Another autumnal equinox, another Rilke poem. As it did last year, Rilke's poetry came back into visible orbit for me via this summer's Token Creek Chamber Music Festival. The final program of the music series featured a performance of Peter Lieberson's "Rilke Songs", composed to five poems from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (I:4, "O ihr Zärlichen"; II:1, "Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht!; II:12, "Wolle die Wandlung"; II,5, "Blumenmuskel"; and II:29, "Stiller Freund"). Wanting to familiarize myself with the poems before the program, I found myself in the poetry stacks of the B&N, four different translations propped open to the first of the poems, and relied on instinctive reaction to choose Edward Snow's translation, which, after more hours in its company, still reads just right to me.
I moved onto reading Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation by William Gass, which sends me into a little orbit of my own. The academic stilt of its title is misleading; this is a very personal and personable book. Rilke emerges as a three-dimensional human from the strokes of Gass's biographical sketch in the opening chapter. Somehow I'm unexpectedly relieved that the revered Rilke is flawed and real, not out of indulgence (I don't believe that it's okay to be a jerk so long as you produce great art) or sympathy (...nor that it's okay to be a jerk if you are oh so sensitive), but because unflattering truth is always better than hagiographical spin. Rilke, the poet of the Big Idea, believed in and worshiped passion...but mostly in his head. The existential losses of youth, love and life are celebrated in his poetry, but unsung, and perhaps unknown to the poet, are what he's lost by having passed up the chance to be a good father, and having never experienced an honest day's hard work. Why is it that Rilke's poetry is now even more appealing to me even after the unveiling of these hairy warts? Gass gets at this mystery in describing Rilke's poems as "lyrics that love, however pure or passionate or sacrificial, could never have achieved by itself...lines only frailty, terror, emotional duplicity even, could accomplish—the consequence of an honesty bitter about the weaknesses from which it took its strength."
As advertised, the meat of Gass's book is the philosophy and practice of poetry translation. Gass lays out and examines selected stanzas in multiple iterations by several different translators (including himself), parsing them with time-honored methods of literary criticism, his own poetic sensibility, and sometimes just a little bit of Simon Cowell ("Leishman is sappy. MacIntyre is insipid", he says about their translations of the first stanza of II:12 of the Sonnets). After reading Gass, I'm grateful for the bounty of English translations available on bookstore shelves, and hopeful that I can get closer to the essence of the elephant by putting all the blind men in a room and listening to each of their stories.
But where were we? Oh, yes. It's the first day of fall. Rilke's poem "Herbst" ("Autumn"):
Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit,
als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten;
sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde.
Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.
Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt.
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.
Gass translates the first stanza: "The leaves are falling, falling from far away, / as though a distant garden died above us; / they fall, fall with denial in their wave."
"Herbst" is recited and sung in German, set to acoustic guitar accompaniment, here.
The way I want to hear this poem today is in the Edward Snow translation, set to music for voices by Joshua Shank (scroll down the post for the translation), which was brought to us earlier this year through the good offices of The Fredösphere. (Links to a sound file of its performance and its score can be found in the first paragraph of this post.)
Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.
Snow's translation is definitely the best! Good choice!
Posted by: | May 17, 2007 at 08:54 AM