Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is the most translated into English of twentieth century poets.  He has attracted, and continues to attract, scores of translators and poets who have set themselves the task to English separate poems or whole books.  Duino Elegies is the single most frequently translated twentieth century book into English.   Since James Blair Leishman (1902-1963) and Stephen Spender’s (1909-1995) translation was published in 1939, the book has always been in print in English, currently (ninety years after their original publication) with at least a dozen versions in print.   Perhaps only Homer and Dante sustain similar translation intensity.   No modern poet does, not Lorca, Baudelaire, Valery, Montale, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Elitis, Seferis or even Neruda.  What justification then for another Rilke volume? 

            A tremendously seductive mystique surrounds Rilke’s writing of Duino Elegies.  It is a story that he fostered and repeated in numerous letters.  Readers, teachers and commentators continue to relish and embellish it.

            Briefly, then—once upon a time—well, actually in 1912—as guest to Princess Marie von Thurn-und-Taxis (1855-1934) , Rilke stayed at the small castle of Duino in what is now Slovenia along the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  During a storm one winter night, with waves lashing the cliffs beneath the castle, as he stood outside on a balcony, he felt a voice dictating the opening lines of the First Elegy.

                        Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel

                        Ordnungen?                           

                        Who, if I cried, would hear me among the Orders

of the angels?

(“First Elegy,” 1-2)

 Within days he had completely written the first two elegies and part of a third which he later rejected.  After that powerful and mysterious moment of impassioned “dictation” and creativity, he awaited the continuation and completion of what he always believed to be a much bigger work.  He often lamented it would ever come and that his “great work” would be a failed fragment.  Ten years later, in 1922, at Cháteau de Muzot a small Swiss tower near Sierre which had been bought by Werner Reinhart, a Swiss patron, for Rilke’s permanent residence, he finished the ten elegies in a second feverish and all-engrossing period of a few days, and went on in the next few days to write two cycles of sonnets, Sonnets to Orpheus.  During the decade between Duino and Muzot, he had endured wandering across war-torn Europe in search of the privacy and calm which alone, he believed, might foster the receptiveness to finish the project so mysteriously begun.

            Princess Marie’s patronage and support was unbroken and they shared a voluminous correspondence that includes some of Rilke’s most revelatory and profound letters.  In his mind, were they ever to be completed, Princess Marie was the elegies’ owner and immediately upon completion of the set, he wrote to her:

                                                                                    11. February, evening

                        At last,

                             Princess,

at last the blessed, how blessed day, when the completion—as far as I can see—of the

Elegies

can be announced to you: Ten!  My hand is still trembling with the last, great one . . .

(Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke and Princess Marie von Thurn-und-Taxis, 214)    

            Despite the almost fairytale aura of castles and a princess, amid twentieth century modernism’s debunking of romanticism, the story of the elegies brings together many of romanticism’s most cherished notions to recast them with a renewed veracity: moments of heightened creative and inspired production scarcely needing revision; the artist’s need to suffer in misunderstood isolation; the superhuman production of transcendent masterworks as reward for isolation, suffering and inner turmoil and self-doubt; and belated recognition and acclaim.  That readers have believed and trusted Rilke’s story of the elegies’ creation is as much a part of their grip on our imaginations as is the story itself.  As recent as 2010, Kathleen Komar, a leading authority on the Elegies,  although surely she knows better, states:

Written between 1912 and 1922 in two burst of creative activity separated by the trauma of the First World War, Rilke’s Duino Elegies simultaneously record his creation of a poetics and exemplify that poetics.  (82)

            But the real story of the elegies is rather less magical, though no less heuristic.   Between 1912 and 1922, Rilke’s attention rarely strayed far from the materials of the elegies.  His restless travels sought a settled space to live where work on them might resume and flourish.  When he was not drafting fragments that he associated directly with them, frequently the themes associated with the final work were touched peripherally in other poems—or in letters—some of which actually predate the Duino epiphany.  For instance he wrote three memorial requiems (“For a Friend” and “For Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth” published in a single volume, Requiem, in 1909; and “For a Boy” written in November 1915 but not published until 1953 (English translation, 1959).  The first two are poems of breadth and structure with the assured cadences, swerves and veering and the incomparable elegiac tone that we associate with the Duino set.  Despite the highly personal occasion of each, they belong to the slow process of making the elegies.  “For a Boy” has specific affinities with the Fourth Elegy.  Besides the three requiems, the great elegiac tropes of angels and lovers, are explored in poem after poem and fragment upon fragment during these years.

            By 1918, Rilke had collected a packet of elegy related materials, and despairing that he might ever finish the project, he entrusted the set to his publisher, Anton Kippenberg, with the title Anfänge und Fragmente aus dem Umkreis der Elegien (Beginnings and Fragments from the Thematic Material of the Elegies).   The significance to him of the set is manifest by his collecting it as he did, and apparently he even imagined a small volume with these materials as an appendage to the two original completed elegies.  At this time they were simply Elegies for the name Duino was added at the time of their completion.

            The story that the 1912-1922 decade was essentially barren is refuted by the large number of poems and fragments that were published in 1953 as Gedichte 1906 bis 1926 and updated with a few additions in Sämtliche Werke: Zweiter Band in 1957.  Although Rilke published no new books between Das Marien-Leben (1913) and Duino Elegies (1923), he was far from mute as Gedichte 1906 bis 1926 attests.  One thread running through the many uncollected poems and fragments is the packet Rilke called Beginnings and Fragments from the Thematic Material of the Elegies.

In February 1922 when he celebrates the achievement of the Tenth Elegy, there is a back-story to his crowing letter to Princess Marie, for only days before he had announced completion of the cycle to Anton Kippenberg, but his letter described a distinctly different set.  He told Kippenberg that he envisioned a two-part volume: nine elegies in part one and collections of “beginnings and fragments” at part two.  Further, “Gegen-Strophen” (“Antistrophes”) was the Fifth Elegy.  The notion of a “book” consisting in part of fragments was not necessarily seen as a failed project.  Friedrich Hölderlin’s (1770-1843) fragmentary late elegies had become canonical and much studied, and Franz Schubert’s (1797-1828) Eighth Symphony and Anton Bruckner’s (1824-1896) Ninth Symphony were performed as unfinished but “whole” works.  Perhaps more to the point, Gustav Mahler’s Tenth Symphony (1860-1911) was premiered in 1923 after his death in a performance edition made by Ernst Krenek (1900-1991) at Mahler’s widow’s request as a single movement Adagio; it is still often performed as a magnificent “fragment.”  During the same period Krenek was briefly married to Mahler’s daughter and received support from Swiss patron Werner Reinhart (1884-1951) who also helped Rilke with the purchase of Muzot.  Might Rilke have envisioned something like a poetic Mahler’s Tenth? On 11 February, such considerations became moot. His “hand . . . still trembling with the last, great one,” the Tenth, and a new Fifth Elegy to replace “Gegen-Strophen,” the cycle was complete as he long envisioned it—nothing tentative, no mere “beginning,” no fragments.

J. B. Leishman worked closely with the German editor, Ernst Zinn, to produce a complete translation of these uncollected materials entitled Poems 1906 to 1926 which has remained the standard English version for over fifty years.  Leishman’s long introductory essay makes a strong case for the indispensable value to our picture of Rilke’s life’s work of these materials.  As he struggles with the many problems of concept, image, diction and word-invention which characterize Rilke’s poetry, Leishman’s translations are often felicitous, and are always engaging.  The depth of my appreciation of Rilke’s language-world has been built on careful comparison of Leishman’s English with the original German.  More than any other translator, his way of translating taught me how to read Rilke.  I remain in his debt.  It is no exaggeration to say that I speak for thousands of readers when I say were it not for Leishman’s Englished Rilke, we would have a smaller Rilke, and the ontology for us of what poetry is would be also diminished.   Nevertheless, there are compelling reasons to do again in English some of the materials he first translated over fifty years ago. 

First, the elegies are now well into a fourth generation of translations in English.  Page by page comparisons of the early translators with the most recent reveal a trend that revises the Rilke we thought we knew.  I find crisper, tighter rhythms, a tendency toward more concrete word choices, and a shift away from the early translators’ invention of gerund noun plurals and hyphenated word-inventions.  The diction of late Victorian symbolism has definitely shifted to modernist colloquialism and concreteness.  As much as I have long admired Leishman’s massive labors, on many occasions I crave a more incisive English poem, something that captures the shift of diction and hardness of image which Rilke exploited in the Neue Gedichte (1907-1908) and carried forward into his later years.   Leishman is sometimes more ethereal, prolix and obscure than Rilke deserves.  Not only is there a vast enterprise in translating Rilke, unlike almost any other poet he has inspired deep reflections on the problems of translating poetry. William H.  Gass’s (b.1924) Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (1999) is almost unique in its reflective intensity.

Second, to my knowledge the materials associated with the elegies have never been presented in English as a group.   Both Zinn and Leishman print the uncollected materials in chronological order of composition but separate what Zinn considers “finished” poems in one section from “fragments” in a later section.  With both editors, one must do considerable digging and cross-referencing to find the items Rilke packaged as Anfänge und Fragmente aus dem Umkreis der Elegien.  Even then, the job is only partial, since materials which were actually incorporated into final elegies are not printed separately at the chronological point when they were first written in either Sämtliche Werke: Zweiter Band or Poems 1902-1926.  For instance the lines produced in winter and spring 1913 at Ronda and Paris that later became part of the Sixth Elegy are not printed next to items labeled Anfänge und Fragmente such as “Unwissend vor dem Himmel meines Lebens . . .” (item 18) written near the same time. With Zinn and Leishman, it is impossible for a reader imaginatively to embrace the text Rilke entrusted to Kippenberg in 1918, which means we can’t embrace the conception-process of the elegies as they occurred in real time.  Of course, when the elegies came to full fruition in 1922, the need for a set of Anfänge und Fragmente for Rilke was moot; in fact, had they been published while he was alive, they would have undermined his story of “possession” and “dictation,” hiatus, despair and suddenly eventual “achievement.”

Third, as the impact of Duino Elegies on successive generations of readers and poets is unabated, the Anfänge und Fragmente might now have an urgency that neither Zinn nor Leishman would have appreciated, simply because a chronology of the writing of the Elegies is beneficial to understanding them. After all, up to the last days before the cycle took final shape, Rilke himself considered the Beginnings and Fragments worthy of publication and integral to the completed cycle of nine. Reading the materials associated with the elegies in chronological order presents us with a different vision of how the elegies were written, and in significant ways undercuts the much cherished story of the double moments of possession and dictation at Duino and Muzot separated by ten years in the wilderness.  From a chronological reading, two facts drive that undercutting.  Rilke was never far from the elegies during the alleged silent decade and by the time the set of ten was assembled in February 1922, much more than just the first two were already accomplished.   As Leishman long ago explained:

What, exactly, did the ‘completion’ of the Elegies involve?  The first four, as we have seen, were already there, and all but the last ten lines of the Sixth; the Fifth, Seventh, and Eighth were written entirely at Muzot, together with all but the first six and the last three lines of the ninth, and all but the first twelve lines of the Tenth.  (Elegies, 13)

Later scholarship has adjusted his account somewhat as this book shows, but as early as 1939, Rilke readers in English should have been aware that the 1912-1922 decade was neither mute nor lost.  It was intermittent with flashes of powerful and insightful writing, sometimes in fits and starts that seemed to be groping toward an as yet unimagined totality which did not take final shape until Muzot in 1922.     

            I have not found it easy to know what to include in this book   The 1912-1922 materials, whether completed poems or fragments and drafts, often overlap themes in the elegies: childhood, dolls, angels, the smile, night, lovers and heroes.   Doubtless, these poems all played a part in building up the language-world out of which the elegies were ultimately constructed and articulated.   I have made my choices using four criteria.

1.      All the materials that Rilke included in Anfänge und Fragmente aus dem Umkreis der Elegien as identified by Zinn and Leishman.  There are the six items he labeled as Anfänge plus lines and sections that later were incorporated into finished elegies as well as the elegies fully complete before he put together the manuscript for Kippenberg in 1919.

2.      The rejected versions of the Fifth and Tenth Elegies.

3.      A few separate poems such as “To the Angel” which are so close in composition to elegy materials that the relationship is self-evident and compelling.

I have further included all Rilke’s inscriptions that have been found in gift copies of Duineser Elegien after its publication in 1923.  These short poems resonate with the elegies in illuminating ways and deepen our overall understanding of them.  Finally, I end with the exchange of poems between Rilke and the young Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) in 1926.  His poem to her is named Elegy, his only use of that word in a title outside the Duino set, which led her to refer to it as the Eleventh Elegy.

A short heading introduces each item with identification of date and its relation to the elegies.  My hope is that through this volume, readers who have come to know Duino Elegies will find their pleasures of that remarkable book to be enhanced and renewed, and that I have justified yet another Rilke in English.

Finally in a peculiar reversal of Rilke’s diptych arrangement proposed to Kippenberg shortly before the final completion of the Elegies, after the items that constitute the Beginnings and Fragments, I include the full cycle of the ten Duino Elegies.  As readers explore Beginnings and Fragments they can reference the elegies without needing to find another source.

A word about my notion of translation.  German syntax differs from English.  Many translations from German to English, especially prose, simply cast the German word order aside and devise sound idiomatic English sentences.  To do otherwise can create ugly contortions.  For poetry, however, and especially for Rilke, this approach is a problem.  Rilke’s thought flow is temporal and inseparable to his syntax, what William Waters describes as his “kinetic motion or rides” (60).  This can sometimes be unconventional and startling even in German—such that to English the syntax as one might prose severely distorts the “ride” of his thought.  Rilke’s syntax withholds key words and spreads syntactic relations across intervening phrases and other modifiers, in order to perform a sense of ideas and images discovering themselves as it were.  The “kinetic motion” of is poems perform a temporal drama that sets him apart from many poets.  As the order in which images and verbs arrive to a reader’s consciousness, the “ride” is integral to their meaning.   In this he is most like Shakespeare in English, for like Shakespeare, we await and then arrive at words often after extended syntactic suspensions, halts and interruptions.  My approach to translating Rilke has been to be faithful to the temporal drama of his syntax while not falling into such non-idiomatic English constructions as to be unreadable.  My goal is to make a poem that “works” in English.  With these priorities, I therefore have not attempted to replicate meters and rhymes.

                        Don Mager

Charlotte, NC 1991-1992, 2010