Better Angels: On Rilke in Translation

William Haskins

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By Drew Calvert

Anyone who has scanned the poetry shelves of a well-stocked Barnes and Noble will have seen the name of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Along with Neruda, the Chilean bard, and Rumi, the Sufi mystic, Rilke is one of the few foreign poets to have made it big in America. It isn’t hard to understand why. Pretend, for a moment, that you are having a garden-variety emotional crisis. Your job has recently siphoned off your last kilowatt of youth, Janet from Human Resources hasn’t replied to your Facebook missive, the bars in Flagstaff or Buffalo play the same three inane songs, and existence itself has begun to feel like a passive-aggressive feud. And yet, inexplicably, you harbor a weird affection for life in the abstract—a blue flame of gratitude for your place in the world—even when your insurance provider keeps you on hold for over an hour. The paradox is inexpressible. You assume that you are uniquely troubled. But then you open an English version of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (say, for example, the one translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann):
Who, if I screamed out, would hear me among the hierarchies
of angels? And if one suddenly did take
me to his heart: I would perish from his
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing
but the onset of terror we’re still just able to bear,
and we admire it so because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.
http://theamericanreader.com/better-angels-on-rilke-in-translation/
 

C.bronco

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"Looking into the heart of light, the silence."

My boss likes to say, "Perception is everything." She is awesome, btw.


Sometimes beauty can be sweet or bittersweet, and I think only terrifying when looking at tsunamis.
 

AnnaPappenheim

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Have you read Letters On Cézanne? It's a book of letters Rilke wrote to his wife.

I recommend reading these two letters in particular:
PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE,
SEPTEMBER 13, 1907 (FRIDAY)
and
PARIS VIe, 29, RUE CASSETTE,
ON SUNDAY [SEPTEMBER 29, 1907]

William Haskins:
Followed the link you posted [http://theamericanreader.com/better-...n-translation/], and further down in this article, Drew Calvert writes:
"Rilke rejects the tenets of Christian cosmology: he wants there to be a place where perfect human love can happen now, not in some metropolis of clouds at the end of time."

Made me think of something Rilke wrote in one of his letters to his wife: "One lives so badly, because one always comes into the present unfinished, unable, distracted." (Letter on p. 9-11 from Letters On Cézanne) It gives (even more) depth to this letter actually. Thank you for that!