An evocation of nature’s magic

With the revival of an old translation, there has been a renewed appreciation of the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, its richness and imagery.

In 1922, four years before his death, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke finished his 10 poem cycle, Duino Elegies. He’d begun it almost a decade before, in 1911, while staying in the castle at Duino, near Trieste in Italy. Rilke, by the time of his passing, was regarded as the greatest poet in the German language and yet, it would be another nine years before an English translation of the Duino Elegies would be published.

That first translation was done by two cousins, Vita and Edward Sackville-West, who were themselves stars of the English literary scene in the early decades of the 20th century. And it was Hogarth Press, run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, that published a few hundred copies of the translation. And then the translation disappeared from view — there was some blowback with the approach the Sackville-Wests had taken, translating Rilke’s poems into blank verse in English and this meant the work languished away from the reading public for over 90 years.

Last year, in time for the centenary of the publication of Rilke’s original, Pushkin Press brought back the Sackville-Wests’ translation. And with this revival, has come a renewed appreciation for what the translators had done. The original elegies were in German hexameter, but as Vita and Edward observed in their note at the end of the volume, this was not a form into which the English language could meld itself with any elegance or grace. Hence, the choice to do it in blank verse, which is now being acknowledged as able to bring out the richness of Rilke’s imagery, his evocation of the magic and the power of nature, and the spiritual forces that abound in the universe.

These poems can be intimidating to parse on first reading no matter which translation you reach for — the trick, I found, is to read it not once, but two, three, and even four times over. Each time you read them, something new seems to emerge from those dense, charged lines.

Biographical elements are threaded through a few of the poems, along with Rilke’s contemplation of what it means to be in love, what it means to be loved by your mother, the transubstantiation that happens through dying and death, and, of course, religious themes reflected in the actions of angels.

The first elegy, in fact, starts with a question to those angels:

“Who would give ear, among the angelic host/ Were I to cry aloud? And even if one/ Amongst them took me swiftly to his heart,/ I should dissolve before his strength of being./ For beauty’s nothing but the birth of terror,/ Which we endure but barely, and, enduring,/ Must wonder at it, in that it disdains/ To compass our destruction.”

Every angel is terrible, Rilke says and goes on to reflect on heartbreak, the greater beings that animals seem to be in comparison to humans, and of course, the strangeness of death that robs us of what we’ve learned through a lifetime. The suddenness of breath-stopping, the finality of it, and the fact that we are the most transient of beings haunts each poem, making them impossible to forget once you’ve read them. And you find yourself reaching out again and reading again from the first to the tenth and marvelling at the truth you find in them.

The author is a Bengaluru-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

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