THE SECOND ELEGY
A figure from the Apocryphal book of Tobit. Ordered by his dying father to travel from Nineveh to Media to retrieve a sum of money being held for him there by another man, Tobias looks for someone who knows the way, and encounters a youth his own age who is the archangel Raphael in disguise. The angel agrees to accompany him, “and so the two went forth, and the young man's dog went with them.”
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Ancient Greek marble tombstones or funerary plaques, often carved with scenes of intimate, everyday human interaction.
THE FOURTH ELEGY
Rilke's cousin, Egon von Schiele (1873â80), to whose memory the eighth sonnet of the Second Part of theSonnets to Orpheus is dedicated. Rilke wrote of him:
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I often think of him and keep on returning to his figure, which has remained for me indescribably affecting. Much “childhood,” the sadness and helplessness of childhood, is embodied for me in his form, in the ruff he wore, in his neck, in his chin, in his beautiful brown eyes, disfigured by a squint. So I invoked him once more in connection with that eighth Sonnet, which expresses transitoriness, after he had already served as the prototype for little Erick Brahe, the dead child, inThe Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
(To Phia Rilke, January 24, 1924; in Carl Sieber,René Rilke: Die Jugend Rainer Maria Rilke [Leipzig, 1932], p. 59f.)
THE FIFTH ELEGY
Frau Hertha Koening was a lyricist who in December 1914 had purchased, perhaps at Rilke's suggestion, Picasso's 1905 paintingLa famille des saltimbanques. Rilke subsequently wrote to her asking permission to reside in her Munich apartment while she was away on her country vacation. She granted his request, and he spent the summer and early fall of 1915 living beside “the great Picasso.” The human figures who stand quietly, almost abstractedly in Picasso's painting do influence “The Fifth Elegy” (though as much in ontological mood as in detail), but they mingle in Rilke's imagination with a troupe of real-life acrobats he observed with fascination during his first years in Paris. (“And so now the âSaltimbanques' too are there, who had such a profound impact on me during my earliest stay in Paris and who have been packed away inside me ever since,” Rilke wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé on February 20, 1922, just days after finishing “The Fifth Elegy.”) These actual acrobats inspired an entry in one of Rilke's notebooks dated July 14, 1907. Comparing it to Picasso's so differently haunting tableau may suggest something of the complex alchemy at work in “The Fifth Elegy”:
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In front of the Luxembourg Gardens, near the Panthéon, Père Rollin and his troupe have spread themselves out again. The same carpet lies there, the same thick winter overcoats have been removed and piled on top of a chair so that there is just enough room for the little boy, the old man's grandson, to come and sit down on its edge during breaks. He still needs toâhe's a beginner, after allâand his feet hurt from those steep jumps out of high somersaults onto the ground. He has a large face that can hold a great many tears, and yet they often well up all the way to the edge of his widened eyes. Then he has to carry his head very cautiously, like an overfull cup. It's not that he's sad, not at all; he wouldn't even notice if he were. It's simply the pain that cries, and he has no choice but to let it cry. It will grow fainter with the passage of time and eventually disappear. The father has long since forgotten what it was like, and the grandfather, well, it's been sixty years since he forgot it, otherwise he wouldn't be so famous. But look, Père Rollin, who has become a legend at all the fairs, doesn't “work” anymore. He no longer lifts huge weights and he (once the most eloquent of all) says nothing now. He's been assigned the drum. Touchingly patient, he stands there with his long-gone athlete's face, whose features sag loosely into one another, as if a weight had been hung on each one and pulled it down. Dressed like a commoner, a knitted sky-blue tie around his colossal neck, he has withdrawn at the height of his fame into this coat and into this modest position upon which, so to speak, glory no longer falls. But any one of these young people who has ever seen him knows that in those sleeves are hidden the famous muscles whose slightest play would cause the weights to leap. That person has vivid memories of one such masterful performance, and he says a few words to his neighbor and points across, and then the old man feels their eyes on him, pensive and uncertain and respectful. That strength is still there, young people, he thinks; it's not as available as it used to be, that's all; it has descended into the roots; it's still there somewhere, all of it. And it's really far too much for just beating a drum. And he pounds away. But he pounds too rapidly. His son-in-law whistles over to him and signals him to stop; he was right in the middle of his spiel. The old man breaks off, frightened, and makes excuses with his heavy shoulders and shifts his weight ponderously onto his other leg. But already he has to be whistled off again.Diable. Père! Père Rollin! He's already started drumming again. He scarcely realizes it. He could drum on forever and ever, they mustn't think he'd get tired. But there, now his daughter is talking; sharp-witted and sturdy and solid and with more brains than the others. She now holds the thing together; it's a joy to watch her. The son-in-law does good work, no one can deny that, and he does it willingly, as if that's his function. But she has it in her blood, one can see that. It's something she was born to. She's ready:“Musique!” she shouts. And the old man drums away like fourteen drummers. “Père Rollin, hey, Père Rollin,” calls one of the spectators, and steps right up, recognizing him. But he only gives him a slight nod; his drumming is a sacred trust, and he takes it with utmost seriousness.
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Commentators usually gloss this passage along the following lines: Rilke, perceiving the standing figures in the PicassoSaltimbanques as forming a largeD, puns on this visual peculiarity by coining the wordDastehen (roughly, “standing-thereness,” and strongly echoingDasein â“existence,” “being-thereness”) to register the quality of the acrobats' presence. Hence the translator's challenge to find an equivalent word that begins with a capitalD. But this line of thought may be fundamentally in error. The elegy visualizes a family of itinerant acrobatsperforming in the outlying regions of the city before passersby who randomly gather and disperse. The large capital letter of theirDastehen âbarely there, only for a moment “erect” and “on show,” before “even the strongest” are rolled and crumpled againâlikely refers to the figure they construct in one of their feats of acrobatic balancing (later in the elegy Rilke will employ the metaphor of a swiftly erected and deconstructed tree). The capital letter they form would thus be like those in the “grotesque alphabets” of entwined bodies so popular with late medieval engravers. And assuming that the capital letter they form exists in some written alphabet (forDastehen, after all, may spell itself differently),D seems an especially unlikely figure for an acrobatic tour-de-force to construct.
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The reference is to August II, King of Poland (1670â1733). He was notorious for his feats of strength, his drinking bouts, and his sexual prowess. According to legend he fathered more than a hundred children.
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An abbreviation forsubrisio saltatoris â“acrobat's smile.” The passage envisions an apothecary's shelf with rows of small labeled vials on it.
THE SIXTH ELEGY
The site of the Temple of Amon in southern Egypt, which Rilke visited in January 1911. The temple's stone pillars depict battle scenes with the pharaoh-generals in their conquering chariots.
THE EIGHTH ELEGY
Rudolf Kassner (1873â1959) was an Austrian cultural philosopher and friend of Rilke's from 1907 to the very end of the latter's life. They admired each other greatly, but differed over key issues. Kassner argued (from the position of a philosophical, allegorized pseudo-Christianity) that the human limitations Rilke laments as tragic and inexplicable are in fact necessary conditions which a mature “conversion” must accept. He considered the latter's depiction of “the Open” and the animal's pure consciousness as “atavistic.”
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The Etruscans depicted the soul as a bird on the walls of their sarcophagus-chambers. The lids of the sarcophagi themselves were often sculpted representations of the dead person lying in repose.
THE TENTH ELEGY
Rilke'sPschent is the Arabic spelling of the Greek transcription of the ancient Egyptian word for the double crown worn by the pharaohs to signify the union of Upper and Lower Egypt. But turn-of-the-century Egyptologists also used the term to designate the royal headcloth over which the crown was worn. Before the restoration of the Sphinx in 1925, an actual owl supposedly nested at the headcloth's edge.
Also by Edward Snow
PROSE
A Study of Vermeer
Inside Bruegel
TRANSLATIONS
Rainer Maria Rilke: New Poems [1907]
Rainer Maria Rilke: New Poems: The Other Part [1908]
Rainer Maria Rilke: The Book of Images
Rainer Maria Rilke: Uncollected Poems
(with Michael Winkler) Rainer Maria Rilke: Diaries of a Young Poet
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RAINER MARIA RILKE was born in Prague in 1875 and traveled throughout Europe for much of his adult life, returning frequently to Paris. There he came under the influence of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and produced much of his finest work, most notably the two volumes ofNew Poems as well as the great modernist novelThe Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Among his other books of poems areThe Book of Images andThe Book of Hours. He lived the last years of his life in Switzerland, where he completed his two poetic masterworks, theDuino Elegies andSonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukemia in December 1926.
EDWARD SNOW is a professor of English at Rice University. North Point Press has published his translations of Rilke'sNew Poems [1907], New Poems [1908]: The Other Part, The Book of Images, andUncollected Poems. He is the recipient of an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for the body of his Rilke translations, as well as the Academy of American Poets' Harold Morton Landon Translation Award and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He is also the author ofA Study of Vermeer andInside Bruegel.
North Point Press
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Copyright © 2000 by Edward Snow
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Published in 2000 by North Point Press
First paperback edition, 2001
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