Sonnets to Orpheus

By Rainer Maria Rilke and Edward Snow

Breathing, you invisible poem!
World-space in pure continuous interchange
with my own being. Equipose
in which I rhythmically transpire.

Written only four years before Rilke's death, this sequence of sonnets, varied in form yet consistently structured, stands as the poet's final masterwork. In these meditations on the constant flux of our world and the ephemerality of experience, Rilke envisions death not only as one among many of life's transformations but also as an ideally receptive state of being. Because Orpheus has visited the realm of death and returned to the living, his lyre, a unifying presence in these poems, is an emblem of fluidity and musical transcendence. And Eurydice, condemned to Hades as a result of Orpheus's backward glance, becomes in Rilke's universe a mythical figure of consolation and hope.

Edward Snow, in his translations of New Poems, The Book of Images, Uncollected Poems, and Duino Elegies, has emerged as Rilke's most able English-language interpreter. Adhering faithfully to the intent of Rilke's German while constructing nuanced, colloquial poems in English, Snow's Sonnets to Orpheus should serve as the authoritative translation for years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466872677

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.

Book preview

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Introduction

Erster Teil / First Part

Zweiter Teil / Second Part

Also by Edward Snow

About the Authors

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

I would like to step out of my heart’s door and be under the great sky.

—Rilke, Lament

I

How to account for the Sonnets to Orpheus? Rilke himself regarded them with amazement. They seem genuinely to have taken him by surprise. Since July of 1921 he had been living in the Château de Muzot, a tiny medieval castle-tower near Sierre in the Swiss Valais. There he had been creating conditions hospitable to the resumption of what would eventually be the Duino Elegies, his task since they had been given to him in a burst of inspiration and then broken off, incomplete, almost a decade earlier at Duino Castle on the Adriatic. This meant gradually divesting himself of human contact and conversation, gathering himself into an absolute solitude (one wondrously efficient housekeeper excepted). If he could not will the Elegies to completion, he could at least try to turn himself into a core of undistracted readiness.

Meanwhile serendipity was at work, scattering the most diverse influences (at least in retrospect they seem so) into this scene of attempted concentration. For Christmas 1920, Rilke’s lover, the painter Baladine Klossowska (Merline), had given him a French prose version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which prominently features the story of Orpheus. When she departed from Muzot at Rilke’s urging in November 1921, she left pinned to the wall opposite his writing table a postcard reproduction of a Renaissance drawing of a youthful, almost carefree Orpheus (though his expression could be anguished) sitting at the base of a tree, singing and playing a stringed instrument, while a gathering of animals (one bird, two deer, and a pair of rabbits) listens attentively. The image would remain in place throughout the winter months of 1922, a token of Merline’s absence. Increasingly, Rilke translated. By the end of 1921 he had finished a version of Michelangelo’s Sonnets, which left him thinking about the strictness of the sonnet form and the extent to which it might be freed. He immersed himself in the work of Paul Valéry (by 1921 his most important artistic other), a poet who had remained silent for almost twenty-five years, studying mathematics, and who had only recently resumed writing. Rilke found in the French poet’s new work a masculine exactitude and measure that was precisely what he felt missing in things German (and now the pace of every one of his lines is enriched by that deep balanced repose which none of us can muster).¹ At the same time, when he translated Valéry he felt an almost bodily sense of fit. In the early winter he agreed, at Valéry’s request, to translate the latter’s Eupalinos dialogue into German, and in January he copied out L’âme et la danse (The Soul and the Dance), which he would translate in 1926, the last year of his life.

The decisive influence came in the form of the record of a young girl approaching death. Rilke knew Vera Ouckama Knoop, the daughter of friends from his prewar Munich days and the playmate of his own daughter Ruth, when she was still a child and already a dancer of great promise. He had learned in 1919 from Vera’s mother, Gertrud, of her daughter’s recent death at age nineteen from leukemia, but it was not until November 1921, on the occasion of Ruth’s engagement, that he chose to write in consolation. A heartfelt correspondence ensued between these two people who only casually knew each other, and one of Rilke’s letters culminated in a wish for some keepsake by which he might remember Vera (some little thing that was dear to Vera, if possible something that she often had with her).² Gertrud complied with a gesture whose very extravagance could almost be construed as a protest against the sentimentality in Rilke’s request. On January 1, 1922, he received from her a package, without any cover letter, containing sixteen closely written pages on which Gertrud had chronicled, day by day, the last stage of Vera’s leukemia, with its torturous alternations of pain and despair, remission and hope.³

The effect on Rilke was overwhelming, and Vera took on an almost hallucinatory reality: Now it is about Vera, he wrote her mother, "whose dark, strange, vivid

Reviews for Sonnets to Orpheus

[evelynnygren · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the first collection I’ve read of Rilke’s, and I’m beginning to think I shouldn’t have started with this one. I really liked most of the Elegies, I think they had a lot of great images and ideas. I underlined a lot of lines. I wasn’t as hyped about the Sonnets to Orpheus, though. I think I was expecting Rilke to talk to Orpheus more, so that may be why I was a bit disappointed. I think I want to re-read this collection again in the future, possibly after I’ve read more from Rilke, then I’ll have a better grasp on his style. Anyway, thought this was just solidly good. Also really liked that it had both the English and the original German.

[stillatim · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Probably the most infuriating book of poetry I've ever read, perhaps will ever read. The highs and lows are so dizzyingly high and so mind-numbingly, banally low that I couldn't always keep pace. The first and tenth elegies were high, the other elegies interesting and beautiful, if you can stomach the whole whiney little boy thing he falls into occasionally, and his affection for idiot-metaphysics ('Sein Aufgang ist Dasein' and so forth). Many of the sonnets, however, are appalling. Once Rilke ditches the generally critical stance of the elegies (complaints on injustice, suffering etc...) the idiot-metaphysics becomes overwhelming:

"Be - and at the same time know the implication of non-being...
to nature's whole supply of speechless, dumb,
and also used up things, the unspeakable sums,
rejoicing, add yourself and nullify the count."

Not to say there aren't great sonnets in there too, but my overall impression was one of disgust at this wonderful poet - what's more human than poetry? - wanting to become an object, thrilling in a mysticism of death. Add this to the apparent desire for a god to save us from the injustice and suffering so perfectly evoked in the elegies (uh... couldn't we save ourselves?), and my brain explodes. Because the whole thing is so beautiful, and at once so horrible, that there's nothing else for my brain to do.

[poetontheone · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rilke, in this comprehensive translation of two major works, crafts powerful yet elegant poetic odes to the majesty of the human experience and its relationship to the external world. A realm in which the human being exists in quandary and struggle. The translation is quite readable and often beautiful, but sometimes a little uneven. I would like to compare it to other translations.

[arctic1stranger · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For my taste this is not the best translation, but I do like certain parts. These are two of Rilke's major works (The third being the Book of Hours). I would not use this as my primary translation, but if you are looking for a second copy, this is more than adequate.

[chellerystick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Obviously we should all read all of Rilke's poems... but the Sonnets to Orpheus would be the second work I would buy, right after the Book of Hours. I like having the parallel translations--I can sound out just enough German to appreciate some of the sonic work.