An Anatomy of Orpheus

Rilke among the critics - By Michael Hamburger



Early in 1927, not many months after Rilke’s death, his daughter wrote to Hugo von Hofmannsthal to tell him of plans for the posthumous publication of works by Rilke and ask for Hofmannsthal’s advice and co-operation. Hofmannsthal replied:
 

... If I felt my death drawing very close, I should leave instructions in a sense almost diametrically opposed. I should do all I could— in so far as anything can be done in this disconnected world of ours—to suppress all those tiresome and often indiscreet statements about a productive individual and his works, all that diluting chatter, or at least to deprive it of nourishment as far as possible by the removal of private letters and notes, by putting difficulties in the way of that inane biography-mania and all indecencies of that kind. My idea would be to really entrust the hardly explicable phenomenon that once existed here, R.M.R. or H.H., to death, even to oblivion if need be (except in the hearts of a few loyal men and women), and leave the works to engage unaided in their hard secret struggle with the next hostile decades..

It may look as though Rilke’s reputation had not only withstood these hostile decades, but reversed the usual process by turning hostility into unstinted homage. Editions of his poems, prose works and letters, translations into countless languages, biographies, memoirs, critical studies and academic theses have jostled one another at a rate that must be almost unique in modern literature. To many of his readers Rilke was not a poet, but the poet, the reincarnation in his time of the archetypal Orpheus whose myth he revived and celebrated in the Sonnets. Yet his work appealed to many different kinds of readers and satisfied many different needs. It was as exquisitely musical and pictorial as the poetry of the French Symbolists and their German successor, Stefan George, yet without being deliberately recondite and exclusive; and though firmly based on an aesthetic akin to theirs, it was open to that order of reality which had been the province of the opposing school, the Naturalists. It ranged from the intense self -communion of the Stundenbuch to the seemingly social preoccupations of the Butch der Bilder and the seeming absorption in things of the ‘Neue Gedichte. During the critical year that followed Rilke came to terms with the new style and energies that might so easily have left him stranded. Like Yeats, and unlike Valery, George, or Hofmannsthal. he entred yet another new phase as a distinctly "modern"—post-1914— poet. Most important ot all, as his reputation is concerned, he annexed so much of “life” :to a basically autonomus art,. so much of the language of relegious and mystical communion :to a basically individualistic out look,. that like no other poet of his time he seemed to offer a new existential philosophy and a new morality. this philosophic and didactic function can be discounted as one of tncse misunderstandings on which, as he said, the fame of artists rests; but it has become as dificult to separate from Rilke’s fame as our knowledge of his person from his poetry.


Hofmannsthal knew that his own choice entailed other difficulties and dangers, and foresaw the eclipse which own work was to suffer during those hostile decades;but, now that Rilke struggle began in earnest, it will soon be all too clear that Hofnannsthal’s warning was apt and right. Three-and-a-half decades after Rilke's death the spate of publications continues as though nothing had happened; but more and more readers of poetry turn from Rile’s work with a feeling little short of disgust. The myth so beautifully sustained in his later poetry has been blasted by a barrage of biographical “indecencies”; the philosophy well and truly debunked by critical examinations like Professor Romano Guardini’s line-by-line exegesis of the Duino Elegies (now made available in an excellent English translation*); the Orphic poet. in Professor E. C. Mason’s scholarly and sardonic study,2 anatomised by travel snapshots like the following:

There is still, however, one way in which Rilke is disturbed, and that is when he is bathing. The chief thing about bathing is, for him, not so much actually going into the water, at least above the knee, as divesting himself of his bathing costume altogether, to take the air more unimpededly. When this is not practicable, he makes a point of putting on the top half of his striped black and red bathing costume except in case of emergency, the emergency being “the Englishwoman who suddenly pops up somewhere.” It was under these very trying circumstances that Rilke wrote the third part of his Book of Hours, one of his most important cycles of religious lyric, terminating with the famous hymn to St. Francis, “the most loving of all.”

The source, of course—duly supplied in a note—is an intimate letter of Rilke’s; and, having been published as part of the Rilke canon, these are fair game. A great many of them were written with an unmistakable squint at posterity; but this one is part of a chattily innocent sequence to his wife, very much like anyone’s account of a holiday abroad, only more observant and more amusing. If poetry, as well as poets, were subject to the usual moral imperatives and responsibilities, it would be reasonable to blame Rilke for some of the posthumous indignities which his work has suffered. It was he who sowed the seeds of the philosophical and theological criticism of his work in confessions and manifestos like his Letters to a Young Poet, Letter from a Young Artisan, and his letters to his Polish translator on the Duino Elegies. Almost from the start, he claimed an absolute authority. 1-lAs early autobiographical sketch Ewald Tragy contains this casual remark: “I am my own legislator and King; there is no one above me, not even God.” Yet as far as his poetry is concerned, this question of responsibility is neither here nor there. If we cannot dissociate the poetry from the pretensions and vanities—let alone the harmless foibles—of the man, it is we who are the losers.


Both Professor Mason and Professor Guardini have long been prominent in that branch of Rilke criticism which has been mainly concerned with his ideas. Professor Guardini’s complete commentary on the Elegies first appeared in 1953, but sections of it were published in book form much earlier. A distinguished Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher, Professor Guardini has published similar examinations of the works of Dante, Hölderlin, and Dostoievsky. His approach to Rilke~—and, very broadly speaking, his inevitable judgment also—is summarised and justified in the Introduction:

In view of the far-reaching claims which the poet makes for his work we are not merely justified—we are obliged to examine how far they can be substantiated. The question to be answered he re is not whether Rilke’s message commands respect, but whether his pronouncements are true in themselves; whether his impressive account of life and death, of humanity and personal relations really corresponds to the truth.

Though the answer, needless to say, is no, and Professor Guardini finds in Rilke’s thorough-going individualism “the same gaping void” later to be filled by revolution and dictatorship, because “the overburdening of modern autonomous man creates an empty space”—much of his detailed interpretation of the Elegies is sympathetic, even where it is open to doubt or errs on the side of literalness. Professor Guardini’s learning is not confined to theology and philosophy; he can introduce his comments on the fig-tree image in the Sixth Elegy with an explanation of the flowering and fruiting habits of the fig-tree, or relate Rilke’s stylistic innovations to those of Gottfried Benn, Mr. Eliot, and Mr. Auden.

At first sight Professor Mason’s new book on Rilke strikes one as little more than a postscript to his important earlier studies, if not as a scraping of the barrel of Rilke criticism; and in fact his Introduction to the first complete English translation of Rilke’s Stund€nbuch5 is more consistently excellent. The trouble with his book is the subject itself, Rilke’s attitude to the Anglo-Saxon world, its literatures and representatives, in relation to his political, social, and cultural preferences in general. Professor Mason sets out to prove that Rilke’s prejudice against all things British and American—a prejudice familiar from Heine and Nietzsche before him—was not as complete as Rilke himself professed. But does it~ matter greatly? As Professor Mason is well aware, it is the prejudice that tells us most about Rilke, not the minute particulars that contradict it; and the prejudice itself was based on a vague identification of Britain and America with the things that Rilke disliked in the modern world. In collecting his particulars, Professor Mason goes to lengths surprising in a critic so remark-able for his good sense. Thus he adduces examples of Rilke’s use ~ English words, but includes such 1o ~as “tramway,” “snob,” “clown,” and “pony ot which there were no German equivalents. sho ‘uld also have mentioned that in Ewald elegy Rilke used the transitional form “Trambahn,” later to be wholly naturalized as “Strassenbahn” or “Elek!rishe.” But could Rilke have anticipated the whole process?) One way in which Professor Mason’s good sense gets even with the subject is in ironies at Rilke’s expense, like the one already quoted, or this one about Rilke’s reading in English:

After all his disappointing and estranging experiences with the English language and English literature, even when they were represented by such figures as Shakespeare or Keats, he would appear here at last, in this British Lady’s Newspaper and Court Journal, to have found something more congenial to him.

But this is an allusion to one of many interesting aspects of Rilke’s rare contacts with England that had received little or no attention. Other English literature congenial to Rilke included works by Arthur Symons, Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence. By his deft management of his miscellaneous facts, and in digressions on such matters as Rilke’s “partisanship for the child against adults,” which affected all his views on societies and nations, or on Rilke’s “gesture of withdrawal,” Professor Mason succeeds in drawing a new and very lifelike portrait of Rilke after all. By the time we reach Excursus II on Problems of the Duinese Credo we are back at the heart of Rilke criticism, and know considerably more about Rilke than before. Professor Mason’s conclusion, too, is rather less damning than Professor Guardini’s, for he allows that “the doctrine of the Duinese Elegies does after all amount to a glorification in new term3 of art as a substitute for religion.’

Thiss is ALSO the view of Professor E. L. Stahl in his inaugural lecture at Oxford.4 Though Rilke’s terms were certainly new, the glorification of human creativity, either for its own sake or within a variety of metaphysical and ethical systems, has very solid precedents in earlier German literature. Professor Stahl traces itsincestry in 18th-century writers like Moses Mendelssohn, Kant, Karl Philipp Moritz, Schiller, and Goethe, then on to Nietzsche and Rilke. Even more than Friedrich Schlegel, whom Professor Stahl mentions, Novalis anticipated Rilke’s crucial conception of life as something not given, but created by the imagination. “In the final count,” Professor Stahl says of Rilke’s Ninth Elegy, “man stands justified by his creativity alone.”
Like the English version of Professor Guardini’s interpretation of the Elegies, Professor Stahl makes use of Mr. J. B. Leishman’s translation, but avoids embarrassments and ambiguities by basing his comments on the original text. If Mr. Leishman’s translation does not prove literal enough to be substituted for the original even in a commentary concerned less with diction and style than with meaning—and there is no reason why it should
—one dreads to think that Dr. A. L. Peck’s new version of the Stundenbuck might be put to the same test, or only that English readers might consider it “capable of taking the place of the original. . . of conveying.., a true impression of the qualities of the original,” as Dr. Peck says he wanted his version to do.
Admittedly the Book of Hours is very much less translatable than the Elegies, for all their idiosyncrasies of metaphor and syntax (some of which Professor Guardini deplores as a violation of the German language). Mr. Leishman has rendered these idiosyncrasies—even, at times, with a vengeance. The diction of the Stundenbuch is less purely Rilkean, for it blends some of the conventional vocabulary of Romantic and religious verse with a new colloquial fluency and bareness. That parts, at least, of its three sequences are translatable was proved by Miss Babette Deutsch, who treated them with a poet’s linguistic tact. Fluency is the weakness and strength of the Stundenbuch. Its multiple rhymes and irregular cadences meet too little resistance—that is its weakness; its strength is simply to flow, over shallows, deeps, and all sorts of curious deposits. A rendering that interrupts the flow—which, as Professor Mason writes in his admirable Introduction, is also “the ceaseless ebb and flow of Rilke’s inner life”—utterly ruins this brilliant and precarious performance. Above all, a rendering must convey an effect of ease, spontaneity, and inexhaustible improvisation, as Dr. Peck’s laborious inversions and fustian poeticisms disastrously do not. “Of visage wondrous pale”
—“his watch to keep”—”On, onward still” (where Rilke says, “one must only go”)—”The Baptist gaunt” (only “the Baptist” in German)
—such dead and insulating phrases occur on every page, not to cite the more monstrous inversions, archaisms, and padding epithets. Here is one of the most celebrated (and controversial) poems from the Book of Monastic Life in the original and in Dr. Peck’s translation:

Was wirst du tun, Gott, wenn ich stcrbe?
Ich bin dein Krug (wenn ich zerscherbe?),
lch bin dein Trank (wenn ich verdeive?),
Bin dein Gewand and dein Gewelr
mit mir verlierst du ….

Nach mir best du kein Hans, darin
dick Worte, nab und warm, begriissen.
Es fallti von deinen ,müden Fulssen
die fremden Samtsandale, die ich bin.

Dein grosser mantel lässt dick Los.
Dein Blick, den ich mit meiner Wange
warm, wie mit einem Pjuhl, emplange
wird kommen, wird mich sachen, lange—
and legt beim Sonnenuntergange
sick fermi/en Striven in den Schoss.

Was wirst du tan, Gott? Ich bin bange.

What will you do, God, if death takes me?
I am your jug (if someone breaks me?)
I am your drink (if curdling cakes me?)
I am your dress, your trade—it makes me
think, if I go, your meaning goes.

No home you’ll have, none standing close
with warm, kind words and welcome cheering.
No velvet sandals you’ll be wearing
on your tired feet—for I am those.

Your great cloak, too, will then be gone.
Your glance, which on my check finds rest,
pullowed so snug, so warmly pressed,
seeking will come, and, dispossessed,
will, as the sun sets in the west,
sink in some lap of alien stone.

What will you do, God? I’m distressed.

There is no need to comment on the inevitable loss of significant alliteration and assonance, on which Rilke relied to an uncommon degree in these poems for his transitions and associations; his dependence on them was one aspect of his precarious fluency, and the only question worth asking is whether a translation could possibly afford the loss. In the first line “if, death takes me” introduces an alien motive by what amounts to a personification of death; the sensitive reader cannot help asking himself what precisely is the relationship here between God and death, a theological question which doesn’t arise over Rilke’s “if 1 die,” and which is a disturbing irrelevance in the context. The translator has also committed himself to an awkward Byronic rhyme, which leads to the faintly nauseating “cakes mc” in the third line and, much worse, to the circumlocution and inorganic enjambement in the fourth and fifth, “it makes me / think” (where Rilke only says:
“I am your garment and your trade, / if you lose me you lose your meaning”). . -,


The next two lines introduce a vulgar send-mentality which Rilke narrowly avoids; his simple “greet you” becomes “welcome cheering,” and the superfluous “none standing close” may refer either to “home” or to a person, where Rilke clearly speaks only of a house and words; these words are “near and warm,” not “kind.” Rilke’s velvet sandal “drops from God’s weary fect”—a much more striking concept than the translator’s mere negative. The same loss of dynamism is incurred in the next line; where in Rilke the cloak actively detaches itself from God, in the translation it is merely “gone.” In the next action Rilke puts his stress on the “I” of the poem and thus on the receiving of God’s glance; the translation distorts and cloys the action, mainly by substituting “snug” and “warmly pressed” for Rilke’s single, and relatively neutral, adverb “warmly.” The penultimate line, “in some Zap of alien stone,” again misleads, by suggesting the lap of some person less receptive than the speaker—reducing “stone” to an ab:~tract and conventional attribute—or possibly the lap of a statue, whereas Rilke says “lies down in the lap(s) of alien stones”—the whole point being that these stones are things with an independent, inhuman mode of ex””’~”
These renderings will do Rilke no service now that his reputation in English-speaking countries is threatened not only by the cold blast of dogmatic criticism but by a growing indifference to foreign literature.

Miss Elizabeth Jennings, nonetheless, has included Rilke in her study of the relationship between poetry and mystical experience.~ Since she writes both as a poet and as a Roman Catholic, one might have expected her to agree with Professor Guardini’s condemnation of Rilke’s ideas or Professor Mason s analysis of Rilke’s “mysticism” in his Introduction to the Book of Hours—the mysticism of a poet who declared that “religion is the art of those who are uncreative” and believed that it is men, especially artists, who create God. But whether out of charity or ambivalence Miss Jennings is reluctant to acknowledge any irreconcilable quarrel between Christian dogma and Rilke’s religion of poetry. In her eagerness to establish parallels between mystical and poetic vision she goes so far as to affirm on page.118 that “the ‘angels’ which appear in, and are indeed the protagonists of, the Duino Elegies, are ‘pseudonyms’ for God,” only to state on the next page: “And Rilke’s angels, those potent beings who soar through the Ziuino Elegies, are secular angels not sacred ones.’ The same desire to have it both ways informs her essays on all those poets—Hart
Crane, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Muir, and Mr. David Gascoyne—who do not fit comfortably into a line running from St. Augustine through the English and Spanish mystics, Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne, to Hopkins, Peguy, Bernanos, and Mr. Eliot.

As long as she relies on her own experience as a writer and reader of poetry, Miss Jennings is reliable and perceptive. “There is no other modern poetry,” she writes of Rilke’s Elegies, “which gives so strong a sense of the poet both being carried away by his verse yet also of never quite losing his hold on it,” and goes on to remark on their symphonic structure. Unfortunately she has felt obliged to present a series of miscellaneous essays as though they were parts of a single coherent study—not the record of a poet’s response to writers to whom she feels related in one way or another, but an austere thesis on a subject full of pitfalls; and to provide information that is neither indispensable nor correct. Quite unnecessarily, she gives the year of Rilke’s death, and dates it 1927 instead of 1926; she writes of “Rilke’s deep affection for his mother,” when Rilke attributed his difficulties with women to his inability to love his mother (and the fear of being loved); she asserts that “desperate and painful as Rilke’s poetic struggles often were, he never for a moment doubted the power of poetry,” when the important thing about Rilke’s struggles is that he did doubt the power of poetry, and even contemplated giving it up in his middle years to become a country doctor. She concludes that “one can, I think, justly claim not only that Rilke knew personally both the darkness and ecstasy of the search for God (even though he often expressed it in different terms), but also that such experience and the transcribing of it released him from his own intense subjectivity”—when all the evidence points to the precise reverse of this claim.
The truth which Miss Jennings never quite faces throughout her book is that whatever common faculties may be involved in both, religious faith is one thing, poetic imagination another. (Even in purely psychological terms they are distinct in that faith demands a con~ centration of the will, whereas will is the enemy of imagination.) In her introductory chapter she distinguishes religious mysticism from the modern tendency to raise “the sense
of place to a kind of metaphysical contemplation”; but when she comes to deal with Rilke and Wallace Stevens she fails to bring out the special significance of this metaphysic of place in their work. “Life is an affair of people and places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble,” Stevens put it with laconic finality. In the same way, and for the same reasons, Miss Jennings has missed an excellent opportunity to compare the angels of Rilke with those of Stevens—”secular” and “necessary” angels in both cases—and indeed to recognise the essential agreement of these two theologions of the creative imagination, hierophants of the earthly.
..... What makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it, and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive it.” This is Stevens, but it is also the essence of what Rilke said about the poet’s function and vocation.

The poet “has had immensely to do with giving life whatever savour it possesses. He has had to do with whatever the imagination and the senses have made of the world
“The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us. .
“The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God
“After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence which takes its place as life’s redemption
“poetry’s mystical theology “
“The poet is the priest of the invisible “Every man dies his own death …..”

There is scarcely a seminal idea in Rilke without its exact counterpart in the poems and prose writings of Wallace Stevens, from which all the above are extracts.6


STEVENS, TOO, OFFERS THE CLUE to why so much excellent Rilke criticism now seems to be flogging a dead horse. “Rational beings are canaille,” Stevens said (and Rilke also in slightly different words); and “in the long run the truth does not matter.” These blunt and shocking admissions of what many poets feel, but few have dared to say, goes to the root of the misunderstanding between poets like Rilke and Stevens—’Thinkers without final thoughts,” to quote Stevens yet again—and their interpreters. (That Rilke became one of these when he consented to explain his own work has already been regretted here.) Such poets think experimentally, not definitively; but every overall interpretation of their thought must treat it as though it were definitive, as though their discoveries were codifications, their flashes of
recognition (within a particular context) the articles of a creed. The result is like using a lasso to catch a humming-bird.
And what do such poets discover? Stevens, once more, knows the answer: “Poetry is a satisfying of the desire for resemblance.” The satisfying of this desire is rarely contained within the bounds of a poet’s beliefs, even if he is a poet who holds beliefs. The imagination picks up its resemblances wherever it can find them. If it needs angels, it will take them from a religion which the poet cannot accept, or actively opposes; hence the Christian imagery in Rilke. Unscrupulous as such habits may seem, not only Christian mystics, but sober apologists and preachers are equally apt to borrow metaphors, and more than metaphors, from worldly pursuits, arts and sciences which they have no intention of glorifying. It is a two-way traffic; and though in recent cen
tunes faith and imagination have usually moved in opposite directions, it is their linguistic convergences that confound criticism.

G RAN P ED that Rilke’s creed scarcely “works” outside the sphere in which poetic processes, or their analogues, apply, we are forced every day of our lives to allow for specialisations of this order. To write great poetry is quite enough for one man to achieve in “this disconnected world of ours.” That the truths of poetry are partial and provisional truths does not make them less valuable. It is up to the reader (and critic) not to approach poetry with expectations which it cannot, by its nature, fulfill. If Rilke is unlikely to attract many more disciples and hagiographers for the time being, he will be losing nothing but an accidental accretion; and his poetry will be all the better off without it.








1 Romano Guardini: Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Translated by K. G. Knight. Darwen Finlayson,
30S.
2.E.C. Mason: Puke, Europe and the English-Speaking World. Cambridge UP., 30s.
3.Rainer Maria Rilke: The Book of Hours. Translated by A. L. Peck. Hogarth Press, i8s.
4.E.L. Stahl: Creativity. A theme from Faust and the Duino Elegies. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
5.Elizabeth Jennings: Every Changing Shape. Andre Deutsch, 25S.
6.That Stevens knew Rilke’s work transpires from references in his Opus Post]lumus (pp. 245, 279, 280). What concerns me here, however, is not a possible debt, but a deep concordance that has escaped those who have dealt with Stevens’s more obvious French sources and affinities; and the light which Stevens’s clearer awareness sheds on Rilke’s practice.



 

courtesy - Encounter -103 April-1962