Duino Elegies

Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephen Cohn, Elizabeth Frink, Stephen Cohn, Elizabeth Frink

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780856358371
• eBook ISBN: 9781847776211
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

With all his contradictions, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the fathers of modern literature and the Duino Elegies one of its great monuments. Begun in 1912 but not completed until 1922, they are 'modern' in almost every sense the word has acquired; yet Rilke was by temperament anti-modern, a snob and a romantic. He was devoted to the three A's: Architecture, Agriculture, Aristocracy. The Duino Elegies aroused real excitement among English readers when the now-dated Leishman/Spender versions first appeared in the 1930s. Stephen Cohn, the distinguished artist and teacher, has worked for over three years to complete this outstanding new translation. Peter Porter writes: 'Your translation must have grandeur, essential size in its component parts, and speed to catch the marvellous twists of Rilke's imagination.' He adds, 'Cohn has met all these requirements.' These versions show a rare empathy with the originals and an instinct for the right diction and cadence. They are, says Porter, 'the most flowing and organic I have read.'

Notes on the Translation

Die erste Elegie

Where the text of the poems is cited in English in the Notes, a literal prose translation is given.

lines

1–2 Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen? The Elegies begin with a great cry in the wilderness, and each Elegy will, in its own manner, refer back to this cry.

3 die findigen Tiere: English permits an adjective to be made of ‘searching’ but not of ‘finding’.

4–5, Rilke’s partial answers to the great portmanteau questions concerning

6–7 human purpose and destiny sometimes come very close to those of Marcel Proust, who was his contemporary. Both men died in their fifty-first year. (Rilke 1875–1926; Proust 1871–1922. See also the note to 11.49ff of the Seventh Elegy.)

8–9 Gaspara Stampa, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman, so transcended the tragic failure of a love affair that her despair was changed to exaltation.
Rilke’s enthusiasm for parting, loss, death and bereavement is critical to his particular existentialist credo.

10–11 An inscription in this church, probably the one remembered by Rilke, can be translated as follows:

While I had life I lived for others.

Now after death I have not disappeared

But coldly live in marble for myself.

I once was Willem Hermanus.

Flanders mourns me

Adria sighs for me

And poverty calls me.

Died the 16th October

1593.

12–13 ‘What they want of me? I am quietly to remove that impression of injustice, which sometimes impedes their pure movement a little.’ The young dead have laid on Rilke himself the obligation of preaching that their fate, their early death, is not unjust, is not outrageous.

14–15 The First Elegy ends with the Linos legend: a young god dies and his mourning discovers music. The Elegy has returned once more to the theme of ‘value in loss’. But perhaps it also points forward (‘can we exist without them?’) to some of the matter of the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Elegies: to the nature of tradition, to the relatedness of past, present, future.

Die zweite Elegie

In the First Elegy, terror of the Angel causes the poet to choke back his cry for help. Here, in the Second, need overcomes dread and the Angels are invoked in spite of his fear and in spite of their dangerousness.

1–2 In the Apocrypha, Tobias sets out on his journey to Rages accompanied by his dog and by the guide, Azarias; who is really the angel Raphael in disguise.

3–4 Wer seid ihr? … in das eigene Antlitz. One can sense real fear in the question – Who are you? Next comes a chain of wonderfully high-flown parentheses which apparently answer the question, describing the Angels themselves. Nevertheless, alone (without Mankind’s presence?) these sublime creatures are no more than reflectors of themselves.

5ff Aufschaun can bear the same meaning as Aufpassen: it can mean ‘to pay attention’, ‘to be watchful’. In living, in caring, in feeling, we live and care and feel ourselves out of life altogether. As we burn … so do we burn out. Denn Bleiben ist nirgends. To be is to change and, gradually, inexorably, to depart from life.

6–7 Und alles ist einig, uns zu verschweigen, halb als Schande vielleicht und halb als unsägliche Hoffnung. To the universe, Mankind represents the highest aspirations, and yet also the deepest embarrassment and shame.

8–9 … weil die Stelle nicht schwindet die ihr, Zärtliche/zudeckt … ‘…because the place does not disappear which you, tender ones, cover …’ Everything fades. Nothing is permanent. Nothing stays still. ‘We know flowering and withering at one and the same time.’ (1.16, Fourth Elegy.) Yet, amazingly, Rilke now takes sexual love, takes lovemaking itself, as his theme and begins to preach its permanence, its lastingness, its connections with notions of ‘Forever’.
Here, and again at the beginning of the Third Elegy, Rilke succeeds in offering, at one and the same time, chaste metaphor and explicit sexual imagery; and in allowing readers their own choice of interpretation.

Die dritte Elegie

1 … ehe das Mädchen noch linderte … : I believe that Rilke here chose to use the verb lindern (‘to soften’) reflexively; which would give a reading: ‘even before the maiden softened’. But the line is usually taken to mean: ‘even before she has gentled him’.
All action and drive are given to the Lord of Desire himself: the role of the young woman is entirely subordinate.

2 O des Blutes Neptun: Britannia herself, Drake, Nelson and others have appropriated ‘Neptune’ so thoroughly in English folklore that I have thought it best to leave the god anonymous, here. Furthermore, Rilke’s ‘river-god of the bl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Die erste Elegie
• The First Elegy
• Die zweite Elegie
• The Second Elegy
• Die dritte Elegie
• The Third Elegy
• Die vierte Elegie
• The Fourth Elegy
• Die fünfte Elegie
• The Fifth Elegy
• Die sechste Elegie
• The Sixth Elegy
• Die siebente Elegie
• The Seventh Elegy
• Die achte Elegie
• The Eighth Elegy
• Die neunte Elegie
• The Ninth Elegy
• Die zehnte Elegie
• The Tenth Elegy
• Notes
• Copyright