From Barnes & Noble
Obsession can be ugly. But the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke obsessed beautifully -- over individual artists and individual women, even over individual flowers. Interestingly, delightful obsession tends to ensnare readers of Rilke, too, especially those readers who become writers.
Now, 73 years after Rilke's death, two prominent American writers with long and rich careers take a personal look at Rilke. And -- no surprise -- these riffs on Rilke are obsessive. So obsessive, in fact, that each writer stops to analyze obsession itself, and then, in fitting tribute to Rilke, each molds that obsession into art.
What's nice about these writers' personal obsessions is how educational they are for the rest of us. Galway Kinnell's The Essential Rilke, a co-translation with Hannah Liebmann, includes Kinnell's excellent introduction to the five main groups of poems in Rilke's large body of work and a discussion of the translation problems that Rilke's poems present.
But Kinnell's introduction stands out because he makes the reader feel the magic of a poet reading Rilke for the first time. Here, for example, Kinnell's describes his own half-century-long interest in Rilke, which began with a cover-to-cover read while standing in a Manhattan bookstore in 1948:
Even in that first spellbound encounter, I thought I sensed under the words of the translation another, truer Rilke struggling to speak. Possibly many young poets, on first reading the Elegies, have had a similar reaction and felt the same impulse to translate.
Kinnell doesn't stop there. Instead, he pushes at that feeling and tries to understand that "same impulse," that easy-to-slip-into Rilke obsession:
Perhaps the intimacy of Rilke's voice makes it seem that he speaks to you alone and that only you understand him. Perhaps the elusiveness of his poetry makes reading Rilke a more creative act than with most poets, and the poem you come away with, more than usually your own. Based on the large number of English versions of Rilke in bookstores, I have to think that a good number of those early-smitten carried through on that wish to translate.
Kinnell brings that same passion to the individual poems, which are all chosen simply because the translators were passionate about them. Here, for example, are the opening lines to the Kinnell-Liebmann rendering of Rilke's "Requiem for a Friend," an afterthought on obsession:
I have my dead and I have let them go
and been surprised, to seem them so consoled,
so soon at home in death, just right this way,
so unlike what we hear. Only you, you come
back; you brush against me, you move about, you want
to knock into things, to make them sound of you,
telling me you're here.
In that entire passage, the longest word is two syllables. Kinnell and Liebmann take care not to gussy Rilke up, not to mar that simple address to the dead. They are respectful, too, of the innate plainness of English, the direct exactness that the language demands.
That same care of Rilke and thought about his effect on an English-speaking reader shows up in William Gass's Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. Gass's unusual book is a great accompaniment to the Kinnell/Liebmann effort -- a series of personal essays that form a diary of encounters with Rilke's work. Gass also includes his own version of the famous Duino Elegies, composed at the Duino castle on the Adriatic Sea.
Naturally, Gass's concept owes something to Rilke's copious record of obsession, in letters, essays, and poems. Rilke's Letters on Cézanne, for example, is a collection of poetic daily letters Rilke wrote to his wife, describing the ginger jars and mountains in Cé;zanne's paintings, which Rilke saw at a retrospective exhibition held in Paris in 1907, just after the great painter's death.
Gass takes his cue from Rilke's moving introduction to the Cézanne letters and produces his own beautiful opening section. Like Kinnell, right from the start, Gass tries to map out why he feels such an intimate tie to Rilke:
The poet himself is as close to me as any human being has ever been; not because he allowed himself -- now a shade -- at last to be loved...nor because his person was so admirable that 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 a lifetime; how commitment 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.
Reading Rilke, one gets as close as possible to understanding why a writer wants to and in fact must write. Rilke's respect for great art was huge, and his dedication to the process of writing -- including sketches, revisions, return to main themes, and editing -- was astounding.
As both Kinnell and Gass note, Rilke believed that art can be learned only from masters, and he was a devoted student of what he considered top-tier artistic accomplishment.
Yet even in Rilke's most masterful writing, there's a note of humility. Both Gass and Kinnell -- distinguished writers in their own right -- take care to preserve that humility in their own approaches to Rilke. Their artful and painstaking self-examination allows us to understand not only why Rilke is magnificent, but why he spurs other writers toward a magnificence of their own.
—Aviya Kushner
From the Publisher
The greatly esteemed essayist, novelist, and philosopher reflects on the art of translation and on Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies-and gives us his own translation of Rilke's masterwork.
"A rich, ambitious, densely interconnected set of musings on the life and work of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke....This book is many things: an idiosyncratic biography of a brilliant if often irritating artist; a critically sophisticated meditation on the sources of inspiration that can itself be movingly lyrical...a guided line-by-line safari in which Gass leads us, 'as into some movie Africa,' into the dark linguistic and interpretive jungles of Rilke's 'obdurate, complex and compacted' lines; a philosophical investigation into the meaning of the Elegies; and, not least, a series of English renderings of several of Rilke's poems culminating in Gass's new translation of the Elegies themselves." -New York Times Book Review
"Reading Rilke, a deep celebration of reading and translating, is a kind of antidote for when words become unhinged from meaning, an antidote to the loneliness of reading and of writing. Gass repairs the arteries between the heart and the mind and the mouth and the hand, giving them new flexibility and vigor." -Los Angeles Times
Publishers Weekly
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 essays--at times veering between melodramatic and elliptical--that 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 elegy--"but the contours of our feelings stay unknown/ when public pressure shapes the face we know"--as 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 available--superior, in particular, to the once-standard versions by Leishman and Spender, and to the recent versions of Stephen Mitchell. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
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 Cahners Business Information.
Booknews
After reading the 20th-century German poet in English for most of his life, essayist, novelist, and philosopher Gass ( tried his hand at translating. He offers not only his version the but also a deep exposition of what he learned about language, thought, and translation from the effort. He does not index them. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
The New York Times Book Review -
Daniel Mendelsohn
It would be hard to think of a subtitle
more blandly misleading than that of
William Gass's new book, a rich,
ambitious, densely interconnected set of
musings on the life and work of the
German poet Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875-1926). Yes, there are some
extended and fascinating reflections here
on the difficulties of translating poetry --
and few poems are as difficult to
comprehend, let alone translate, as the
Duino Elegies Rilke's great
masterwork and the focus of Gass's
energies here -- but that's just one part of
a complex whole. This book is many
things: an idiosyncratic biography of a
brilliant if often irritating artist; a critically
sophisticated meditation on the sources
of inspiration that can itself be movingly
lyrical (''roses climb his life as if he were their trellis''); a guided
line-by-line safari in which Gass leads us, ''as into some movie Africa,''
into the dark linguistic and interpretive jungles of Rilke's ''obdurate,
complex and compacted'' lines; a philosophical investigation into the
meaning of the Elegies; and, not least, a series of English renderings of
several of Rilke's poems, culminating in Gass's new translation of the
Elegies themselves.
Kirkus Reviews
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 he's one of our foremost public critics of literature. This new book—dedicated entirely to Rilke and focusing special, superbly concentrated attention on the Duino Elegies—has 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." Abook not only for people interested in Rilke or Gass, but for anyone who takes poetry seriously.
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