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Sonnets to Orpheus: Bilingual Edition

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Praising, That's It!
by Tom Goff,
Carmichael, CA


Rainer Maria Rilke: Sonnets to Orpheus. Translated by Edward Snow. $22 (hb). 122p. North Point Press, 19 Union Square West, NY 10003. Published 2004. ISBN # 0-86547-611-x.

For some years now, Edward Snow's free-verse translations of Rilke have allowed that German-speaking Czech poet (really an almost stateless wanderer for much of his life) to speak in English as the modernist he was at heart, his mastery of the sonnet, the elegy, and other verse forms notwithstanding. Chances are that if you know the two books of New Poems-their sculptural intensities inspired by Rodin-you know them in Snow's version; and he has had equivalent success with Rilke's earlier Book of Images, as well as the Uncollected Poems, his terrific choice of works the poet mysteriously failed to unify.

So much does Snow emphasize the unknown Rilke, the poet of unsuspected toughness, of constant flickers of poetic improvisation, that he risks slighting the writer's pet projects. In particular, Snow would like to revise the myth Rilke himself generated: that after beginning the Duino Elegies in high style in 1912-ready to utter his whole vision of life's and death's interconnectedness-he fell helplessly silent for almost ten years. Silent, that is, until (working furiously in a secluded tower in Switzerland) he recaptured his touch in one magic February, in 1922. Inspired as perhaps no other poet has ever been, Rilke poured forth the mystical utterances that would complete the Elegies, prompted by a creative icebreaker: the fifty-five Sonnets that are our subject. So goes the legend, much of it true, if we credit Rilke's account of his suffering and triumph.

But Snow's introduction to his recent (2000) translation of the Elegies should be read between the lines: it's clear that this sequence of ten poetic meditations in the grand manner is not completely to Snow's taste, nicely rendered as his version is. So it's a relief to see enthusiasm return as Snow now discusses, and then renders, the Sonnets to Orpheus, with a clarity and (unrhymed) musicality these intimate poems-often inspirational teachings-require.

The Sonnets came to the poet as he pondered the last letters of Vera Ouckama Knoop (a friend of the poet's daughter Ruth); these described vividly the leukemia that ended this talented dancer-musician's life at nineteen. Thoughts of Vera's fate mingled with musings about the mythic poet Orpheus, and with certain experiments in the sonnet form Rilke had recently been attempting (so much for the notion of total prior "blockage"). Once Rilke was started, there was no stopping the singing, as this example illustrates:

Wait..., this taste...Already it's escaping.
...A bit of music, feet tapping, a hum-:
You girls, with your silences, your warmth,
dance the knowledge of the tasted fruit.

Dance the orange. Who can forget it,
the way it fights, drowning in itself,
against its sweetness. You've possessed it.
Its deliciousness has entered you.

Dance the orange. Fling the warmer landscape
out from you, so the ripe fruit may glow
in its native breezes! Aglow yourselves, peel

perfume from perfume! Create a kinship
with the pure, reluctant rind,
with the juice that fills the happy fruit!

[First Part, Sonnet 15]

Fine as this poem is on its own, it also benefits from the context. Other sonnets help adumbrate its theme: how life's intensified by death, so that this poem's images might emanate from an "orange" realm habitable only by the dead, conjured into being by Orpheus (the Greek poet-musician, spirit of resurrection and transcendence); Vera may be among the "girls" the speaker summons, as if in the person of Orpheus himself. (Snow, to be sure, would emphasize that "may be" and that "as if.")

In past reviews, Snow's musicality has sometimes been faulted. I beg to differ; he is true to the tone and tune of the work. If extended works of poetry have each a distinct voiceprint, the Duino Elegies would fluctuate steeply, even erratically, above and below a vocal midpoint, as the poet swings from oratorical crowd control to anguished or ecstatic soliloquy and back. The Sonnets to Orpheus have a more even tenor, yet still pulse with vibrancy. They speak, intimate, instruct, reminisce, epiphanize, epitomize, or intone, with something like Buddhist serenity.

Snow has remarked of the Elegies that these, in the poet's view, were his masterwork, the Sonnets merely an unexpected "reward or `bonus' confirming the high oracular achievement" of the former. But in Snow's new version, the Sonnets render that verdict exactly reversible: it is as if Rilke suffered his spectacular blockage and release simply to say through the Sonnets (as one of them exclaims) "Praising, that's it!" Rilke may have been summoned, like his Greek singer, to earn the right to that simple praise of life-life lived up to and over the threshold of death. So: reader, go out and get ready to dance that particular orange.

Reading in translation always makes me suspicious. I am among the faithful who believe that a translator should be a translator above all--and a poet second. To dismiss the words of a renowned author and supplement your own is blasphemy and arrogantly disrespectful. I, for one, believe that it *isn't* impossible to capture the spirit of the work and the actual wording.

Edward Snow does a fairly good job of keeping pace with Rilke, and in some places he shines brilliantly. However, he strays too far in other areas for my comfort. I have trouble following his reasoning in some of the translated passages, which are altered without apparent benefit to meaning or beauty. Also--and perhaps here I am again missing some greater point--he once changes the tense of a verb (I do not mean the konjunktiv) from past to present. Why? Really?

Anyway, Snow is good (this is actually the only translation I've read, so he's really the best I know) enough; for English-only speakers, you will get not only the gist but the passion. But I'll stick to the German part. Students of German: do not rely on it to be strictly accurate.