh transubstantiation!” Though “transcendency” goes better with “tree” than its other forms do. Between Leishman, Poulin, and Norton, it is difficult to choose, although Poulin is more natural in English. There is nevertheless something satisfactory about Norton’s honest literalism.

So Orpheus sings, and a tall tree springs up in the ear. This pure wand of song creates a clearing into which charmed animals are drawn to listen to Orpheus, who could move the trees as well as the wind. We must forbid the image to remind us of Disney.

“Disintricated” is an inspired Shakespearean coinage, but the word it replaces is
gelösten
(with its twin suggestion of “listen” and “loosen”), and we are no longer in those intricated elegies where the compaction would have been appropriate. Leishman
and MacIntyre preserve the rhyme scheme of the original (as they attempt to do throughout), yet it is a strange sort of preservation which so often forces the English into grotesque shapes. Poulin and Norton have a better plan. They allow rhyme to occur as the sense of the language readily permits it, suggesting the sonnet form rather than duplicating it. Flemming’s emphasis (stressing what the animals left behind) is all wrong, and his lines are as painful as walking in a tight boot. Pitchford claims the woods have been disenchanted when exactly the opposite has happened. The forests are confining until Orpheus’ enchanting music releases them. Poulin’s “freed forest” is fine. His version is clearly superior in every respect.

Skipping a few lines:

For everyone but Poulin the poem falls into artificial pieces, as if the loosened petals of a real rose turned to plastic as they reached the ground. Leishman’s “quivering door” is a disaster; moreover, the language is as puffy as a dissipated face. Norton is always a help for those who need a pony, but this time the animal is too young to ride. I would rather Poulin had used a den instead of a dugout, since a canoe doesn’t belong here. My final try follows:

There rose a tree. O pure uprising!

O Orpheus sings! O tall tree in the ear!

And hushed all things. Yet even in that silence

a new beginning, beckoning, new bent appeared.

Creatures of silence thronged from the clear

released trees, out of their lairs and nests,

and their quiet was not the consequence

of any cunning, any fear,

but was because of listening. Growl, shriek, roar,

shrank to the size of their hearts. And where there’d been

ramshackles to shelter such sounds before—

just dens designed from their darkest desires,

with doorways whose doorposts trembled—

you built a temple in the precincts of their hearing.
⁴

The
Sonnets
are written in a light, flowing, yet terribly condensed language of incredible musicality, verbal playfulness, and sudden invention. Metamorphosis is their mode of operation. What is one to do with Rilke’s management of “i” and “e” in that overpowering first line:
Da stieg ein Baum. O reine übersteigung
! or with the way the third line picks it up:
Und alles schwieg. Doch seibst in der Verschweigung
 …? One can do nothing, only try to enrich one’s own poor transcription wherever possible and by whatever harmonious means will work.

It may seem perverse, but the translator must, I think, avoid construing: a tree is a kind of vegetable bridge between earth and sky, the immanent and the transcendent. It is a tree like those of the forest, yet it is made of music. It is this … It is that … Soon I may know too much for my own good, and be tempted to offer the reader an apple from my tree of knowledge. One is generally wise to render the poem as the poet wrote it and let the poet’s poem explain itself. Generally …

2

It was nearly a girl who went forth

from this joyful union of song and lyre,

and shone so clearly through the veils of her youth,

and made herself a bed within my ear.

And slept in me. And all slept inside her sleep:

the trees which had always amazed me,

meadow-deep distances as touchable as skin,

and every astonishment that has ever been.

She slept the world. Singing God,

how could you have made her so complete

she never wanted to be first awake?

See: she rose and slept.

Where is her death? O will you find the hidden theme

before your song sings its own grave?

From me—where does she fade to? still nearly a girl …
⁵

The first set of
Sonnets
appeared unbidden before the remainder of the
Elegies
was given. The second set is written with the exhilarating knowledge that the
Elegies
exist. There’s 11, 17, for instance: