New Poems: A Revised Bilingual Edition

By Rainer Maria Rilke and Edward Snow

The formative work of the legendary poet who sought to write "not feelings but things I had felt"

When Rainer Maria Rilke arrived in Paris for the first time in September 1902, commissioned by a German publisher to write a monograph on Rodin, he was twenty-seven and already the author of nine books of poems. His early work had been accomplished, but belonged tonally to the impressionistic, feeling-centered world of a late-nineteenth-century aesthetic.

Paris was to change everything. Rilke's interest in Rodin deepened and his enthusiasm for the sculptor's "art of living surfaces" set the course for his own pursuit of an objective ideal. What was "new" about Rilke's New Poems, published in two independent volumes in 1907 and 1908, is a compression of statement and a movement away from "expression" and toward "making realities." Poems such as "The Panther" and "Archaic Torso of Apollo" are among the most successful and famous results of Rilke's impulse.

This selection from both books unites the companion volumes in a torrent of brilliant work intoxicated with the materiality of the world. Edward Snow has now improved upon the translations for which he received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award and with which he began his twenty-year project of translating Rilke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466872639

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and traveled throughout Europe for much of his adult life, returning frequently to Paris. There he came under the influence of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and produced much of his finest verse, most notably the two volumes of New Poems as well as the great modernist novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Among his other books of poems are The Book of Images and The Book of Hours. He lived the last years of his life in Switzerland, where he completed his two poetic masterworks, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukemia in December 1926.

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Preface

FROM NEW POEMS

Introduction

Früher Apollo / Early Apollo

Liebes-Lied / Love Song

Eranna an Sappho / Eranna to Sappho

Sappho an Eranna / Sappho to Eranna

Sappho an Alkaïos / Sappho to Alcaeus

Grabmal eines jungen Mädchens / Funeral Monument of a Young Girl

Opfer / Sacrifice

Östliches Taglied / Eastern Aubade

Abisag / Abishag

David singt vor Saul / David Sings Before Saul

Josuas Landtag / Joshua’s Council

Der Auszug des verlorenen Sohnes / The Departure of the Prodigal Son

Der Ölbaum-Garten / The Olive Garden

Gesang der Frauen an den Dichter / The Song of the Women to the Poet

Buddha / Buddha

L’Ange du Méridien / L’Ange du Méridien

Die Kathedrale / The Cathedral

Die Fensterrose / The Rose Window

Das Kapitäl / The Capital

Morgue / Morgue

Der Gefangene / The Prisoner

Der Panther / The Panther

Die Gazelle / The Gazelle

Das Einhorn / The Unicorn

Sankt Sebastian / Saint Sebastian

Der Stifter / The Donor

Der Engel / The Angel

Römische Sarkophage / Roman Sarcophagi

Der Schwan / The Swan

Der Dichter / The Poet

Ein Frauen-Schicksal / A Woman’s Fate

Die Genesende / The Convalescent

Die Erwachsene / The Grown-up

Tanagra / Tanagra

Die Erblindende / Going Blind

In einem Fremden Park / In a Foreign Park

Abschied / Parting

Todes-Erfahrung / Death Experienced

Blaue Hortensie / Blue Hydrangea

Vor dem Sommerregen / Before the Summer Rain

Im Saal / In the Drawing Room

Letzter Abend / Last Evening

Jugend-Bildnis meines Vaters / Portrait of My Father as a Young Man

Selbstbildnis aus dem Jahre 1906 / Self-Portrait from the Year 1906

Der König / The King

Der letzte Graf von Brederode entzieht sich türkischer Gefangenschaft / The Last Count of Brederode Evades Turkish Captivity

Die Kurtisane / The Courtesan

Die Treppe der Orangerie / The Stairs of the Orangery

Buddha / Buddha

Römische Fontäne / Roman Fountain

Das Karussell / The Carousel

Spanische Tänzerin / Spanish Dancer

Der Turm / The Tower

Der Platz / The Square

Quai du Rosaire / Quai du Rosaire

Die Insel / The Island

Hetären-Gräber / Tombs of the Hetaerae

Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes / Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes

Alkestis / Alcestis

Geburt der Venus / Birth of Venus

Die Rosenschale / The Bowl of Roses

FROM NEW POEMS: THE OTHER PART

Introduction

Archaïscher Torso Apollos / Archaic Torso of Apollo

Kretische Artemis / Cretan Artemis

Leda / Leda

Die Insel der Sirenen / The Island of the Sirens

Klage um Antinous / Lament for Antinoüs

Der Tod der Geliebten / The Death of the Beloved

Ein Prophet / A Prophet

Jeremia / Jeremiah

Eine Sibylle / A Sybil

Das jüngste Gericht / The Last Judgment

Der Alchimist / The Alchemist

Kreuzigung / Crucifixion

Adam / Adam

Eva / Eve

Irre im Garten / Lunatics in the Garden

Die Irren / The Lunatics

Die Bettler / The Beggars

Fremde Familie / Foreign Family

Leichen-Wäsche / Corpse-Washing

Eine von den Alten / One of the Old Ones

Der Blinde / The Blind Man

Eine Welke / Faded

Abendmahl / Communion

Die Brandstätte / The Site of the Fire

Die Gruppe / The Group

Schlangen-Beschwörung / Snake-Charming

Schwarze Katze / Black Cat

Der Balkon / The Balcony

Auswanderer-Schiff / Emigrant Ship

Landschaft / Landscape

Römische Campagna / Roman Campagna

Lied vom Meer / Song from the Sea

Nächtliche Fahrt / Night Drive

Papageien-Park / Parrot Park

Bildnis / Portrait

Venezianischer Morgen / Venetian Morning

Spätherbst in Venedig / Late Autumn in Venice

San Marco / San Marco

Ein Doge / A Doge

Die Laute / The Lute

Corrida / Corrida

Don Juans Kindheit / Don Juan’s Childhood

Don Juans Auswahl / Don Juan’s Election

Dame auf einem Balkon / Lady at a Balcony

Begegnung in der Kastanien-Allee / Encounter in the Chestnut Avenue

Übung am Klavier / Piano Practice

Die Liebende / Woman in Love

Das Rosen-Innere / The Rose Interior

Dame vor dem Spiegel / Lady Before Her Mirror

Die Sonnenuhr / The Sundial

Schlaf-Mohn / Opium Poppy

Die Flamingos / The Flamingos

Persisches Heliotrop / Persian Heliotrope

Schlaflied / Lullaby

Der Pavillon / The Pavilion

Rosa Hortensie / Pink Hydrangea

Das Wappen / The Coat of Arms

Der Junggeselle / The Bachelor

Der Einsame / The Solitary

Der Leser / The Reader

Der Apfelgarten / The Apple Orchard

Mohammeds Berufung / Mohammed’s Summoning

Der Berg / The Mountain

Der Ball / The Ball

Das Kind / The Child

Der Hund / The Dog

Der Käferstein / The Beetle Stone

Buddha in der Glorie / Buddha in Glory

Index of Titles and First Lines in German

Index of Titles and First Lines in English

Also by Edward Snow

About the Authors

Copyright

Preface

The translations in this book were originally published in two separate volumes: New Poems (Neue Gedichte) in 1984, and New Poems: The Other Part (Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil) in 1987. It seemed important to assert then, when an array of Selected Rilkes offered so few poems from so large a body of work, that Rilke published two complete volumes of New Poems, each with its distinct structure and personality. Now it seems equally worth bringing the majority of these poems together in one volume, so that, for example, the reader interested in The Panther does not have to search elsewhere for Archaic Torso of Apollo. Hence the present selection, which seeks to preserve the distinct characters of the two volumes while including enough from each (sixty-six of the eighty-two poems in New Poems, sixty-seven of the one hundred and six in New Poems: The Other Part) to allow the reader to discern their play of motifs and inner architecture.

The task of selection has presented a last opportunity to revise, and I have done so lavishly. Indeed, many of the poems in this volume would be better characterized as retranslated than revised. I hope this says less about the quality of the original versions than about the unfinishedness intrinsic to translation. Each of these poems has been subjected to elaborate rethinking, and I offer them to the reader (even where they have remained unchanged) as substantially new translations.

I would like to express my thanks to other translators of Rilke. The selections of Stephen Mitchell, M. D. Herder Norton, C. F. MacIntyre, Robert Bly, and Franz Wright have all aided me at one time or another—as, of course, has J. B. Leishman’s pioneering translation of the complete New Poems. For this revision, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Stephen Cohn, whose recent translations of the New Poems¹ have, through their intelligence and deep thoughtfulness, served as a constant goad and inspiration.

NEW POEMS

[1907]

Introduction

Rilke arrived in Paris for the first time in September 1902, commissioned by a German publisher to write a monograph on Rodin. He was twenty-seven and already an accomplished poet with a considerable body of work behind him. In addition to the outpourings of his early years (nine books of poetry and fiction between 1894 and 1899), two of the three sections of The Book of Hours were complete, and the first edition of The Book of Images was about to be published. All this early work is unremittingly subjective; it still belongs tonally and texturally to the impressionistic, feeling-centered world of a late-nineteenth-century aesthetic. But what in the beginning borders on callow self-indulgence gradually deepens into a disciplined lyric temperament. The spacious, gently modulated rhythms of the first part of The Book of Hours are the creations of a poet who is very sure of himself; Rilke later said he could have continued in this style for the rest of his life.

But the move to Paris was to change everything. Shortly after Rilke arrived there, he met Rodin, and his interest in him soon deepened into discipleship. As his enthusiasm for the sculptor’s work increased, so did his dissatisfaction with his own. Rodin was a laborer, a craftsman, and the energy and dedication with which he immersed himself in the actual process of making seemed to Rilke a rebuke to his own lyric dexterity and slavish dependence on inspiration. With Rodin’s travailler, rien que travailler ringing in his ears, he set about acquiring an entirely new set of working habits—forcing himself to write every day during regularly scheduled hours, wandering about Paris practicing the art of observation, taking notes, making lists of subjects for poems. Meanwhile he began to entertain the idea of a poetry that would answer to what he described as Rodin’s art of living surfaces—a poetry that would somehow manage to belong to the world of things rather than feelings. The results—appearing slowly at first, then coming to fruition in an incredible burst of creative energy that spanned the summers of 1906 and 1908—were the two volumes of the New Poems, which together constitute one of the great instances in modern literature of the lyric quest for objective experience.

What specifically is new about the New Poems? The most striking transformation occurs in Rilke’s language, which grows simultaneously more lucid and complex. Compression of statement and elimination of authorial self are taken to their extremes in the pursuit of an objective ideal. Only a few of these Dinggedichte or thing-poems, as they soon came to be called, are actually about objects, but all of them have a material quality, and confront the reader with a sculptural, free-standing presence. Even their semantic densities communicate a sense of volume and contour. One is always aware of them as things made. Syntax, especially, becomes a tensile material capable of being worked into structures that remind one more often of the space-mobilizing forms of Arp than of Rodin’s massive presences. Even in a poem like The Capital, devoted entirely to the description of a static object, visual image interacts with a kinesis of line and syntax to change the thing into a forcefield of opposing impulses:

                                      the vaulting’s ribs

spring from the tangled capital

and leave that realm of crowded, intertwined,

mysteriously winged creation:

their hesitance and the suddenness of the heads

and those strong leaves, whose sap

mounts like brimming anger, finally

reversing in a quick gesture that clenches

and outthrusts—:

Several of the New Poems participate even more directly than this in the movements and energies they describe—the chthonic windings of The Tower and the flamenco gestures of Spanish Dancer are especially brilliant instances. Seldom is visual perception an end in itself, and often it is the focus of a poem’s deconstructive energies: a gazelle dissolves into the stream of discontinuous metaphors that evoke it; a marble fountain becomes a complex microcosm of fluid interchanges and secret relations. As ifs proliferate through the poetry, keeping the reader’s attention fixed not so much on the object-world as on the zone where it and the imagination interact. Even the icons of indifference that figure so prominently in the New Poems live in the imagination whose desire for relation they refuse:

What do you know, O stone one, of our life?

And do you smile even more blissfully

when you hold your slate out into the night?

                                   (L’Ange du Méridien)

This interanimation of object and consciousness is, finally, the great theme of the New Poems, in spite of their apparent worship of states of withdrawal, apartness, and fulfilled isolation. At their most radical they seek to open the dimensions of what a phenomenologist like Merleau-Ponty would call the lived world, where subject and object are inseparable aspects of an imaginatively engendered unity. In The Bowl of Roses, the New Poem that may go furthest in this direction, what begins as an object of perception is gradually transformed by the imaginative impulse it releases into a multifarious world teeming with metamorphic energies:

What can’t they be: was that yellow one,

that lies there hollow and open, not the rind

of a fruit in which the very same yellow,

intenser, orange-redder, was juice?

And was mere opening too much for this one,

since touched by air its nameless pink

has