Tuesday, June 19, 2007

 

"Reading Rilke" by William H. Gass



Reflections on the Problems of Translation - (Knopf 1999)



   
William H. Gass and Rainer Maria Rilke


This book is not my usual study of poetry essays - but instead an entire text of William Gass's examination of Rilke's (German) work in the light of the many translations that have been given to it, with his own opinions and interpretations. As a student, I found the entire book very fascinating since Rilke's work is one of the bigger and more embarrassing holes in my education. This text not only addresses the biography and analysis of Rilke's life but includes many of his most famous poems, most especially the Duino Elegies which Gass describes as Rilke's most difficult (to properly translate).

Gass's admiration for Rilke is best exemplified in the Acknowledgment:

The poet himself is as close to me as any human being has ever been; not because he has allowed himself--now a shade--at last to be loved; and not because I have been able to obey the stern command from his archaic torso of Apollo to change my life, nor because his person was always so admirable it had to be imitated; but because his work has taught me what real art ought to be; how it can matter to a life through its lifetime; how committment can course like blood through the body of your words until the writing stirs, rises, opens its eyes; and finally, because his work allows me to measure what we call achievement; how tall his is, how small mine. Italics, mine.

If that didn't get me reading, what would?

Lifeleading

A fascinating chapter about Rilke's life, including his childhood when his parents, who yearned for a girl child, dressed him like a little girl and called him Sophie, while he was treated like a toy, picked up and discarded at will. Gass shows us how so much of Rilke's work reflects the decisions and choices made in those early years of insecurity and neglect, his mother a negative influence over all.

During childhood contradiction paves every avenue of feeling, and we grow up in bewilderment like a bird in a ballroom, with all that space and none meant for flying, a wide shining floor and nowhere to light.

Wonderful information about Lou Salome, a 'mother/lover' to Rilke and brilliant writer, Muse, and independent woman. When she spurns him, he marries Clara. This chapter also describes his Parisian experience with Rodin, and includes Rilke's last touching lines in a notebook before his death.

Transreading

Gass starts us off, in a short chapter, on the job of the translator, using several poems as examples of how one would move German to English without betraying the poet's intention.

--Translating is reading, reading of the best, the most essential, kind.

--It will usually take many readings to arrive at the right place. Somewhere amid various versions like a ghost the original will drift.

--To read with recognition (not just simple understanding) is to realize why the writer made the choices he or she made, and why, if the writing has been done well, its words could not have been set down otherwise.



Ein Gott Vermags

This is a hilarious chapter about the various translations of Rilke's work. Gass is a true academician and loves language and reveres Rilke's work with a passion that makes for very entertaining competition and criticism. It verges on gossipy and is very funny while also seriously defending the purity of Rilke's work against all bad and self-serving translations. The Duino Elegies are used for line-by-line examples, comparing and damning translations (including Gass's own in some cases), and it's a wonderful opportunity to get "into" the language and the heart of these works. The critical analysis is very intelligent and well written, causing me to admire Gass a great deal indeed. It is my first insight into the inner life of the academic--the fire that burns bright under all those brains.

--Leishman is sappy. MacIntyre is insipid. Pitchford has never heard of Vietnam.

--Gass, a jackal who comes along after the kill to nose over the uneaten hunks, keeps everything he likes.


Gass ends this chapter with the famous sonnet "Torso of an Archaic Apollo" and considerable dicussion of its translation and analysis of its meaning. (Google it if you don't know it...the last line is the kicker.)

As the Elegies argue: the beauty of perfection, when we are granted the doubtful good fortune to grasp it, announces the reappearance of our fearful conviction that we are, in both the soul and body of our being, so much less.

Inhalation in A God

This chapter gave me goose bumps. It attempts to describe the process by which Rilke (artists, mathematicians) came into his sublime own. Gass uses the mathematician, Poincare's essay to make the point that "it takes fruitful connections between otherwise unlinked elements of the medium...resemblances, parallels, analogies...which constitute the synthesizing side of the science or the art; as well as the analytic aspect--the ability to discern deep differences among things as apparently similar as twins."

What does one learn? To ask the right question. As I noted in the section on transreading, Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason in effect asks it:
namely, why is a thing what it is, and not some other thing; or, why was this word chosen rather than some other? It may be that the nature of the universe does not provide answers of such completeness, so that we are left with half an explanation(what a thing is, not why it could not be otherwise), but works of art are supposed to bear more justification for their existence than you or I, a fox or flower or blade of grass, have to. There could be causes for the cosmos, but no reasons, or all of "IT" and the whole of "WE" could be accidents. The artist must do a better job than God has, although, having internalized the reasons for his choices, he may not be easily able to articulate them. Nevertheless, they'll be there.


This is such a fascinating chapter, and at the end Gass includes the poem "The Great Night" (or perhaps could be translated The Vast Night). Here is just a tiny bit of the ending:
--it was then,
great Night, you weren't ashamed to know me.
Your breath passed over me. Across all those solemn
spaces, your smile spread to enter me.


Now Rilke knew what the glue was. (says Gass).

Schade

This word translates as "a shame," and was uttered by artist Paula Becker at her early death, after childbirth. The wife of Otto Modersohn, another famous artist, Becker had been close to Rilke and their relationship is outlined in this chapter in a most intriguing way. (I rather like the gossipy aspects of this book, and Gass is not unwilling to diss). A poem called "Requiem for A Friend" resulted from Becker's death, and it caught me quite unawares. I actually broke down and wept reading this long, very personal piece. It hit me personally in many ways, reflecting my own life, my own relationships and problems with men. This is the section in the book when I woke up and started to really pay attention to Rilke. I had formed some very negative opinions of him and his lifestyle, but (due to my ignorance) had not yet focused on his actual work. This was the alarm clock for me! The poem is too long to quote here, but I shall quote just a few segments of it. Rilke experiences that Paula is still with him, even though she is dead.


--So that's what you had to come back for:
the mourning that was omitted. Do you hear mine?
I should like to clothe you in my cries,
cover the sharp shatters of your death,
and tug till the cloth is all in rags, so my poor words
would have to shuffle around
shivering in the tatters of their sounds--
as if lamentation were enough. But now I accuse:
not the one who withdrew you from yourself
(I cannot find him hereabouts, he looks like all the others),
but through him I accuse...I accuse all men.

--Are you still there? In what corner are you?
You understood so much, you did so much;
You passed through life as open as daybreak.
Women suffer; loving is lonely;
and artists in their work sometimes sense,
where they love, the need for transmutation.
You began both; both live in that
which fame distorts by taking it away.
Oh, you were far from all fame. You were
inconspicuous; had gently withdrawn your beauty
as one lowers a festive flag
on the gray morning of a working day.

--Don't come back. If you can bear it, stay
dead among the dead. The dead have their own concerns.
But help me, if you can, if it won't distract you,
since--in me--what is most distant sometimes helps.


His inability to commit to women, to keep them distant and out of reach, reigning even in the closing lines of this poem. It really struck me down with familiarity. To say nothing of its sheer gorgeousness of language.

The Grace of Great Things

Now Gass gets down to the epistemology of Rilke's personal transformation, and his Duino Elegies. It is a fascinating examination of some scientific theories as well as Rilke's own writings about the sensory aspects of the world. This paragraph barely begins to address the process. This is a must-read chapter to fully appreciate the depth with which Gass is trying to lead us through Rilke's mental changes.

--To breathe, to see, feel, touch, taste, hear, smell, realize the world, widely, without judgment or repudiation: this was the first task--to allow the world in. To inhale all, to swallow all to become the place observed. For no more reason than its recognition. Such openness permits the intial transformation that the Elegies demand; for when we breathe, when we see, feel, touch, taste, hear the world, we alter its materiality profoundly. What was simply an emitted signal, the outcry of a thing to let us know it was there, becomes a quality in consciousness. The object is visible because its messages can be received, but the message itself is invisible; it is nowhere; or rather, it is now in an inner space, not the space between our ears, but the space between what our ears hear. Rilke called it "innerworldspace." He liked to image that the material world of flux was, with its signaling, beseeching us to become conscious of it, to realize it fully, free it from its grave.

--(Change 1): our self must become selfless, in order (Change 2) fully and unreservedly to accept the world, making matter into consciousness, and following these (Change 3) to alter the medium of what will be an artwork so that it is ready to serve a purposeless purpose....Language restored to its purity is ready to praise. The 4th metamorphosis requries the poet to make a verbal object from the previous transformations, and insert in into the world.


He uses various poems throughout this complex chapter to illustrate his points, which go in and out of logic with the same regularity that Rilke went in and out of love.

--By now, Rilke's psychological patterns should be fairly clear. First, he expects of ordinary life far more than it can possibly produce in any regular way. Second, he consequently enters a state of dismay and disappointment. Third, he requires of the poet that he lead an elevated life anyway. Fourth, the poet, in order to lead that elevated life, is forced to accept and praise the same ordinary world he bagan by disdaining.

--In sum: we live only once, and everything that fills this life, we shall have only once--once and no more. And what is this life but our awareness of ourselves and our awareness of the world?

--The reader must retain a head clear enough to realize that Rilke's inwarding of life depends entirely upon a detachment from it. It is not "living" life he asks for but its contemplation. "Living" paradoxically requires ignoring things, forgetting things, enshrining partiality, obeying interest, changing your situation, not simply observing it change; living is wanting, living is willful, heedless, fearful; living absorbs life; living feed; living excretes; living is as brutal and indifferent as chewing teeth.


Well, you just have to read it and wonder!

Erect No Memorial Stone

Now we are dipping into Rilke's angels--his angels! The metaphors eating the metaphors like big fish eating little fish becomes a tapestry of exposition of the Duino Elegies to come. At this point in the text, we have been educated and a banquet of suppositions, histories and snippets of early work has been spread--all to lead us to this tantalizing last chapter--which precedes Gass's translation of the ten elegies. The chapter ends with "The Death of the Poet" (see two earlier posts)
before giving them to us. I could NOT WAIT to read them in their entirety at this point!

I am still reading Gass's versions of the Elegies, but I have another book by another translator (Poulin) which also includes the Sonnets of Orpheus (his two major works done in this period) so I can hopefully report back to you again soon. Or not.
Rilke is all-consuming in 2007, so I can only imagine what he was like in the living flesh. A formidable poet indeed.

I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in Rilke.

Now...I must change my life.

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Comments:
most impressive! wow. you are a gold mine.
 
I can read German, but it is only a slight advantage in reading Rilke, though his Sonnets to Orpheus I find more difficult than his Duino Elegies, unlike Gass. Did you know Hemingway's mother dressed him up as a girl as well? Hart Crane was nearly treated as a girl by his mother. Maybe this is good training for a writer. (Just kidding!)
 
Thanks, MAS. I'm glad someone's reading these!

C.E., no I did NOT know about Hemingway or Crane. Good training for dysfunctional lives, I'd say? So nice to see you here! I envy your knowledge of German!
 
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