Vintage International Edition, March 1989
Introduction copyright © 1982 by Robert Hass
Copyright © 1980, 1981, 1982 by Stephen Mitchell
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States by Random House, Inc., with the cooperation of Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, W. Germany, in 1982.
Some of these translations first appeared in the following periodicals: American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, New York Review of Books, Occident, Paris Review, The Ten Directions, Threepenny Review, Zero.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Bechtle Verlag (Munich): Excerpts from Rainer Maria Rilke’s
Briefwechsel mit Benvenuta, edited by Magda von Hattingberg
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.: “Sometimes a man stands up” (this page) from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. A Translation from the German and Commentary by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1875–1926.
The selected poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Reprint.
Originally published: New York:
Random House, 1982.
English and German.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. Mitchell, Stephen. II. Title.
[PT2635.165A2525 1984] 831’.912 83-47799
Print ISBN: 978-0-679-72201-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-78754-5
v3.1
To Robert L. Mitchell
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A Note on Using This eBook
Looking for Rilke, by Robert Hass
THE SELECTED POETRY: ENGLISH
FROM
THE BOOK OF HOURS (1905)
[I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice]
[I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all]
FROM
THE BOOK OF PICTURES (1902; 1906)
Lament
Autumn Day
Evening
The Blindman’s Song
The Drunkard’s Song
The Idiot’s Song
The Dwarf’s Song
FROM
NEW POEMS (1907; 1908)
The Panther
The Gazelle
The Swan
The Grownup
Going Blind
Before Summer Rain
The Last Evening
Portrait of My Father as a Young Man
Self-Portrait, 1906
Spanish Dancer
Tombs of the Hetaerae
Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes
Alcestis
Archaic Torso of Apollo
Washing the Corpse
Black Cat
The Flamingos
Buddha in Glory
FROM
REQUIEM (1909): English
Requiem for a Friend
FROM
THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE (1910)
[For the Sake of a Single Poem]
[Faces]
[Fears]
[The Bird-feeders]
[Ibsen]
[The Temptation of the Saint]
[The Prodigal Son]
UNCOLLECTED POEMS, 1913–1918
The Spanish Trilogy
Ariel
[Straining so hard against the strength of night]
The Vast Night
[You who never arrived]
Turning-point
Lament
‘We Must Die Because We Have Known Them’
To Hölderlin
[Exposed on the cliffs of the heart]
Death
To Music
DUINO ELEGIES (1923)
The First Elegy
The Second Elegy
The Third Elegy
The Fourth Elegy
The Fifth Elegy
The Sixth Elegy
The Seventh Elegy
The Eighth Elegy
The Ninth Elegy
The Tenth Elegy
APPENDIX TO
DUINO ELEGIES
[Fragment of an Elegy]
[Original Version of the Tenth Elegy]
Antistrophes
FROM
THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS (1923)
I, 1
I, 2
I, 3
I, 5
I, 7
I, 8
I, 25
II, 4
II, 8
II, 13
II, 14
II, 23
II, 24
II, 28
II, 29
UNCOLLECTED POEMS, 1923–1926
Imaginary Career
[As once the wingèd energy of delight]
[What birds plunge through is not the intimate space]
Duration of Childhood
[World was in the face of the beloved]
Palm
Gravity
O Lacrimosa
[Now it is time that gods came walking out]
[Rose, oh pure contradiction]
Idol
Gong
[Four Sketches]
Elegy
[Dove that ventured outside]
THE SELECTED POETRY: GERMAN
FROM
DAS STUNDEN-BUCH (1905)
[Ich bin, du Ängstlicher. Hörst du mich nicht]
[Ich finde dich in allen diesen Dingen,]
FROM
DAS BUCH DER BILDER (1902; 1906)
Klage
Herbsttag
Abend
Das Lied Des Blinden
Das Lied Des Trinkers
Das Lied Des Idioten
Das Lied Des Zwerges
FROM
NEUE GEDICHTE (1907; 1908)
Der Panther
Die Gazelle
Der Schwan
Die Erwachsene
Die Erblindende
Vor Dem Sommerregen
Letzter Abend
Jugend-Bildnis Meines Vaters
Selbstbildnis Aus Dem Jahre 1906
Spanische Tänzerin
Hetären-Gräber
Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes
Alkestis
Archaïscher Torso Apollos
Leichen-Wäsche
Schwarze Katze
Die Flamingos
Buddha in Der Glorie
FROM
REQUIEM (1909): German
Requiem Für Eine Freundin
FROM
DIE AUFZEICHNUNGEN DES MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE (1910)
[Ach, aber mit Versen ist so wenig getan]
[Habe ich es schon gesagt]
[Ich liege in meinem Bett, fünf Treppen hoch]
[Ich unterschätze es nicht]
[Da saß ich an deinen Büchern]
[Wie begreif ich jetzt die wunderlichen Bilder]
[Man wird mich schwer davon überzeugen]
NICHT GESAMMELTE GEDICHTE, 1913–1918
Die Spanische Trilogie
Der Geist Ariel
[So angestrengt wider die starke Nacht]
Die Grosse Nacht
[Du im Voraus]
Wendung
Klage
>Man Muss Sterben Weil Man Sie Kennt<
An Hölderlin
[Ausgesetzt auf den Bergen des Herzens]
&nb
sp; Der Tod
An Die Musik
DUINESER ELEGIEN (1923)
Die Erste Elegie
Die Zweite Elegie
Die Dritte Elegie
Die Vierte Elegie
Die Fünfte Elegie
Die Sechste Elegie
Die Siebente Elegie
Die Achte Elegie
Die Neunte Elegie
Die Zehnte Elegie
ANHANG ZU
DUINESER ELEGIEN
[Fragment Einer Elegie]
[Ursprüngliche Fassung Der Zehnten Elegie]
Gegen-Strophen
FROM
SONETTE AN ORPHEUS (1923)
I, 1
I, 2
I, 3
I, 5
I, 7
I, 8
I, 25
II, 4
II, 8
II, 13
II, 14
II, 23
II, 24
II, 28
II, 29
NICHT GESAMMELTE GEDICHTE, 1923–1926
Imaginärer Lebenslauf
[Da dich das geflügelte Entzücken]
[Durch den sich Vögel werfen, ist nicht der]
Dauer Der Kindheit
[Welt war in dem Antlitz der Geliebten]
Handinneres
Schwerkraft
Ô Lacrimosa
[Jetzt wär es Zeit, daß Götter träten aus]
[Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch]
Idol
Gong
[Four Sketches]
Elegie
[Taube, die draußen blieb]
NOTES
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES (GERMAN AND FRENCH)
INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES (ENGLISH)
A Note on Using This eBook
In this eBook edition of The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, the title of each poem contains a hyperlink that allows you to navigate back and forth between the English translation and the original German text.
There is a link labeled “Notes” on the initial page of each section that navigates to the pertinent notes for poems contained in that section. Each poem title in the Notes section links back to the English translation of the poem.
LOOKING FOR RILKE
Last fall, in Paris, a friend promised to take me to the café, not far from Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, where Rilke was said to have breakfasted in the early years of the century when he was working as Rodin’s secretary. I was glad for the pilgrimage because, of all poets, Rilke is the hardest to locate in a place. He was born a year after Robert Frost, in 1875, a little too soon to be a young modernist, and the dissimilarity between his work and Frost’s is so great that the fact does not help to anchor for me a sense of his life. The house where he had lived in Prague as a child cannot be seen; it was destroyed during the war. Besides, Prague—“that, God forgive me, miserable city of subordinate existences,” he had written—seemed to explain very little. In his childhood, it was the capital of Bohemia. Rilke’s family belonged to the German-speaking minority that formed the city’s professional class in those years. He was insulted once to be called a German, and, when the speaker corrected himself, “I meant, Austrian,” Rilke said, “Not at all. In 1866, when the Austrians entered Prague, my parents shut their windows.” He had a lifelong sense of his own homelessness.
Anyway, Rilke came to hate his native city. His father was a failed army officer who became a petty clerk for the railroad. His mother, a complicated woman, cold and fervent, driven alternately by a hunger for good society and by pious Roman Catholicism, was an affliction to him. There was probably nothing more suffocating than the life of a genteel, aspiring European household of the late nineteenth century in which failure brooded like a boarder who had to be appeased, or like the giant cockroach which was to appear in another Prague apartment in 1915. All his life Rilke carried that suffocation inside him; and it was very much on my mind because I had just been reading Stephen Mitchell’s fresh, startlingly Rilkean translations of the poems. Here, finally, was a Rilke in English that would last for many generations. Walking through European cities with Mitchell’s Rilke in my ear, trying to see with Rilke’s eyes, I could begin to feel in the new downtowns, in the old city squares like stage sets with their baroque churches by the rivers and restored fortresses on the hills, the geography of that suffocation; it flares in the brilliant anger of the Duino Elegies—in the Fourth, for example, where the images that the world presents to him seem so much like a bad play that he swears he’d prefer a real puppet theater and imagines himself as a kind of demented critic who refuses to leave the theater until something happens:
Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart’s
curtain? It rose: the scenery of farewell.
Easy to recognize. The well-known garden,
which swayed a little. Then the dancer came.
Not him. Enough! However lightly he moves,
he’s costumed, made up—an ordinary man
who hurries home and walks in through the kitchen.
I won’t endure these half-filled human masks;
better, the puppet. It at least is full.
I’ll put up with the stuffed skin, the wire, the face
that is nothing but appearance. Here. I’m waiting.
Even if the lights go out; even if someone
tells me, “That’s all”; even if emptiness
floats toward me in a gray draft from the stage;
even if not one of my silent ancestors
stays seated with me, not one woman, not
the boy with the immovable brown eye—
I’ll sit here anyway. One can always watch.
Or the Tenth, which envisions adult life as an especially tawdry carnival:
And the shooting-gallery’s targets of prettified happiness,
which jump and kick back with a tinny sound
when hit by some better marksman. From cheers to chance
he goes staggering on, as booths with all sorts of attractions
are wooing, drumming, and bawling. For adults only
there is something special to see: how money multiplies, naked,
right there on stage, money’s genitals, nothing concealed,
the whole action—educational, and guaranteed
to increase your potency …
This anger is probably part of the reason why the Elegies took ten years to complete. Rilke seems to have needed, desperately, the feeling of freedom which he found only in open, windy spaces—Duino, Muzot.
Wandering the empty Sunday-morning warren of streets off Boulevard St.-Michel, remembering how passionately Rilke had argued that the life we live every day is not life, I began to feel that looking for him in this way was actively stupid. There was another friend with us, a Dutch journalist named Fred, who was hungry and could not have cared less where Rilke ate breakfast. It was Fred who asked me if I knew the name of the woman who had loaned Rilke a room in Duino Castle. I did. She was Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe. Trying to imagine what it would mean to have a name like that discouraged me from thinking I would ever understand Rilke’s social milieu. It signified a whole class of people, seen at a distance like brilliantly colored birds, which had been wiped out by the First World War. Fred was in Paris to interview the Rumanian writer E. M. Cioran, who has been called “the last philosopher in Europe,” about the new European peace movement. He pointed out to us the little garret, tucked like a pigeon coop under the roof of a building just off the Place de l’Odéon, where Cioran lives and works, as if he hoped that it would serve as a reasonable substitute, or would at least drag us back to the present. For it was clear that my friend Richard was also looking for something that the memory of his student days in Paris had stirred in him. He had lost some map in his head and felt personally anxious to retrieve it.
And it was clear that he wasn’t going to find it. The transience of our most vivid experie
nce is the burden of another of Rilke’s complaints, the one in the Second Elegy where he compares humans with angels:
But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we
breathe ourselves out and away; from moment to moment
our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume. Though someone may tell us:
“Yes, you’ve entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime
is filled with you …”—what does it matter? he can’t contain us,
we vanish inside him and around him. And those who are beautiful,
oh who can retain them? Appearance ceaselessly rises
in their face, and is gone. Like dew from the morning grass,
what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish
of hot food. O smile, where are you going? O upturned glance:
new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart …
alas, but that is what we are. Does the infinite space
we dissolve into, taste of us then?
We abandoned the search, standing in front of a bar called King Kong, where Richard may have had breakfast in a former life of the establishment twenty years before and Rilke fifty years before that. The morning had begun to warm up, and the streets filled with people. Like many other young artists at the turn of the century, Rilke was drawn to Paris, and there, under the tutelage of Rodin, he began to be a great writer in the poems of Neue Gedichte, but he didn’t altogether like the city, either its poverty or its glamour, both of which shocked him at first and saddened him later. It was hard, watching the street come alive with shopkeepers, students in long scarves, professors in sleek jackets solemnly lecturing companions of the previous night who walked shivering beside them, shoppers already out and armed with that French look of fanatic skepticism, not to set beside the scene the annihilating glimpse of the city in the Fifth Elegy:
Squares, oh square in Paris, infinite showplace