Heraclitean quality of a flame in which others have been unwilling to hold their hands without wincing (11, 12):
Will transformation. Be inspired by the flame
where a thing made of change conceals itself.
then the figures, so essential, and some sense of Rilke’s rich verbal music, complex wordplay, and intricate complicities of suggestion; so that reaching the last factor, I think I’d be ready, in most cases, to give up his verse forms first.
Most of the translators of the Elegies and the Sonnets do their homework and offer useful notes. There are certainly many clues to the meaning of Rilke’s poems to be found in his letters. Above all, nearly every poem is a version of many poems that have been written before it, and of many more to follow. This is one reason why Rilke is given to poetic outbursts. These sudden outpourings are summations: the regathering, reclenching, and releasing of a fresh fistful of former themes, images, motifs, emotions, ideas.
Yet in several significant instances, scholarship has failed to warn translators away from errors. The most outrageous of these occurs in the first quatrain of a very famous sonnet from New Poems , “Torso of an Archaic Apollo.” In a footnote in his Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Works , 7 Leishman explains that in Germany and Austria the word Kandelaber “was the usual word for a streetlamp: not for the comparatively short post with a single square lantern, but for the much taller and more elegant sort with two globes, each suspended from either end of a wide semicircular crosspiece. Gas lamps, in which the main supply was turned on by means of a long pole and ignited from a small, perpetually burning bypass, had not yet been replaced by electric. Rilke had already used the word in the poem ‘Night Drive.’ ”
This news comes too late to help C. F. MacIntyre, who is forced into contortions:
Never will we know his fabulous head
where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened. Yet
his torso glows: a candelabrum set
before his gaze which is pushed back and hid …
Even Leishman concentrates on the second part of his information (how the gas is turned down), instead of on the shape of the lamps, with their semicircular, hence skull-like, crosspiece and their eye-shaped globes. He writes, omitting mention of the Augenäpfel :
Though we’ve not known his unimagined head
and what divinity his eyes were showing,
his torso like a branching street-lamp’s glowing,
wherein his gaze, only turned down, can shed
light still.
My own effort tries, perhaps too hard, to justify itself:
Never will we know his legendary head
where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened. Yet
his torso glows as if his look were set
above it in suspended globes that shed
a street’s light down.
The temptation to push past Rilke’s German into the Platonic poem itself, the poem no one can write without resorting to some inevitably distorting language, is sometimes irresistible. One should never go, I think, quite all the way, yet a little flirting, some heavy petting, may sometimes be more than a pleasant indulgence. Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, or the gods may succeed. To do so, the translator has to say to the reader:forget the fact that the poem belongs in its body as utterly as you do in yours; listen to what’s going on behind my tongue, in my mind where the Muse was, in your mind where the Muse is. Try to realize the presence of Apollo’s decapitated head, its absent eyelight shining down upon the fragment that is its torso. See how complete this desecrated stone is, although it has no face, no smile, once upon a time tight curls of hair maybe, now armless, no longer wearing its inoffensive little phallus like a bit of fatter pubic hair, its well-muscled legs once extending into a firmly footed stance. They are the same bodily implements you have, reader (excepting, sometimes, the sex), without the necessity to imagine them, and none of them stone. Yet, lo and behold, that absent look, that vanished
Will transformation. Be inspired by the flame
where a thing made of change conceals itself.
then the figures, so essential, and some sense of Rilke’s rich verbal music, complex wordplay, and intricate complicities of suggestion; so that reaching the last factor, I think I’d be ready, in most cases, to give up his verse forms first.
Most of the translators of the Elegies and the Sonnets do their homework and offer useful notes. There are certainly many clues to the meaning of Rilke’s poems to be found in his letters. Above all, nearly every poem is a version of many poems that have been written before it, and of many more to follow. This is one reason why Rilke is given to poetic outbursts. These sudden outpourings are summations: the regathering, reclenching, and releasing of a fresh fistful of former themes, images, motifs, emotions, ideas.
Yet in several significant instances, scholarship has failed to warn translators away from errors. The most outrageous of these occurs in the first quatrain of a very famous sonnet from New Poems , “Torso of an Archaic Apollo.” In a footnote in his Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Works , 7 Leishman explains that in Germany and Austria the word Kandelaber “was the usual word for a streetlamp: not for the comparatively short post with a single square lantern, but for the much taller and more elegant sort with two globes, each suspended from either end of a wide semicircular crosspiece. Gas lamps, in which the main supply was turned on by means of a long pole and ignited from a small, perpetually burning bypass, had not yet been replaced by electric. Rilke had already used the word in the poem ‘Night Drive.’ ”
This news comes too late to help C. F. MacIntyre, who is forced into contortions:
Never will we know his fabulous head
where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened. Yet
his torso glows: a candelabrum set
before his gaze which is pushed back and hid …
Even Leishman concentrates on the second part of his information (how the gas is turned down), instead of on the shape of the lamps, with their semicircular, hence skull-like, crosspiece and their eye-shaped globes. He writes, omitting mention of the Augenäpfel :
Though we’ve not known his unimagined head
and what divinity his eyes were showing,
his torso like a branching street-lamp’s glowing,
wherein his gaze, only turned down, can shed
light still.
My own effort tries, perhaps too hard, to justify itself:
Never will we know his legendary head
where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened. Yet
his torso glows as if his look were set
above it in suspended globes that shed
a street’s light down.
The temptation to push past Rilke’s German into the Platonic poem itself, the poem no one can write without resorting to some inevitably distorting language, is sometimes irresistible. One should never go, I think, quite all the way, yet a little flirting, some heavy petting, may sometimes be more than a pleasant indulgence. Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, or the gods may succeed. To do so, the translator has to say to the reader:forget the fact that the poem belongs in its body as utterly as you do in yours; listen to what’s going on behind my tongue, in my mind where the Muse was, in your mind where the Muse is. Try to realize the presence of Apollo’s decapitated head, its absent eyelight shining down upon the fragment that is its torso. See how complete this desecrated stone is, although it has no face, no smile, once upon a time tight curls of hair maybe, now armless, no longer wearing its inoffensive little phallus like a bit of fatter pubic hair, its well-muscled legs once extending into a firmly footed stance. They are the same bodily implements you have, reader (excepting, sometimes, the sex), without the necessity to imagine them, and none of them stone. Yet, lo and behold, that absent look, that vanished
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