Rainer Maria Rilke, Germany's greatest modern
lyric poet, is known
to English speakers through countless translations
and studies. Born of German
parents in Prague in 1875, he was sent to a military
academy by his father and thence into business, to both
of which he was unsuited. A rich uncle arranged for a university
education, but Rilke took to writing, starting with a sentimental
poetry that was much disliked by critics and himself subsequently.
He married the artist Clara Westhoff in 1901, but left a
year later, unable to cope with the emotional or financial
commitments. His first important collections came with The
Book of Hours (1905) that resulted from a visit to Russia
with Nietzsche's friend, Lou Andreas Salomé. and
New Poems (1907-8) that show the influence of Rodin,
whose private secretary he briefly became. He stayed on
in Paris, composing his one novel The Notebooks of Malte
Laurids Brigge (1910)and writing poetry in French.
Translations from English, French and Italian poets were
the product of travel in Spain and north Africa. Restless
and solitary, Rilke found refuge in 1912 at Schloss Duino
on the Dalmatian coast, where a flood of inspiration began
a style of poetry unknown in German before. These Duino
Elegies were completed in 1923, Sonnets
to Orpheus
followed, and in 1926 Rilke died of leukemia.
Rilke's poetry
Rilke made the passage from the exquisite musicality and
introverted world-weariness of fin-de-siècle verse
to a muscular clarity in New
Poems and then opened up new realms of experience
in the Duino Elegies. Many of the poems in The
Book of Hours are extraordinarily beautiful, and can
be appreciated with little German. But the work in New
Poems was denser and more direct: Rilke had learned
from Rodin to record objectively what he saw, and not create
at secondhand from the history or musical associations of
words. Animate and inanimate objects were studied until
they were understood and could be recreated in their intrinsic
natures. Though the Duino
Elegies have become central to contemporary debate
on language
and meaning, older readers admired Rilke for making
the German language a more flexible, precise and sensitive
medium.
Rilke's
thought
If many of Rilke's early poems are virtuoso pieces,
richly coloured and sometimes verging on the precious and
sentimental. the later work is much more difficult. The
Duino Elegies
may only be understandable to those familiar with Rilke's
own states of mind, which resulted from an intensely private
and solitary existence.
Language
was pushed to its uttermost, and the technical mastery allowed
Rilke to say beautifully what it had not said before. "The
essential function of art is to think and feel existence
to that conclusion which convinces us of its perfection
- to affirm, bless and deify existence." The
words are Nietzsche's, but express the existentialist
aims of much of Rilke's poetry. The heroic self-dedication
of the Symbolist poet reached greatness in the Rilke, but
it was a road that left enormous problems of interpretation,
and one that few travelled thereafter.
Books and Internet resources
Innumerable studies exist — H E Holthusen's R.M. Rilke:
A Study of His Later Poetry (1952), H W Belmore's Rilke's
Craftsmanship: An Analysis of this Poetic Style (1954)
and R. Gass's
Reading
Gass Reading Rilke, to name but three. Well-regarded translations
include: J B Leishman's Duino Elegies (1939), E Snow's
The Book of Images (1991), S. Mitchell's Duino
Elegies (1992) and Kinnell and Liebmann's The Essential
Rilke (2000). A short bibliography is given by books
and writers, a longer one by Left
Bank, and readings by Cliff
Crego. German readers will find these useful: rilke
gesellschaft, gutenberg
and litlinks.
Many readers will have learned German at school, and these
sites offer excellent resources: learngerman,
germanware,
german
language web exercises, and Colonel
Craig's links. The international Goethe
Institutes teach German, and German learning courses can
also be obtained on CD,
cassette,
online
and elsewhere.
