by Adam Zagajewski

from The Poetry of Rilke, translated & edited by Edward Snow

[. . .] If some other poets from his generation and beyond tied both their spiritual disquietude and moments of inspiration to the cause of their nation, to the historic situation, or to their starkly accentuated biography, Rilke, we know, remained free in this respect; he kept his creative fire far from the furnaces of political or societal passions. There is one exception though: in August 1914 he briefly shared the enthusiasm of German crowds for the just-beginning Great War (he was strengthened in this by his recent discovery of Friedrich Holderlin's poetry, which could be read in a patriotic mode). This happened in his Five Songs, written in the first weeks of the war. These poems sang the praise of a god of war as a great renewer of humanity. Later on, Rilke never joined those poets who wept over the disaster of the same war, which failed to renew anything except the death industry.

The material absence of modern history in Rilke's work will intrigue or even dismay some of his readers. Let us quote one of them, Mieczyslaw Jastrun (1903-83), an eminent Polish poet and a seasoned translator of Rilke's (and Hoderlin's) poetry.

I owe to Jastrun many rich hours and one particular luminous moment, many decades ago, when, still a high school student, I bought a slim, elegant book, Duino Elegies, in his translation. Standing in the street filled with the mediocre din of a lazy Communist afternoon, I read for the first time the magical sentences "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels' / Orders? And even if one of them pressed me / suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed / in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure." The street suddenly disappeared, political systems evaporated, the day became timeless, I met eternity, poetry woke up.

This book was a jewel in my then still very modest library—as opposed to the library of my parents, which was quite well stocked, mostly with novels and short-story collections; don't we live in an age of prose? I loved the forrmat of the Rilke volume—slightly bigger than the conventional size—and the sheer fact that this sequence of ten poems merited a separate edition. This was at a time when I was addicted to fat Russian novels I'd check out from the municipal library. The very slenderness of the Elegies made me wonder about the weight of words: if a thin volume can have so much significance, why carry the epic loads?

Here is what Mieczyslaw Jastrun said in the afterword to one of the many editions of his translations: "When, after World War II, during my stay in Switzerland, I visited the Muzot castle and Rilke's grave in Raron, I was no longer this young man who endlessly admired poems from The Book of Hours and The Book of Images. Rilke was never as remote for me as then, right after the war and the Nazi occupation had ended."

It's not difficult to guess why. Rilke's dialogue with gods and angels, his meditation on night and death (a quiet, aristocratic death, not the plebeian one having to do with machine guns or gas chambers), left out a whole territory of down-to-earth suffering, not sublime at all and yet craving recognition, maybe needing its own poetry. Those of us who have witnessed (or even only read about) the several terrible sequels of World War I and understand that there are two contradictory betrayals lying in wait for every poet—one that consists in forgetting the pain of modern history for the sake of the spiritual life, untouched by the news, and another that has to do with paying close attention to the pain of modern history but forsaking the delicate, nameless substance of our interiority—will be probably more than willing to exonerate Rilke from this criticism. Mieczyslaw Jastrun, for whom every day and hour of the war and occupation could have been his last (he was Jewish and lived in hiding in Warsaw while at the same time actively participating in the underground literary life), himself returned later to Rilke's poetry; his rejection of the unpolitical sublime was only temporary. Once the evil shadow faded, he became again fascinated by the magnetism of this work.

While it is easy and even pleasant to exempt Rilke from the historicist's censure, the question remains and looms large on the horizon of Rilke studies. Yes, it's an unanswerable question. No Stalin ever flung him into a camp. Nobody, and fortunately so, ever sent the poet to the muddy trenches. The ridiculous episode of Rilke having been drafted in Vienna during the war (he held an Austrian passport at the time, after all), the comedy of the forty-year-old poet being for a short time subjected to the absurd ritual of a military drill he painfully remembered from the St. Polten school of his childhood, the stupidity of a larger-than-life sergeant humiliating the poet, mocking him for having a not very soldierly "Maria" as his middle name, and finally the successful rescue operation mounted by the influential and energetic Princess Maria von Thurn und Taxis, who delivered him from the barracks (once upon a time it was the knight who liberated the princess, but here the situation was reversed)—all remain parts of an isolated event in the otherwise well-protected if modest existence of our artist. The wise princess, who admired the poet but also knew well his weaknesses, liked to address Rilke in her letters and otherwise as Dottore Serafico—what a lovely, ironic sobriquet! How good for us, his readers, that he escaped the dungeons of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, some kind of modern evil that manifested itself in World War I and flourished in the following decades in many areas of our planet never made inroads into Rilke's poetic meditation. This is our loss. We've learned that to understand the nature of modern evil is an utterly difficult thing, perhaps impossible; having Rilke among the researchers working in this particular artistic laboratory would have been of inestimable value.

For me, the happy owner of the elegant slim book bought long ago, the Elegies represented just the beginning of a long road leading to a better acquaintance with Rilke's entire oeuvre. The fiery invocation that starts "The First Elegy"—once again: "who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels' / Orders? And even if one of them pressed me / suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed / in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure"—had become for me a living proof that poetry hadn't lost its bewitching powers. At this early stage I didn't know Czeslaw Milosz's poetry; it was successfully banned by the Communist state from the schools, libraries, and bookstores—and from me. One of the first contemporary poets I read and tried to understand was Tadeusz Rozewicz, who then lived in the same city in which I grew up (Gliwice) and, at least hypothetically, might have witnessed the rapturous moment that followed my purchase of the Duino Elegies translated by Jastrun, might have seen a strangely immobile boy standing in the middle of a sidewalk, in the very center of the city, in its main street, at the hour of the local promenade when the sun was going down and the gray industrial city became crimson for fifteen minutes or so. Rozewicz's poems were born out of the ashes of the other war, World War II, and were themselves like a city of ashes. Rozewicz avoided metaphors in his poetry, considering any surplus of imagination an insult to the memory of the last war victims, a threat to the moral veracity of his poems; they were supposed to be quasi-reports from the great catastrophe. His early poems, written before Adorno uttered his famous dictum that after Auschwitz poetry's competence was limited—literally, he said, "It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz"—were already imbued with the spirit of limitation and caution.

I admired the spartan sparseness of Rozewicz's language then, and for some time I did agree that poetry definitely must be tame, metaphorless, prosy, since history had delivered it such a deadly blow. Flights of imagination had to be strictly forbidden, I thought. Compared to the intentional flatness of Rozewicz's poetry, the wild opening of the first of the Duino elegies—but also everything that followed in this and the other elegies—was a welcome, almost unexpected confirmation that the poetic fire could still be alive, indeed was alive. Luckily, chronological (or, as the boring theorists of structuralism liked to say, diachronic) order doesn't apply to poetry at all, so that an earlier poem can contend with one written much later and thus can reassure the young reader: Don't listen to any contemporary commandments that seem to represent the verdict of the Zeitgeist itself. Listen to great poets only; sometimes a Catullus can save you from a literary dictatorship of somebody who lives only five blocks away. And then perhaps you will see that under some circumstances the Zeitgeist may turn out to be no more convincing intellectually than a vulgar poltergeist.

These were the happy beginnings of my long acquaintance with Rilke's poetry. Later I also delighted in reading his prose: not so much the Cornet Christopher Rilke story, which somehow never appealed to me, but his only novel, the difficult Malte, which, with the density of an existentialist treatise, fascinated me. I also read with pleasure and profit Rilke's book on Rodin. Every young artist should read it: this beautiful praise of discipline exerts a stimulating effect on younger minds who may tend to overrate the irrational, purely inspirational ingredient of artistry. Even later I discovered the ocean of Rilke's letters. These letters contain everything from everyday gossip (but how elegant! how entertaining!) to the most sublime observations on life and art. In recent years I've read with the greatest interest his letters to Nanny Wunderly Volkart, a rich Swiss lady. There are two volumes of the correspondence, containing only the poet's letters; Wunderly Volkart decided to keep private her part of the exchange. These two volumes belong to the last chapter of Rilke's life, to the period when he left Munich, escaping political insecurity and the postwar misery of the Bavarian city, and went to Switzerland, at first with the idea of staying there for a short time only, but then, relishing the Swiss stability and lack of any revolutionary mood in the Alpine country, deciding to prolong his visit indefinitely.

The letters to Nanny Wunderly Volkart allow us a deep insight into Rilke's method of living and creating. The entire Dottore Serafico is in them: as the lady in question was quite powerful within the Swiss political and administrative network and the homeless poet's passport tended to lose its validity quite often, the letters are sometimes not free of supplicatory undertones. At the same time they never lose the air of a sovereign artistic dignity; Rilke rewarded his friend with the most generous pages, which reflected his spiritual quest in the new-for-him context of quotidian life in a Swiss villa or castle. For Rilke at this stage of his poetic pilgrimage, letters didn't represent just a way of communicating with friends and acquaintances; rather, they were the very content and substance of his life. In all these Swiss palaces he was only a guest, dependent on the whims of his hosts. He couldn't yet begin to write his great poems, his Duino Elegies, his Sonnets to Orpheus, and he knew it; he was still looking for a quiet place, for a poetic tower, which, as we know, he did find later in the canton of Valais. In the meantime, any villa he temporarily inhabited was only a waiting room. So—we know this from his letters—there were days if not weeks entirely devoted to letter writing. Here the usual ratio between living a life and writing letters that would give an account of it was radically reversed. It was a life that consumed itself in endless missives whose addressees were mostly representatives of European nobility plus a few chosen anonymous people, mostly women, whom he considered his flock and looked after.

From the letters we learn about the rituals that accompanied Rilke's writing, what kind of paper was suitable, which inkpot and what kind of table were absolutely necessary. We also learn that many other letters had to be written; sometimes a letter to Nanny Wunderly Volkart has to be cut short because another must be urgently jotted down and soon after brought to a distant post office. Later, when the long-awaited avalanche of inspiration arrived, there were for quite a while no letters; their aim had been achieved, but at this preliminary juncture the correspondence filled his time and mind. At the same time it prevented him from writing poems he would consider minor.

Anyone who has spent several decades reading a major poet—of course always with some interruptions, we never dwell upon one poet for years continuously—will agree that this is a very complex story where fidelity and fickleness, even disloyalty, change places all the time, as in some elegant seventeenth-century dance—the minuet, let's say. Someone who loves C. P. Cavafy's work, for instance, will probably have to admit that, as much as he admires this poet, he has also known periods when passion for and interest in the modern Greek bard faded for a while—as if each act of reading poetry consisted in acquiring some kind of spiritual vitamins and in the process our inner voice would tell us from time to time: good, enough of this, give me a different nutrient now. So after the immense intelligence of Cavafy's historical poems the inner voice might be tempted to say: Please, give me a poet like Dylan Thomas now. Rilke is no exception to the rule; perhaps he's even one of those great poets whose grip on readers fluctuates the most. For one thing, there's almost no sense of humor in his poetry, as contrasted with his letters, which emanate a lovely understanding of the droll side of life—in the letters we hear the voice of Dottore Serafico, not a prophet. His poetry is almost always high-strung; in a way it represents the essence of poetry in the purity of its lyric song. Rilke's oeuvre, especially in his last years, is also characterized by a certain "passivity"; this is a poetry that receives, that listens to, that waits for a signal coming from the outside—as opposed, for instance, to many of W. H. Auden's later poems, where a muscular rhetoric is at work, a rhetoric that gesticulates, posits, invents, denies, and moralizes all the time. Not so Rilke, who listens to the world, watches the world, who receives.

And we, spectators, always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
It fills us to overflowing. We arrange it. It falls apart.
We rearrange it, and fall apart ourselves.
                                 ("The Eighth Elegy")

The poetic language has to follow the gaze, not the other way around. This is why he declares in "The Ninth Elegy":

The traveler doesn't return to the valley from the mountainside
with a handful of sod, around which all stand mute,
but with a word he's won, a pure word, the yellow and blue
gentian. What if we're only here to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window, —
at most: column, tower ... but for saying, understand,
oh for such saying as the things themselves
never dreamt so intensely to be.

I have to confess my own fickleness in regard to Rilke's oeuvre. Even the Duino Elegies, the absolute summit of this poetic mountain range—the sequence of poems that was revealed to me in the shape of the slim book very early in the history of my reading, in the middle of an industrial city in Silesia—has in my life, known periods of oblivion, periods of gathering dust in a distant corner of my library. His wonderful requiems have known the same fate. Rilke's grip on an individual reader may indeed fluctuate strongly; nevertheless, his power of captivating new generations of readers is absolutely undiminished.

How to read the Duino elegies, those ten great poems that form the summit of Rilke's art? should we try to understand them thoroughly or rush through them like children who run through the forest at night, half terrified, half elated? The question is almost pointless: whoever will risk an expedition to a good library will soon find an almost endless array of commentaries. Christian philosophers will inform us how Christian the Duino elegies are; existentialists will claim Rilke as one of their colleagues; Husserl's disciples will find here ten tons of phenomenology; other historians of ideas will inform us that this is simply Friedrich Nietzsche put into verse! Should we listen to them? Of course not. Or rather: we should know about these philosophical or ideological readings and then try to forget them. The elegies are like a forest; there's not a single line in them not written under the spell of inspiration, and truly poetic, not philosophical, inspiration. The elegies are an enchanted forest, and after a while an attentive reader will resemble not a child but a snowy owl flying silently between the dense spruce branches with the utmost facility—and with a kind of sad happiness that is, it seems, a proper response to great poetry. An attentive reader will understand that this is a poem that deals with ultimate questions, with unanswerable questions—who are we, what is death, are lovers the privileged ones, what can art give us ...

Consider this strophe in "The Seventh Elegy":

Life here is magic. Even you knew that, you girls
who seemed so deprived of it, whose lives twisted down
into the city's vilest streets, festering, or opened
for the worst debris. There was an hour for each of you,
perhaps not even an hour, but between two intervals
a space scarcely measured by the rules of time—,
when you existed. Completely. Veins filled with existence.
But we so easily forget what our laughing neighbor
neither covets nor confirms. We want to lift it up
and show it, even though the most visible happiness
only reveals itself when we've changed it, within.

Do we really need any commentary? We feel the poet has arrived here at the limit of the sayable and takes risks like a gambler who, shortly before the casino is going to close, puts on the table bills of the highest denomination: life, existence, happiness. The croupier looks at him with a condescending smile that says: Come on, I've seen it all hundreds of times. But the poet wins.

Maybe it's more interesting to see Rilke's work as not as virginal, not as ethereal, as it seems to many readers. After all, like the majority of literary modernists, he is an antimodern; one of the main impulses in his work consists in looking for antidotes to modernity. Heroes of his poems move in a spiritual space, not in the streets of New York or Paris, but they also, because of their intense existence, are meant to act against the supposed or real ugliness of the modern world. Even Rilke's snobbery, hypothetical or not, can be seen as corresponding more to his ideas than to the weaknesses of his character: aristocrats represented for the poet the survivors of a better Europe, a chivalric continent, as opposed to the degradation caused by profit-oriented modernity, cherishing mass production and car races. He was not alone in representing this position—it will be enough to refer to the aesthetic movement and Walter Pater, who preceded him by one generation. Had Rilke met Marcel Proust, who was born only four years before our poet (they never met, but we know that Rilke admired the first volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu, published before his death), we can be sure there would have been between them no major disagreement concerning matters of philosophy, taste, and society. And certainly he would have readily agreed with his friend Paul Valery when the French poet was sadly sighing at the sight of a new Europe of efficiency, labor, and military drill, and when, regretting the loss of the unhurried pace of intellectual work and musing in the past, he pronounced these beautiful words: "Adieu, travaux infiniment lents ... "

Some of the more sharp-eyed scholars have even found one or two sentences in Rilke's letters in praise of Mussolini. This is not what I mean: I don't intend to accuse the superb poet of any political misdemeanor. What I want is simply also to see in his poetry a dimension that has a lot to do with the diversity of intellectual polemics, some of which are still ongoing. We're still pondering the value of modernity, as was Rilke, even if we do this using different notions and examples. We have a new sorrow today: after the terrible catastrophes of the twentieth century, after the disasters that entered both our memory and imagination, we tread gingerly at the point where poetry meets society; "Don't walk beyond this line," as the sign on every jetliner's wing warns us. And yet the central issue for us is probably the question of whether the mystery at the heart of poetry (and of art in general) can be kept safe against the assaults of an omnipresent talkative and soulless journalism and an equally omnipresent popular science—or pseudo-science. It also has a lot to do with the weighing of the advantages and vices of mass culture, with the influence of mass media, and with a difficult search for genuine expression inside the commercial framework that has replaced older, less vulgar traditions and institutions in our societies. In this respect, it's true, poets have less to fear than their friends the painters, especially the successful ones, who, because of the absurd prices their works can now command, will never see their canvases in the houses of their fellow artists, in the apartments of people like themselves, only in vaults belonging to oil or television moguls who don't even have time to look at them. Still, the stakes of the debate and its seriousness are not very different and not less important than a hundred years ago.

We know that the main domain of poetry is contemplation, through the riches of language, of human and nonhuman realities, in their separateness and in their numerous encounters, tragic or joyful. Rilke's powerful Angel standing at the gates of the Elegies, timeless as he is, is there to guard something that the modern era—which gave us so much in other fields—took away from us or only concealed: ecstatic moments, for instance, moments of wonder, hours of mystical ignorance, days of leisure, sweet slowness of reading and meditating. Ecstatic moments—aren't they one of the main reasons why poetry readers cannot live without Rilke's work? I mean here readers of contemporary poetry who otherwise are mostly kept on a rather meager diet of irony. The Angel is timeless, and yet his timelessness is directed against the deficiencies of a certain epoch. So is Rilke: timeless and deeply immersed in his own historic time. Not innocent, though; only silence is innocent, and he still speaks to us.

About the Author
Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945. His books include Tremor, Canvas, Mysticism for Beginners, Without End, Two Cities, Another Beauty, and Eternal Enemies—all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He lives in Kracow, Paris, and Chicago.

The Poetry of Rilke
North Point Press